Born on St. Valentine’s Day in 1936—a Depression baby whose destiny was to engender love—the child named Marilyn Levey grew up the middle of three daughters of a divorced mother, Rita Brouse, who worked two jobs just to keep them all alive in a tenement apartment. Somehow Rita managed, despite her poverty, to send her to St. Mary’s High School in Lawrence, MA, and then to Catherine Labouré School of Nursing. In high school she was a superstar: president of her class for three years and then of the entire student body in senior year. In nursing school…not so much. In her own words: “I met a man.” George Kopriva was “good looking and a great dancer” and captured her eyes and her heart. Their marriage, which ended in 1983, added six children to the world’s population who spent their childhoods skiing, camping, visiting the lakes, and going to the seashore as a family and spent their adulthoods popping in and out of Marilyn’s house to drink wine, chat, dine, or joke with her about some of the many things they had put over on her in their adolescences.
Among the things Marilyn did in her post-child-rearing life: travel extensively (she especially loved trips to Italy, the Holy Land, and Alaska); ski all winter long until just last year; help found a new church in her community; build and run a hospice for AIDS patients in the 1980’s when AIDS was still a misunderstood disease whose very name inspired fear; dedicate herself to St. Francis, a commitment she held as deeply as a second marriage; enjoy the company of a troupe of friends both lifelong and new; develop deep and abiding relationships with several canine friends, one of whom, Emma, remained with her at the time of her death.
The perfect nurse, whether in maternity or hospice, she never stopped caring for anyone she had ever cared for, and the single greatest group she ever cared for were the faithful of her church community. She was a woman of intense faith, a third order Franciscan who could be found almost every morning at the church she helped to build praying or attending Mass. Even as she lay dying, while her thoughts were still lucid her concerns were for her children and her friends. The woman her eldest daughter called “Saint Marilyn” passed gently from this life on November 2, 2015, surrounded by her family, including her ex-husband George, with whom she had never lost touch. Whether she was bringing life into the world, as she did for half her career, or gently ushering it out, as she did for the second half, Marilyn’s charges never doubted her concern and commitment to their care. She leaves behind hundreds of lives she has touched, including her brothers, Jack and Lawson; her sister Charlene; her children, Karen Topham, Kathy Medina, Gregory Kopriva, Muffin Russo, Maureen Bland, and Chris Kopriva; their spouses; and her fifteen combined grandchildren, as well as seven great-grandchildren, as well as neighbors and friends in and out of her longtime home of Londonderry, NH.
A Liturgy of Christian Burial was held at her beloved Holy Cross Church in Derry, NH on Monday, November 9 at 10 AM. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her name to hospice care at the Visiting Nurse Association of Manchester and Southern NH.