(1932-2022)

Marguerite Lawler was born in Newfoundland, Canada, on September 9, 1932. She loved living near the ocean with her parents. Marguerite’s father was a commercial fisherman who tragically was lost at sea when Marguerite was only one. Her mother remarried a kind and wonderful man, Ernest DeVine, and she grew up in a loving home.

Marguerite entered the Sisters of Charity when she was 17 and taught at a First Nation Reservation in Canada. After 17 years she left the convent and moved to Detroit.

Marguerite became a computer programmer in the early years of computers and married William Lawler, who was 25 years older than she. They enjoyed 25 years of marriage, including living in Arkansas for a time.

After her husband’s death, Marguerite moved back to Michigan and in time began to work at Holy Family parish in accounting. She became very involved in parish ministries and volunteered in Hospice programs and outreach. Bright and bubbly, Marguerite made friends easily.

Marguerite met Sister Ann Petri, OP, and became interested in Associate Life.  She made a commitment to the Dominican Charism on May 25, 2010. Marguerite attended many Associate gatherings and was fun-loving and pleasant.

Marguerite had a love for the vulnerable and compassion for the needy. She was fiercely loyal and thoroughly enjoyed being with her grandchildren.

In the past few years Marguerite had many health challenges, which led to her death on March 6, 2022.

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(1934-2022)

At 8:30 a.m. on February 4, 1934, Jean Annette Stuckel came into the world at St. Joseph Hospital in Joliet, Illinois. Fifteen minutes later, Jean’s twin sister, Jane Bernadette, was born … to the complete surprise of her mother and the doctor, because in those days, there were no tests to determine whether a mother was going to have multiple babies.
 
Jean and Jane joined their brother Robert, who was fifteen years older, and their sister Collette, five years older, as the children of John and Gertrude (Miller) Stuckel. At the time the twins were born John owned a large butter and eggs business, only to lose it in the Great Depression. When World War II broke out, he became a supervisor at a large ammunition plant that had been built in Joliet, and after the war he became a liquor distributor. 
 
Gertrude was a skilled seamstress who made all of the children’s clothes throughout the Depression, and even afterward enjoyed making special outfits for them, especially the girls’ formal dresses for school dances. In later years, she became the costume designer for the St. Francis Children’s Theater in Joliet, a job she held for twenty-five years.

Read more about Sister Jane Robert (PDF)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

 

 

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(1942-2022)

On April 29 – appropriately, the feast day of St. Catherine of Siena – in 1942, Gordon and Margaret (Ryan) Erickson of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, welcomed their first child, whom they named Patricia Laverne, into the world.

At the time, the Ericksons lived in an apartment so small that there was no room for a crib, so baby Patricia’s bed was in a bottom dresser drawer. “To this day, my family has blamed my smallness of stature on this fact!” she joked in her autobiography.

Two more children came into the family over time: Michael, born when Patricia was five, and Nancy five years after that. A job transfer for Gordon took the Ericksons to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, when Patricia was in seventh grade, and it was at her new school there, St. Ambrose, where she met the Adrian Dominican Sisters.

“She walked into her classroom and KNEW that she would become an Adrian Dominican, and never let go of that dream,” said Sister Mary Priniski, Chapter Prioress of the Catherine of Siena Mission Chapter, in her eulogy for Sister Patricia. “In the eighth grade she asked her dad if she could join the convent, but he insisted she finish high school first.”

Read more about Sister Pat (PDF) 

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

 

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(1948-2022)

On February 11, 2022, as Sister Zenaida Nacpil was laid to rest in the Congregation cemetery, she became the first of the former Our Lady of Remedies Sisters to be buried in Adrian rather than their native Philippines. It was to be Sister Zenaida’s last pioneering act in a lifetime filled with them.

Sister Zeny, as she was generally known, was born in Floridablanca, Pampanga, Philippines, on October 9, 1948, to Jose and Rosalinda (Santiago) Nacpil. She was the third of five children in the family; a son, Amado, died shortly after his birth, and then came Blanca; Zenaida; Elisa, also known as Lisa; and Ligaya, or Lily.

She had a happy childhood and was an inquisitive, playful child who knew from a very early age that she was called to a relationship with God. One of her favorite pastimes was to put on a veil and “play nun,” and whenever, even as a toddler, she came up missing, the family knew exactly where to look for her: at the altar, praying with her veil on.

After she graduated from St. Augustine Academy in Pampanga, her pastor, knowing of her interest in religious life, suggested she get to know the then-new community of Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of Remedies. She went on to Assumption College, where among her teachers were Adrian Dominican Sisters Mary Philip Ryan and Ellen Vincent McClain. Sisters Mary Philip and Ellen Vincent were assisting the Remedies Sisters in their early development, and Zenaida had not been at Assumption long before she asked to enter that congregation.

Read more about Sister Zenaida (PDF)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

 

 

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