Maryann and I met when we were 11 years old and upon finding out we both had the same birthdays became forever friends.  We navigated through our Junior/High School years together - kept in touch through our 20 and 30's mostly through phone calls and occasional visits as I was always up and moving!  We even managed to take some family vacations together seemingly always here in North Carolina.  My kids even called her 'Aunt Maryann' because she was always a special person to them.

She was always there for me through good and bad times and was my rock as I went through my cancer treatments.  In the past 10 years we saw alot more of each other as our kids were older we both shared a passion for traveling and took countless trips together almost always to the beaches of North Carolina! We always planned a fun trip in October to celebrate our birthday and more important our long friendship. My favorite trip was to the Florida Keys for our 50th birthday.  We had so much fun!

Maryann was  such a giving and loving person and always was there for anyone and everyone who needed a helping hand.

I  miss her so much but carry all the good memories with me always!

Your missed my friend -  your forever friend- Kathy

To say that my kids loved Maryann just doesn't even come close to their feelings for her. She was my son, Adam's, Godmother. She was so, so loving, so thoughtful and giving. They loved it so much when Aunt MarMar would come to visit. She would always bring them some little gifts .. often a toy that she still had from when Mark Andrew was a little kid. We still call the guest room in our house "Aunt MarMar's Room".

Never was there a mother who loved her son more than Maryann loved Mark Andrew. When he was born, he was a BIG baby. He had a few complications at birth that meant he needed to be in the NICU for a bit. Compared to the other babies in the NICU, he was a giant .... so we called him Bubba. I don't know when or why we stopped calling him that.

He was the center of her life.

Maryann worked for IBM almost her entire adult life .... pretty much just our Dad had. Which when you think about how different the 2 of them were, it seems a bit ironic that they would share such a big part of their lives. Dad was enormously proud of Maryann's accomplishments at IBM. She worked so, so hard and always received the highest accolades. From all that her coworkers have said since her passing, she was a great friend, highly committed to professionalism and getting the job done right, a source of stability and calm in times that were often unsettling, and frequently the picture of grace under pressure. She retired early from IBM because her job was being eliminated. At the time that this happened, she was devastated because she couldn't imagine why they would get rid of such a great employee. Little did she know that it was a gift from God ... so that she would, for once, have the chance to relax, enjoy life a bit more, and finally move to the beach in North Carolina as she had talked about for so very many years.

She almost got there. God made sure that at least if she couldn't live there, she would pass there.

When we were growing up, we often had stray cats come to live with us. Some stayed a short while (like "Tootles", the orange tabby that loved to eat Captain Crunch cereal); others stayed a lifetime (like "Charlie", who turned out to be a girl). Charlie had a couple of litters of kittens before our parents finally had her spayed. Maryann got to keep one of the kittens from Charlie's second litter. She named him Claude. Oh, what a beautiful, sweet and funny gray tabby he was. Her nickname for him was "Bluebie". Maryann loved cats and always had one.

When Maryann was in high school at Ridgefield High, in Ridgefield CT, some of her friends started calling her "Goober" after the chocolate covered peanuts. I think it was because she liked them. We all called her Goober for a long time.

Here's her Senior Prom pic with Tom Kennedy.

When I was in 10th grade, some of my friends started calling one another Irv for some now long-forgotten reason. Maryann and I started saying this to each other as a greeting; at some point "Irv" became "Errrrr". We said it pretty much every time we called each other or wrote an email and it always made us smile and realize how close we were and how much we loved each other.... that something so goofy would endure. It was just one of a zillion silly things we shared.