A Year after Helene, They Grieve without Closure for a Man Never Found

The Washington Post

12:07 JST, September 28, 2025

GREEN MOUNTAIN, N.C. – “It just does me good to come out here and talk to him,” Peggy Williams said on a blue-sky morning at the brink of fall.

She had returned once again to the quiet spot by the North Toe River where, for decades, she shared a life with Lenny Widawski, a Yancey County musician who was known for his soaring violin playing and his ever-present fedora.

Sometimes when she is here, she tells Lenny how she aches thinking about what he endured that morning last September, when Hurricane Helene turned the sleepy river into a raging torrent that carried away the small home where they had lived.

Sometimes, she tells him she’s still angry he didn’t evacuate, despite her pleas. Williams, who was in Virginia at the time recovering from back surgery at her daughter’s house, sometimes blames herself for not being there to convince him.

Sometimes, she reckons aloud with God, asking why the floods took the 78-year-old man she loved, and why he remains one of only a few Helene victims whose body has never been recovered.

A year after Helene claimed at least 108 lives in North Carolina and inflicted $60 billion in damage, Williams spends her days in a particularly gut-wrenching version of the limbo that remains for so many throughout these mountains.

In many ways, a year has brought the region tangible signs of rebirth and healing. Once-shuttered businesses have reopened. Hundreds of roads and bridges have been repaired or rebuilt. Mountains of debris have slowly dwindled. Homes are rising again from the wreckage. Homemade signs advertise fall festivals. Pumpkin patches stand along rural roadsides.

But so many scars remain. Destruction lingers in many areas, where recovery is an aspiration rather than a reality. Some businesses have closed for good, taking jobs with them. Some of those displaced by Helene are living in campers and modified sheds, still waiting for whatever comes next.

And uncertainty and grief persist – particularly for those whose losses can never be replaced.

In Green Mountain, Williams is wrestling with all that remains unresolved. As unlikely as it now seems, she says it would “matter deeply” for Lenny’s remains to somehow be recovered.

Finding him would mean something to hold on to, a sliver of closure.

Williams, 67, has little to cling to from their previous life. Not the music collection that Lenny treasured. Not his guitar or two fiddles, including the yellow one adorned with rhinestones. She lost her own clothes and jewelry. The floods stole photos, as well as keepsakes that her mother had passed down.

Most of all, she lost him. “I feel more empty because I don’t have anything of Lenny,” she said.

Months after the active searches have all but ceased, she yearns to have a proper funeral, to have his ashes close by. The not knowing, she said, “It bothers your soul.”

She long ago accepted that he is gone, and likes to imagine that his spirit also has moved on. But she feels there is more she must do before she can move on, too.

“I want him to rest in peace,” she said. “To know that he is not lost out there and forgotten.”

‘People still feel his loss’

Williams is hardly the only person missing Lenny.

His death, and the fact he remains unaccounted for, ripples throughout the mountains he called home.

“I’ve worked with great musicians all my life,” said Barry Stagg, who along with his wife owns the Dispensary and Upper Club, a bar and music venue in Spruce Pine, where he and Lenny performed nearly every Tuesday evening for more than a decade.

He said Lenny was different from the typical musician. He could play bluegrass, classical and anything in between. It wasn’t just the fact that he had been classically trained at a conservatory in New England. He often performed Stagg’s original songs, and could pick up on a new tune almost instantly.

“He was a master at improv,” Stagg recalled. “He was a genius, he really was.”

The two men shared a stage on countless nights, even once traveling to perform Stagg’s music at a festival in Toronto. Along the way, they became more than collaborators.

“Once you’re his friend, you’re his friend for life,” Stagg said.

These days, a framed picture of Lenny – smiling and with his violin in hand – sits by the stage at the Dispensary.

“People still feel his loss,” Stagg said. “Not a Tuesday that goes by that somebody doesn’t say to me, ‘God, we miss Lenny.’”

