At Harvard, he would concentrate in African history, making sure to take enough science courses for medical school.

In college, their relationship was platonic. Helen was dating a classmate named Elijah Aron, from Santa Cruz, Calif. Elijah had a satirical side and knew he wanted to be a writer. Sophomore year, all three landed in Adams House, which had a long tradition of artists, intellectuals, and extravagant personalities. “There was even skinny-dipping in the pool at Adams,” recalls Jake Hill.

Paul and Elijah became friends, part of a circle with Helen at the center. “Elijah wore a cape and Doc Martin boots, and he was really into spontaneity,” says Keiko Morris, Helen’s roommate, now a reporter for Newsday. “He and Helen often headed out on night adventures, running around downtown Boston, twirling off the light poles. Elijah loved to make fun of the over-seriousness of Harvard, the whole atmosphere.”

“Helen, Elijah, and Paul were the Three Musketeers,” recalls Jake.

An English concentrator, Helen loved the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Helen Vendler’s writings on poetry. But she might have taken even more pleasure from her filmmaking courses. In film classes, she made small puppets and figurines, and used felt pens to draw images directly on the celluloid, a natural extension of her childhood traditions, hand-making cards and little gifts. Keiko remembers the night sophomore year when Helen practically danced in jubilation: “I know exactly what I want to be, Keiko. I’m going to be an animator—an animator!”

She approached the celluloid like a canvas, drawing or painting on the thin strips, experimenting with color combinations for the settings, frame by frame. The figures she made out of cardboard, clay, and plastic functioned as tiny sculptures which she delighted in choreographing around, imbuing them with voices and on-screen life. Her first film, Rain Dance, was dedicated to Elijah.

Helen’s creative side was balanced by decorum in keeping with her Southern manners; she loved to host tea parties. At a parents’ weekend in junior year, recalls Keiko, “My parents came up from New Jersey with my aunt and uncle. Helen, Paul, and Elijah had a tea party in our common room. She served ladyfinger sandwiches. My family still talks about it.”

But the more time Paul and Helen spent at Adams House, the more they came to believe that its aura of tolerance was laced with undercurrents of self-satisfaction and self-congratulatory hipness. “As alternative as it was,” Paul reflects, Adams House also “had a cynical, ironic edge.” The realization crept up on Helen and Elijah Aron that their romance was fading. Elijah viewed life through a comic lens, with all the pain on which artistic comedy thrives. (Today, Elijah lives in Los Angeles, where he writes scripts for TV comedies.) In contrast, Paul and Helen saw each other as genuine idealists, the real deal, people who believed they could make a better world and take pleasure in doing so.

Helen and Elijah remained steadfast friends after breaking up; so did Elijah and Paul.

Helen and Paul moved to New Orleans.

“Helen insisted that everything in her life become an event,” Paul says, “something made festive, to be remembered.”

Heading to New Orleans in 1992 was one such event.

She had dreamed of the city since she was a teenager, when Helen had visited an aunt who lived in the French Quarter. The Old World ambience of New Orleans fascinated her, as did the city’s tropical pace, its contrasting combination of stately avenues draped with ancient oaks and the rich roots culture of black music. After graduation, she wanted a year off before the next step in her studies. New Orleans was a city, they felt, in which their passions could find a home.

They found an apartment together, living as close but platonic friends; took jobs, and explored the neighborhoods, enjoying the ethnic parades and festivals. Inevitably their relationship deepened; that fall, they became lovers. After a dreamy spring of 1993, they were confronted with career plans and headed off to opposite ends of the continent, she to Los Angeles for graduate work in film, he to Nova Scotia for medical school.

Paul and Helen resolved to write every day. They called each other often, but Helen wanted real letters. They numbered each one.

Paul and Helen were married on June 18, 1995, at the chapel of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Kevin Lewis, Helen’s stepfather, officiated. Helen and Paul wrote their vows. Wearing a daisy in his hair, Paul surprised her at the appointed time. His brother Adam began playing guitar; the groom sang the vows he had written.

