Margaret Mary Cohane, formerly of New York, Boston, and Watertown, MA, passed away peacefully on April 29, 2020 at Bear Mountain Nursing Home of Andover, MA (formerly Wingate of Andover) which had been her home for 11 years.
Margaret, the first born of Timothy and Margaret Cohane’s seven children, was born on February 10th, 1939. She demonstrated her tenacity and courage early on, surviving the then unthinkably premature birth weight of 2 lbs. 2 ozs! Despite many physical challenges and health issues, Margaret never wavered in either her deeply-centered Catholic faith or her good-natured acceptance of whatever challenges came her way.
She was a graduate of Immaculate Heart of Mary Grammar School (Scarsdale, NY) and matriculated to Good Counsel Academy in White Plains, NY for high school. Later, Margaret became a certified nurses aide, a profession of which she was extremely proud. Margaret tenderly and faithfully saw to the care of the elderly for a number of years.
Always a great fan of opera in general and the special talents of diva Roberta Peters in particular, she and her mother could be found on most Sunday afternoons glued to the radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Margaret herself was blessed with an angelic singing voice and had several years of vocal training to perfect her lyric soprano voice. She received local acclaim for her solo concert in Scarsdale and was often asked to sing at weddings and funerals. But perhaps her greatest joy was derived by singing for her family, who were her greatest fans.
Her family was everything to Margaret, and she continued to enjoy all the generations as they came along. As the eldest of the clan, and gifted with a remarkable memory for names and family history, if her siblings were unsure about some person, place, or event, they would consistently say, “Let’s ask Margaret, she’ll remember!” She leaves her sister Lorraine (Betsy) Cohane Smith of Colorado; her brother Timothy Cohane and sister-in- law Edna (Lisa) Cohane of Ft. Myers, FL and Middletown, RI; her brother Peter Cohane and sister-in-law Patricia Donohue Cohane of Jupiter, FL; her sister Rosemary Cohane Erpf of Decatur, GA; and her sister Ellen Cohane DePalma of Chester, NH. Her youngest sister, Mary Therese Cohane, predeceased Margaret in 2016.
Donations in Margaret’s memory may be made to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, 28 West 44th Street, Suite 609, New York, NY 10036 or at https://www.bcrf.org/