Obituary of Marilyn Hultgren

Marilyn Hultgren was a little girl who loved playing outside, who wanted to play sports but couldn't (little girls in the 1940s were rarely given that opportunity), and who hated learning to cook. She was the little girl who got into mischief with Roger, her little bestie, once putting a dead fish in the car of Augusta, a grown-up neighbor who they thought was mean.

She was the young girl who loved reading everything, and who loved playing in the waves of Long Island Sound at the summer cottage her Swedish carpenter grandfather built.

She was the teen who secretly dated Catholic boys because her father told her she couldn't. She was the young woman who met her future husband, Weldon, in philosophy class, whose VW bug somehow ended up INSIDE her dormitory, and who sneaked past the dormitory matron at night to drink a beer and smoke a cigarette, habits she didn't maintain.

She was the young mother who read to her kids and called them pumpkin and supported them through thick and thin and encouraged them to be themselves, not carbon copies of their parents.

She was the empty nester who took up birdwatching and Monarch butterfly tagging and studied Swedish and loved the yearly month in Florida where she and her husband read on the beach, played in the waves, and wandered through nature preserves, and visited with friends and relatives.

She was the farmor/mormor (Swedish: father's mother/mother's mother) to her grandchildren, who she adored and who adored her in return.

At the end, she was the mother and grandmother who, though suffering from dementia, still remembered her family and still managed a sweet smile.

Marilyn Elizabeth Johnson Hultgren was 87 when she left this life to be with those who went before her, which include her husband, Weldon, her older brother, Ernie, her parents, Ernest and Jennie, and too many friends. She is survived by daughters, Deb Koleski (Stan) and Sarah Hultgren-Lund (Josh), her son Marty (Camille Verzal), her “honorary” daughter Ruth Lau, and her 6 grandchildren, Noah, Myles, Avery, Ben, Natalie, and Ingrid.