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January 5, 2010

A life remembered: Sister Nicolette Welter

Nun's legacy to live on even in death

By Brian Ojanpa

MANKATO — Sister Nicolette Welter is gone, but her brain will live on.

The 102-year-old School Sister of Notre Dame, who died Sunday at the religious order’s convent in Mankato, was one of the order’s 678 elderly nuns who agreed in the late 1980s to participate in a unique study of aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

Agreeing to donate one’s brain for research was mandatory for participants, but Sister Nicolette took a liturgical — and humorous — view of it.

“After the resurrection, our bodies will be perfect. We’ll be so happy we won’t care what happens to our brains,” she told the New York Times in 2001.

The research, known as the Nun Study, began in 1986 using data collected from elderly School Sisters living in Mankato.

The University of Minnesota study’s goal is to determine the causes and prevention of Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases and the mental and physical disabilities associated with old age.

The nuns were selected for the study because of their relatively homogenous lifestyles and environments. They’re non-smokers, drink little if any alcohol, live in similar housing, held similar jobs and have had similar access to medical care.

In short, they’re an ideal test group, and Sister Nicolette was particularly representative of that ideal.

One of 11 siblings — and among four who became nuns — Sister Nicolette was physically and mentally active and alert nearly to the end of her life.

“Until maybe the last six months or so, she was ‘with it,’” said Sister Mary Jo Welter, a niece who acknowledges her aunts’ influence on her decision to become a nun.

Sister Mary Jo said Sister Nicolette regarded her participation in the Nun Study as an extension of her 50-plus years as a teacher in Minnesota and Iowa elementary schools.

“As soon as she heard that donating her brain could benefit science in some way, she was willing to be a participant. She felt it was another way of continuing her role as an educator.”

Study director Harry Orr said the Nun Study has made major contributions in the understanding of various risk factors to Alzheimer’s and brain functioning as people age.

As a research component, the study scrutinized autobiographical essays the nuns wrote in their 20s when they took their vows.

Study founder David Snowdon said Sister Nicolette’s essay was full of what he called “idea density” — many thoughts woven into a small number of words, a trait correlating closely with nuns who later escaped Alzheimer’s.

For example, one passage in her essay reads, “After I finished the eighth grade in 1921 I desired to become an aspirant at Mankato but I myself did not have the courage to ask the permission of my parents, so Sister Agreda did it in my stead and they readily gave their consent.”

Snowdon contrasted that sentence with one written by another Mankato nun, in her late 90s and suffering from memory loss, who tersely wrote in her long-ago essay, “After I left school, I worked in the post office.”

Of the 678 nuns who originally agreed to participate in the study, 43 are still alive, including three at the Good Counsel Provincial House in Mankato.

The University of Minnesota has plans to begin a Nun Study II with a new group of School Sisters, this time involving nuns of all ages.

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