As Holly Anderson, 62, looked out the airplane window Dec. 22 at the sun setting over the Mississippi River, she knew she was home.

She closed her eyes, relaxed and fell asleep. By the time her husband, Jonathan Kane, had wheeled her through the airport and carried her to the car, she was gone.

A 9/11 survivor, Anderson knew in September that she would be one of thousands of New Yorkers whose fate was sealed the day the World Trade Center came down in Manhattan.

For three months, the artist, poet and playwright had put her life on hold and worked at Respite 1, an emergency relief center for workers sifting through what locals called “the Pile” after the terrorist attack.

She stood at the door and invited beleaguered workers in to rest, talk and eat, her family recalled. For three months, she breathed in the toxic air — filled with crushed fluorescent lights, cement dust, asbestos and jet fuel, and other remains of the two buildings brought down by terrorists in 2001.

Of the 75,000 people enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, more than 5,000 have been diagnosed with at least one case of 9/11-related cancer. Anderson was one of them. Her dying wish was to return home to Minnesota to be with her family in Cottage Grove.

“I think she was looking out for Lucy and I,” said her husband, Jonathan Kane. Lucy Kane, 24, is their only child. “She wanted us to be with family when she passed.”

The family gathered Christmas Day at Anderson’s sister’s house in Deephaven. The house was festive, with fresh flowers arranged by Anderson’s florist sister adorning the long dining room table. They had been expecting to make her last Christmas special. Instead, they spent the day mourning as they looked through pictures. They cried and hugged, trying to imagine how their lives would be now that she was gone.

“We spent a lot of time together,” said Lucy, who consulted with her mother on everything from fashion to cooking to college choices. “I’ve never made a decision without her.”

Anderson’s husband flipped through a stack of books and papers his wife had either written or collaborated on and tried stoically to sum up “the amazing, dynamic life that she lived.”

FEARLESS, INDEPENDENT EVEN AS A TOT

Anderson’s mother, Margaret, described her daughter as a very independent child. Her younger brother Scott and sister Carrie Anderson-Snyder said she could be kind of bossy. Even her daughter described her as “the queen of unsolicited advice.”

“She tried to be my mom,” Anderson-Snyder said. As they grew older, the sibling rivalry mellowed, and the three became good friends.

“She’s my hero,” Scott Anderson said tearfully. “She always will be.”

Her mother described her as talkative and fearless. At age 3, she proudly told folks she was half-Lutheran, half-Catholic, which her mother said was true, since she’d been baptized twice, once in each church. Anderson referred to her Swedish immigrant father, Everett Anderson, as her “Viking” and immortalized him in a poem when he died in 2006.

Always an artist, Holly Anderson knew at a young age she would not stay in Minnesota.

She’d seen pictures of Woodstock in a magazine as a teenager and had declared that she was living in the wrong place.

LEAVING MINNESOTA

After graduating from Cottage Grove’s Park High School in 1973 and spending two years at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Anderson left home, hitchhiked across Europe and finally landed in Boston in 1979.

John Cage, a composer and musical pioneer, was impressed by Anderson’s use of his mesostic invention (a style of writing using acrostics, or word puzzles) in her poetry. He became a mentor to her and his advice would influence her work mixing words with art.

A self-described poet, Anderson found ways to use her gift across a multitude of disciplines. She wrote for dance companies, collaborated on books and wrote off-Broadway plays. She crafted lyrics for the band Mission of Burma. The song “Mica” was described by Spin Magazine as “a punk rock benchmark,” Jonathan Kane said.

She met Kane, a musician and photographer, at a party in 1982, a year after she’d moved to New York City’s Lower East Side, where artists mixed with immigrants and drug addicts.

He was on tour with the Kitchen Center for the Performing Arts, even playing at First Avenue in Minneapolis. At the party, he was impressed by Anderson.

“I realized immediately I was in the presence of an extraordinary woman,” Kane said. They married and had Lucy in 1993. Kane’s father, Art Kane, had been a photographer, capturing images of music legends such as Jim Morrison and of historic moments such as Harlem in 1958 for big-name magazines.

After 9/11, Anderson spent much of her time working on Art Kane’s legacy, a collection of his best photos over the years, which was published in 2014.

Later in life, she dabbled in politics, sitting in on the Occupy Wall Street movement and donating some of her work to the “Nasty Women” art exhibition in January in conjunction with the Women’s March on Washington.

BREATHING TOXIC AIR

In March, Anderson started getting what has come to be called the “World Trade Center cough.” Kane said she began to feel tired and complained of pain in her side and back. Her cancer diagnosis came on Sept. 11 of this year.

Of her experience at Ground Zero, she wrote this in her journal about the men working in the debris: “Some of these guys, the iron workers and steam fitters could be dying before our eyes. Already there are some ghosts walking in their lug-soled boots. Their faces blank under battered hard hats. Goggles and particle masks at their throats.The impulse is strong to take them into your arms. Say something. But what?

“A Queens cop told me, ‘We’re all lab rats down here anyway, no matter what any agency says.’ He was referring to physical health concerns. … God help us all.”

Little did she know she was writing about herself. Her cancer was aggressive and the treatments did nothing to slow it down.

“She was up for the fight,” Kane said. “But the odds were stacked against her.”

Eventually, she just wanted to go home to Minnesota. Home to where her life story had begun, a story that had inspired many of her poems and projects over the decades and had touched lives in the art world and in the horrors of the Pile.

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The family plans to memorialize her life later this winter with two services, one in Minnesota and the other in New York.

Kane wants to invite artists and musicians to come to the New York memorial to celebrate Anderson’s life.

“Her story is epic,” he said. “There’s a lot to tell.”