1933 – 2026
On the sidewalks of Boston, a girl named Janie skipped rope and sang a song she made up herself: “One, two, three ALARY, my first name is Mary, don’t you think I look cute, in my father’s bathing suit.”
That girl — playful, self-possessed, utterly at home in her own skin — never really went away. She just grew into a woman with a very large life.
Born and Rooted
Jane was born in Boston in 1933, the daughter of a family rooted in faith, community, and loyalty. She grew up in a multigenerational home and lived next door to her best childhood friend, Adrian — a friendship that would span more than eight decades, outlasting distance, loss, and the particular erosions of time. That kind of loyalty was simply who Jane was.
At five years old, Jane declared she would become a nurse. She kept that promise to herself, graduating from Boston’s Catherine Labouré School of Nursing in 1954. She had also set her sights on becoming an airline stewardess, and at that time airlines required their stewardesses to hold nursing degrees.
Jane was drawn by an appetite for the wider world that would define her entire life. Then she met Robert L. McGrew. Bob changed her plans, though not her appetite for adventure.
Two Wanderers Who Found Each Other
Before he met Jane, Bob had already seen the world. As a proud merchant seaman, he traveled to roughly 65 countries across South America, Africa, and Asia before he ever walked down the aisle. He was a man with salt water in his blood, a passionate student of history, and an instinct for the horizon. He found, in Jane, a woman who complemented him completely.
They married in 1955. Bob served twenty years in the United States Air Force, retiring in Colorado Springs, the city that became the family’s true and permanent home.
But his service was not without cost to the family at home. In 1962, with a newborn daughter and four school-age children, Jane found herself alone when Bob was deployed to Korean war for eighteen months. She held the fort without complaint, as she always did.
In 1967, Bob was assigned to Germany and went ahead by three months while Jane remained in Boston. When the time came to follow, she gathered their six children — Daniel, age three, through Bruce, age eleven — boarded a transatlantic flight alone, and navigated German trains to finally reunite with Bob. She later spoke of this as one of the most stressful experiences of her life. Six children in foreign airports and train stations, every one of them her responsibility. She did not lose a single one.
The family lived in Germany from 1967 to 1970 — three years of European life that Bob turned into a living history classroom.
Family camping trips took them to Holland, to the Berlin Wall, to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, and later to Native American historical sites across the United States. There was no Disney World. While Bob narrated history from the actual ground where it happened and the children absorbed it wide-eyed, Jane cooked three meals a day at every campsite, cleaned up after each one, and made it all quietly possible. That was her particular genius.
After Bob’s Air Force retirement, he took private sector work building power lines in the early to mid-1970s and was away about three years. Jane held the fort again, the children now older but the household no less demanding.
As a couple they also explored together — traveling across Europe to Spain, France, Austria, Germany, and Luxembourg, through Mexico — two people who had each wanted to see the world long before they found each other.
The Heart of the Home
Through every move, every deployment, every fresh start, Jane was the constant. She ensured her children sat down together for dinner every night after a full day’s work, and organized large family holidays that wove the fabric of a shared life — all of this without television, without smartphones, and without complaint. The friends her children brought through the door were always welcome, and there was always enough food. Many of those friends called her Mom.
She was the glue. Not loudly, not with fanfare, but unmistakably, irreplaceably, in the way that only becomes fully visible when it is gone.
The Nurse
Jane’s calling as a nurse was not separate from her calling as a mother; it was the same impulse, expressed in a different way. As a registered nurse, she served her patients with dignity, compassion, and an unhurried tenderness that people remembered for the rest of their lives.
In the mid-1970s, Jane served as Director of Nursing at the Union Printers Home — the only facility in the United States providing four levels of care exclusively to union printers. Jane’s patients and residents chose her as Employee of the Year and, in a gesture that says everything, wrote a song in her honor.
Among her greatest joys was her work as a neonatal intensive care nurse. Jane loved babies with a particular ferocity — the smallest, most fragile ones most of all. She brought everything she had to that work.
Later, with Bob at her side, she worked as a travel nurse across eleven states — her vocation and her marriage braided together, each sustaining the other.
The reach of her professional life extended further than she likely knew. At a nurse of the year award ceremony, two honorees cited Jane by name as a powerful and lasting influence in their careers. Jane touched not only patients but the nurses who came after her.
The Caretaker
Jane essentially lived two lives. The first was defined by a rare and selfless gift: the ability to make herself invisible in service to others. She cared for Bob, her children, her grandchildren, her parents, her siblings, her friends, and strangers — not as a duty, but as a calling. She rarely complained. She did not ask for much in return.
In 2005, her daughter Lisa was hospitalized for many months in Oregon. Without hesitation, Jane locked up her house in Colorado Springs, flew to Portland, and moved into a hospital apartment alongside Lisa’s husband, Stephan. She stayed for eighteen months. She was in that hospital every single day — advocating, supporting, watching, loving. She was a mama bear.
It is worth noting that Jane herself had known the particular grief of losing a child. Her twins, Patrick and Patricia, passed away in infancy — losses she carried quietly, as she carried most things, without making others bear the weight of it.
Faith
For decades, Jane attended daily Mass without exception. Her faith was not ornamental — it was structural, the frame on which everything else rested. She was deeply involved in her Holy Apostles Catholic Church community in Colorado Springs, and her faith shaped the texture of her generosity, her steadiness, and her capacity to absorb grief without bitterness.
Her Second Act
In 2001, Bob died of lung cancer. Jane had cared for him devotedly through that final year, as she had cared for everyone she loved. She grieved deeply, and for the rest of her life. She carried him always. Bob did not live to see his daughter Lisa marry Stephan in 2002, an absence the family felt keenly on that day and on many days since.
But Jane did not shrink. What was new in her second act was not curiosity — she had always had that. What was new was freedom: to move through the world on her own terms, by her own choosing, with her own courage.
Her first trip after Bob’s passing was to Ireland and Scotland with her childhood friend Adrian and Adrian’s family — a return, in some sense, to her Boston roots and to the loyalty that had always defined her.
In preparation for a Holy Land pilgrimage with Father Paul and several close friends, she walked daily for months to prepare herself for the journey.
She accompanied a blind woman on a two-week Alaska cruise, serving as her eyes and describing everything in careful and loving detail.
She visited family in Japan, the Czech Republic, and Mexico. She explored, at every opportunity, with genuine and undiminished curiosity. On her last international trip, she was 85 years old.
She Is Survived By
Jane is preceded in death by her beloved husband, Robert L. McGrew; by her twin infants, Patrick and Patricia, who were welcomed into the world and into her heart before departing it too soon; and by grandsons, Robert, Jason and Jessie.
She is survived by her six children: Bruce, Timothy, Kathleen, Michael, Lisa, and Daniel; by nine grandchildren: Leigh Ann, Jennifer, Bryan, Alex, Brianna, Livie, Rakahya, Beau and Madison; by five great-grandchildren: Evan, Landon, Aiden, Clayton and Elizabeth; and by one great-great-grandchild, Riley.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you plant something that will live on. A perennial flower. A tree, a shrub – plant something in her name. It seems fitting for a woman who put down roots everywhere she went and left things growing in her wake.