Steve Casper, 55, still wrestles with the “tremendous loss” of his best friend. He and Lenny met in the early 1990s and bonded over their shared love of music and shooting pool. In those years, they would head to pool halls and play for hours on end when Lenny returned from months of entertaining on cruise ships.

“He could make people feel like an old friend,” Casper said on a recent afternoon inside the computer store he owns in Burnsville, a small mountain town northeast of Asheville that is surrounded by some of the rural communities hit hardest by Helene’s floodwaters.

Casper marveled at his pal’s musicals gifts, at his ability to invent things, at his metabolism that never seemed to slow: “He acted 10 years younger than he was.”

Casper said when his children were young, Lenny would come to their birthday parties and perform his ventriloquism act, honed over years of practice.

One of their last times together, Casper said, Lenny helped him build stairs up to game room he was putting together in an unfinished part of his house. There’s a handsome pool table in there now. He’d give anything to play another game with Lenny. “I’m heartbroken,” he said.

Lenny’s younger sister, Lydia Widawski, politely declined to comment for this story, saying in a text that she is no longer interested in doing interviews. But she previously marveled to a local television reporter about how many people admired her brother, and last year told the online publication the Assembly that he was content with his life. “He wasn’t rich at all – he struggled – but he loved his music, and that’s what counted,” she said.

Christy Thrift has known Peggy and Lenny for a decade. Lenny played at her sister-in-law’s wedding and at the inn her family owned in nearby Little Switzerland. They also were neighbors across the usually placid North Toe River.

It was Thrift who watched with dread as Lenny’s house was torn from its foundation amid Helene’s floodwaters, and who for months after the storm helped search and rescue teams hunt for him and others.

Thrift, who with her husband runs an outdoor adventure company in the area, is among those who have helped Peggy secure a new car, a temporary place to live and other necessities.

Lenny mostly kept to himself, Thrift recalled. But he shared his music far and wide.

During warmer months, when she would swim in the North Toe almost every day, Lenny often would be sitting on his front stoop practicing. The notes from his violin echoed off the mountains, an ethereal soundtrack as the river carried her along.

“I really miss it,” she said, “every time I am out there.”

‘The music has stopped’

Here is some of what Peggy Williams misses:

The sycamore trees that lined the banks of the river, casting shadows across a favorite swimming hole not far from their front door. The cool breeze that would drift through their open windows, carrying the scent of honeysuckle. The raccoons, skunks, birds and deer they would see many evenings.

She misses the way Lenny would fill the house with his music – bluegrass, rock, jazz. She misses the silence, too, of sitting with him on the porch out front, the only sound the constant murmur of the river.

For Williams, as for so many other folks whose lives were transformed by Helene, what comes next isn’t entirely clear.

Though together since the mid-1990s, she and Lenny never formally wed, and North Carolina does not recognize common law marriage. As next of kin, his younger sister likely will inherit the land where the home stood, Williams said. What happens to the site over time remains unresolved.

These days, Williams lives alone in a small hillside apartment 15 minutes down the road from the place she shared with Lenny. Many days, she drives along the North Toe River, past reminders of the storm.

The road winds past fallen trees and lingering mounds of debris, past shored-up riverbanks and flood-ravaged houses sitting mud-caked and empty.

On a recent afternoon, she sat again on a makeshift bench on the lot where home once stood. Nearby, the house’s stone and concrete chimney still stands. She points near its top to show how high the water rose. A few steps away, a makeshift cross rises from the silty soil, with a violin long ago affixed to it.

“RIP Lenny,” reads a message in white paint. “May you find a tune in heaven.”

The zinnias she planted this year are blooming, along with sunflowers and morning glories. Someone, she isn’t sure who, stopped by and left a pot of yellow mums – a reminder that mourning across western North Carolina has now stretched into a second autumn.

For Williams, this was once a place of beauty and love and music. A year after everything changed, it has become a place of remembrance and longing.

“The music has stopped for me,” she said, looking out over the river, which rambles on, calm and clear and endless.