Obituary of Carole Kathleen McCormack

Carole Kathleen McCormack died peacefully, surrounded by family and friends, in the early morning hours of February 12, 2024, in Minneapolis. All gathered to send her off with love and support after the unexpected resurgence of the cancer she had fought over the last five years. Carole was born on January 28, 1937, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Arline and Joseph McCormack, where she grew up with her four sisters, Diane, Ellen, Linda, and Arline, and her brother, Joe. An intellectual from the start, Carole was her high-school class president, winning a scholarship to attend Notre Dame College for Women in Cleveland, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in English. She started her career teaching elementary education at St. Vincent de Paul Parish School. An early feminist, Carole went on to forge a career in communications, starting her own company, BDMcP, working as a journalist for the KO Times and freelancing for other Ohio newspapers, and in corporate communications for NCR Corporation, Gem Savings, and Hospice of Dayton. She passionately advocated for equity, justice, and community building, volunteering for the ACLU, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dayton Sister City Committee, and Women in Communications. Carole was always a creative spirit, loving to read and write poetry. She ended her career as she started it as a teacher and reading tutor for young children in Minneapolis Public Schools and recent adult immigrants through AmeriCorps’ education program. It was fitting that Carole could benefit from her work building the hospice movement in the United States. We thank the kind people at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospice for their loving and professional care and guidance through her last days. Carole is survived by her children, Lisa (and partner Ben) and Suzanne (and husband John), and three grandchildren, Sol, Beatrice, and Innes. Known as The Daz to family, all will deeply miss her independent and creative spirit.

“A millennium separates us, yet the Bodhisattva Kuan-yin is here with us in Minnesota.
I take her in, from head to toe or toes, her upturned soles sun-seeking as the lotus blooming in our waterways.

The Bodhisattva takes me back to the days when my feet rested in perfect comfort on my upper thighs, those times decades ago when I journeyed into silence in the Ohio woods, heard the wind rise, skim around a boulder, bend the furred heads of the foxtail, where I began to find my place among countless beings, for the first time feeling an integral part of the world, not a mere observer.” —Carole K. McCormack