April 30, 1918 – February 15, 2010
Sister Winifred Deffè, 91, died at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery, Crookston MN, February 15, 2010.
Cecilia Deffè was born at Hankinson, ND, the fifth child of seven children whose parents were Anna (Wolfe) and Frank Deffè. They had both come from Austria. When she was only four years old, Cecilia thought of becoming a sister after the sisters from Hankinson visited her home. She and her parents, along with her two brothers and two sisters moved to a farm east of Detroit Lakes when Cecilia was in third grade. Her mother died when Cecilia was only fifteen. She then became a mother to her two brothers. While attending high school and living with her older sister Betty, she was asked if she still wanted to become a sister. Cecilia felt that her dad needed her at home, but a housekeeper was hired and Cecilia made her first trip to Mount Saint Benedict. According to her autobiography, when she came to the Mount her sister Betty said, “Well, Sis, here is where you are planted and here is where you will grow.” She replied, “So here I’ve been nurtured and growing ever since. So be it, Lord!”
Cecilia entered the novitiate of Mount Saint Benedict in 1937 and was given the name Sister Winifred. Sister Winifred made her final profession July 11, 1941. She completed nurses’ training at Sacred Heart Hospital in Yankton, SD, and was trained in coronary care in Saint Paul. She lived with the sisters in East Grand Forks and Thief River Falls before being assigned to Saint Mary’s Hospital, Detroit Lakes, MN, for twenty-six years and nine years at Saint John’s Hospital in Browerville, MN. During those years she taught surgical nursing to LPN students and was director of nursing in both locations. She was called home to the monastery in 1988 to be the night nurse in the Health Care Center. In 1993 when she was 75 years old, she asked to be relieved of her health-care duties.
Sister Winifred had a keen sense of humor. In her autobiography, written in 1998, she tells how, as a small child, she was knocked down by a huge dog and started holding her breath. The neighbor and her father revived her by slapping and pouring cold water on her. She quipped, “I started breathing, and have been doing so for seventy-nine years.” Regarding her task of preparing vegetables for the kitchen she said, “I help feed the hungry by cleaning vegetables.” In writing about the different types of vehicles she had ridden in, she ended with “Most everything but a hearse. I’m saving that for the end.”