Sweet Helen Hill,
Will you be mine?
Until the end of time...
I will be strong,
I will be sweet
I’ll hold your hand
When things ain’t great...
I will, I will, I will

Helen could not stop crying.

After the wedding, they surprised guests by riding the old two-seater bicycle on which her late grandfather, Pop, had given Helen countless rides. The newlyweds pedaled to their reception. They held a second celebration for assorted friends a week later in New Orleans. And then, with her freshly minted MFA from the California Institute for the Arts, Helen moved up to chilly Halifax, Nova Scotia, as Paul returned to Dalhousie University Medical School.

Paul’s commitment to living a moral life had only become more profound. In medical school, he became a vegan, eating no animal products of any kind. Vegans often share an ideology linked to pacifism, a belief that killing animals corrupts a pristine order of nature. By this logic, as humans prey on animals, so the predatory hungers of humankind feed on violence and lead to war. "I felt it was unnecessary for animals to suffer and die for people to eat in the modern world," Paul says. Inspired by Paul, Helen also became a vegan.

Helen kept busy while Paul finished becoming a doctor. She taught animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, was a founder of the Reel Vision Festival for women artists, and won a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commission for several shorts on Street Cents, a popular children’s TV series. In 1999, with Canadian Council for the Arts funding, she traveled across the country, meeting with colleagues in the alternative film network, collecting information on handmade filmmaking techniques. The spiral-bound booklet she produced, Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet, parodied a cookbook, including how-to tips on filmmaking and a simulation of her approach with handwritten notes, e-mail messages, different fonts, and her own cartoons. Her travels took her to Phil Hoffman's film farm, a filmmaking retreat in Mt. Forest, Ontario, where she learned how to use chemicals to hand-process film. She was a purist—no video or digital, only celluloid would do.

Several miles from Hoffman's barn, Helen found an animal farm with monkeys, zebras, lizards, and a gaggle of baby pigs. Helen was so taken by the piglets that she bought one as a surprise for Paul. The film she made in Hoffman's barn, Your Pig Is Down the Road, is a love song to Paul and a celebration of pigs, with intimations of the vegan good life.

She would later make a companion piece, Madame Winger Makes A Film. With Paul’s guitar lines as a music track, the film is narrated by “Madame Winger,” actually a friend of her mother’s, Meredith Pogue. The raspy Southern accent, seasoned by cigarettes, wraps around the syllables in a wonderfully comic way. “Filmmakers! How will you survive the new century?” Madame is represented by a hand-drawn woman with a doe-eyed face, snowy hair in a layered beehive, a matching boa around her neck, a red dress, and black-and-white stockings.

Happy pigs and piglets swirl to the voice-under drawl: “The bad news is this: Film for photographs and movies still contains gelatin, which is made from animal bones. I hope that one day, a vegetarian film will be used. After all, toothbrushes used to be made from boar bristles!”

The story line roams from instructions on chemical processing to home movies of Helen as a kid then on to Paul, grinning, hugging, and kissing a 50-pound pig: The artist presenting scenes from her life.

No one could be that happy.

But Helen and Paul were, and, when Paul was officially a doctor, they headed back to the city of their dreams, the place neither had wanted to leave.

On January 4 of this year, at 10 minutes after five in the morning, a 60-year-old woman in a bed-and-breakfast on Rampart Street, four houses down from Paul and Helen, awoke to a strange knock. She opened the door but saw only a darkened hallway. She closed the door. The knock came again. Again, she opened. This time she saw an African-American man—that was the only description the police would release—“just standing there, holding a gun,” she would tell Brendan McCarthy of the Times-Picayune. “He mumbled something and then butted against the door, trying to enter.”

The woman’s husband forced his body against the door, shutting the intruder out of their bedroom. As the man fled, the couple called the police. Officers from the New Orleans Police Department arrived within minutes.

Four houses away, at about the same time, Paul was sleeping in the back bedroom next to his toddler when he heard Helen scream from the living room: “Get away from my baby!”

He bolted out of bed and pulled the boy into his arms.

Her voice again: “Call 911!”

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