Katharine W Lynn

Katharine Wuerth Lynn of Scarborough, Maine, died Tuesday, December 20, 2022, at the age of 98. She passed away peacefully in the presence of her daughters Sarah and Elizabeth, after a long and active life filled with love, family, friendship, and service. In her final year, she summoned herself to be present to all who visited and loved her. She remained poised, gracious, humorous, perceptive, and loving until the end. Katharine Mitchell Wuerth was born February 2, 1924 in Montclair, New Jersey, to Elizabeth Waller Wuerth and Gustav Christopher Wuerth. Kay, as she was known, grew up in Montclair and Essex Fells, New Jersey, with brothers Tom and Jack and sister Elizabeth. The children spent summers with their parents and grandparents and other relatives on Martha’s Vineyard, where the family built a cluster of houses on Katama Bay that they christened ‘Green Hollow.’ There, Kay learned to swim and sail and, as a teenager, crewed for local yacht club races as the spinnaker “man.” Teenage Kay also loved dancing and going into New York City. She graduated from Montclair High School in 1941. The first woman in her family to complete college. Kay attended Smith College (B.A. ‘45), studying Spanish and Labor Economics. She was president of Smith’s Modern Dance Group and participated in arts guild discussions on the role of women students and artists during World War Two. She worked on an assembly line for Westinghouse Electric one summer during college, and as a farm hand the next, learning to run a tractor and in particular to maintain machinery (a skill she continued to enjoy throughout her life and tried to pass on to her children with varying degrees of success). She earned a Master of Nursing from Yale University School of Nursing in 1948, where she served as president of her class. Following graduation Kay moved to San Francisco to work as a pediatric nurse, fulfilling a vow she had made to herself to “live there ASAP after graduation.” By 1949, she had moved back east to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she worked as a public health nurse for the Visiting Nurse Service, traveling across rooftops in the Bronx, medical bag in hand, to visit patients. She would later recall how much she enjoyed her experiences as an independent young woman in those years. Ever interested in new experiences and longing to travel, she next made plans to go to El Salvador as a volunteer nurse with the American Friends Service Committee. Those plans changed. In the fall of 1951, Kay’s sister and brother-in-law introduced her to a tall seminarian from Wyoming named Robert Wood Lynn at a Brown-Yale football game. As the story goes, Kay and Bob never saw a play of that game. They fell instantly and deeply in love, were engaged within weeks, and married the following March at the Congregational Church in Montclair. Over the next decade, Kay and Bob had four children: Tom, b. 1953, Janet, b. 1956, Elizabeth, b. 1958, and Sarah, b. 1961. They spent their early family life moving back and forth between Denver and New York, and Kay continued part-time nursing until 1955, when she stopped paid work for a time. “Where were you when Betty Friedan described the ‘Feminine Mystique’?” she would later write to her Smith College classmates. “I was just eagerly learning to bake pies and attend to motherhood.” In 1959 Bob and Kay and their growing family returned to New York so that Bob could join the faculty at Union Theological Seminary, and they stayed for 17 years. At the same time, they purchased a home in Leeds, Maine, which became their summer home for three months of every year and a special place for their family life throughout those New York years and beyond. In 1969 Kay returned to nursing with Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC).. “The field of women’s reproductive care was increasing rapidly,“ she would later write, “and nursing was central to it.” She became Assistant Clinical Director for the Margaret Sanger Center, and in that role initiated and coordinated the first vasectomy clinic for PPNYC. She was certified as a Nurse-Practitioner in 1975 and developed and led PPNYC’s family-planning nurse-practitioner training for nurse midwives from Africa and the Caribbean Islands. When Bob’s career took him to work for a national foundation in Indianapolis in 1976, Kay sought a job with Planned Parenthood there and soon found herself “providing contraceptive services in church basements in several small towns in Indiana,” as she put it. “Then came 1980, with a slashing of federal funds,” she would later recall. “I took over as Director of Clinic Services. What a time. We had a creative team working to expand services. You know what the ‘80s brought – STDs, HIV, controversy over IUDs, and inflammatory attitudes towards abortion.” Doing this work in Indiana made it even more challenging. In 1989 Kay and Bob retired together and moved back east, dividing time between Leeds and a winter home, first on Martha’s Vineyard and then on Carroll Street in Portland, Maine. In 2001, they joined other first-time residents or ‘pioneers’ who were moving to Piper Shores, a new non-profit life care community situated on a mild bluff in Scarborough, Maine, with a sweeping view of the Atlantic. Piper Shores became a real community for Kay, a place where she could offer leadership and service, share daily life with her beloved husband, form new friendships, enjoy daily walks, and take in the beauty of the ocean. Piper Shores was a place that engaged her on all the many levels of her being. Kay and Bob’s later years brought great joy, in the births of eight grandchildren (Erin and Taylor Lynn, 1984; Samuel Elder, 1990; Katharine Elder, 1992; Pablo Espinola Lynn, Margaret Lynn, and Asa Kerr, 1993; and Anna Espinola Lynn, 1995). These years also brought unexpected grief, with the deaths of their daughter Janet Lynn Kerr from cancer in 1999 and their son Thomas Taylor Lynn, also from cancer, in 2015. Three years later, Bob died after a period of gentle decline. Kay would talk at times of “the depth of life” felt in these losses, a phrase that embraces both the joy and the grief of a life lived so fully in relationship to others. Across all these decades, in good times and hard times alike, Kay found ways to be engaged in good work with the people around her. In the fractious and liberating decade of the 1960s, she led a large group of Union Seminary “faculty wives” in organizing study and offering hospitality. As she later wrote, “I ran meetings, defined purposes, which had been traditional and unexamined, helped to redefine actions and resolve conflicts between ‘old timers’ and younger women with different view of their role.” As president of the seminary’s Parents’ Council, she mediated between students’ and children’s interests, advocating for space for children to play. In the early 1970s she canvassed for the Democratic party of New York City. Later she served on committees of the Indiana Family Health Council, on the board of the Rural Community Action Ministry in Maine, as an officer of the Maine League of Women Voters, and as a hospice volunteer. She also joined and served congregations wherever she lived, teaching Sunday School at Montview Presbyterian Church in Denver, volunteering as a deacon of Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church in New York City, and becoming a ruling elder of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis. All these activities do not begin to capture the inner and outer beauty and energy of Katharine Lynn. Yet activity—doing—was very important to her. Her diaries throughout her life were a record of what she did each day. Whether sewing or sailing, nursing or canvassing, leading a family planning clinic or serving on a health committee, making friends or making a home, building a loving marriage or raising children, Kay came alive in the doing of it. She will be remembered as a woman of love and action, and of grace and fortitude, who made every community, organization, and room she entered better for her ways of being in this world. Katharine Lynn is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah; eight grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband Robert Wood Lynn; their daughter Janet Lynn Kerr and son Thomas Taylor Lynn; her brothers Tom and Jack Wuerth and her sister Elizabeth Wuerth Jones. Services for Katharine Lynn will be held on February 4, 2022, at 1 pm at the State Street Church UCC, 159 State Street in Portland, Maine. Memorial gifts in her name may be made to Planned Parenthood Federation of America or the Robert Lynn ’52 B.D. and Katharine Lynn ’48 M.N. Endowed Divinity Scholarship Fund at Yale Divinity School (409 Prospect Street, New Haven CT 06511).