Hello there Firefighter-wife66,
We can see you're trying to get to your important notes, but your Notes app keeps closing. Let's try some steps to help resolve the issue, or get you pointed in the right direction.
To get started, let's be sure to create a backup of your iPhone: Back up iPhone Since you mentioned you only save your notes locally to your iPhone, this ensures that your notes will still be safely saved away or gives us a backup if we need to restore from the backup.
Next, let's check for any available updates as well: Update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch That ensures you have the latest version of the Notes app, along with the newest software patches and fixes.
We hope this helps!
Take care.