New Rochelle, NY - Marion Shiffer closed her eyes on the night of Sept. 24, 2025, and never opened them again. She was 93, and had decided that more than six years of advanced vascular dementia was enough.

Her death prompted her wide circle of loved ones and friends to remember the woman as they knew her. They recall the voracious reader and writer, the world traveler, the musician, the mother, grandmother, sister, cousin, aunt and friend who had an inexhaustible supply of love and good cooking and book recommendations. While she was erudite and elegant, she never abandoned the ribald humor and streetwise sensibility she learned as a young Jewish girl in the Bronx.

She was born on Dec. 2, 1931, to a first-generation immigrant couple. Her father Irving was Ukrainian by birth, and co-owner of a soda syrup factory in the Bronx that manufactured the key ingredient for New York egg creams. Her mother Lilly had come over from Poland at age 13, joining a father who had left when she was too young to remember him. She was a gifted dancer who loved beautiful clothes.

As a child, Marion traveled the city streets on skates and learned to appreciate education at PS 6. When she was 5, Marion gained a brother, Joseph, and they enjoyed a comfortable middle class existence until her father gambled away everything and her mother kicked him out of the house. Once she was a single mother, Lilly moved her children into a tiny apartment where Maggie came of age in an extended family and her cousins became sisters to her. She was forever grateful to Tante Hinde for mothering her through her teenage years. But this turn of events shaped Marion's view of the world, not least of which was her desire to leave poverty, and the Bronx, behind.

At age 16, she boarded a train to New Haven to go on a blind date with a skinny 19-year-old architecture student in glasses named Edward Shiffer. They watched Yale lose a football game against Columbia. But one Yalie won a companion for life. Three years later, Ed and Maggie were married and spent the next 70 years as husband and wife.

On their honeymoon, they sailed to Italy on a small passenger ship and spent three months visiting the architectural marvels and ingesting the gastronomic offerings of that delightful country. While aboard one of the ships, they discovered they had a common gift: neither would get seasick when the rest of the passengers, and even the crew, were miserable. That shared passion for travel, literature and food, and perhaps strong tolerance for turbulence, helped them stay together through life's rough seas.

Marion earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland before they moved to Germany, where Edward was posted during his Army service. She worked on post as a typist for a U.S. intelligence service. After Edward was discharged, they moved to California, where Michael was born. They quickly traded the beatnik lifestyle for the postwar suburban American dream. Though like everything they did, it wasn't exactly conventional. 112 Lee Road, Scarsdale, N.Y, was a former church awkwardly converted into a house. They replaced all the plumbing themselves, filled the house with books and painted groovy designs on the walls. Shortly after they moved to the suburbs, Maggie and Edward welcomed their second son, Alexander. A third son, James, arrived two and a half years later.

In 1971, she loaded her three sons into a Volkswagen Bus and drove across the country, visiting friends and camping in national parks and writing letters to Edward about what they saw. Upon her return, she soon found out her husband had developed a different kind of wanderlust. He had acquired a small sailboat. Against her better judgment, she accompanied him on cruises all over Long Island Sound, then beyond, to Nantucket, Nova Scotia and Bermuda.

The soundtrack of Maggie's life was classical music, especially Mozart and Chopin and opera. The first thing anyone saw walking into the Lee Road house was her baby grand piano. Over time, the keyboard collection in the Scarsdale house grew to include a build-it-yourself harpsichord and clavichord. Mostly she stuck to the piano, banging out show tunes, rags, sonatas, waltzes, mazurkas and sing-along tunes for the children and then the grandchildren. With friends she played four-handed pieces, and when the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve, anyone on Lee Road would have heard the melody of Auld Lang Syne accompanied by the bellowing of her neighbors and friends, likely leaning on the piano to hold themselves up. She played until arthritis knotted her fingers. By then her grandchildren could take over the keys.

She worked in the civilian side of health care, as an administrator at Mt. Sinai Hospital, then setting up clinical trials. She described the day she retired as the one of the best in her life. She was 60, and she quickly went to work on her true passion: reading, learning and fostering a community of others like her. LIRIC, the learning-in-retirement program at Iona College in New Rochelle, became the center of her intellectual and social life. At home, her book collection spilled out of the living room and the bedroom and climbed the stairs until there was no more room for any of them.

She reserved her greatest love for her children, Michael, Alex and James. She was eager to welcome daughters into the family fold. First there was Amy, then Sharon and finally Kirsten. Those unions brought her four granddaughters and two grandsons, who could count on her to keep them fed and clothed and immersed in culture.

Sometime in her later years, she chronicled select moments in a memoir. "I am the mother of 12 now," she wrote. "It's a daunting number. Each of you has enriched my life. The person who has accompanied me in this odyssey, I now live with (in our dotage). It's a life."

Her final years were spent in the excellent care of Willow Gardens Memory Care in New Rochelle, N.Y.

Five days before his death in 2021, Edward had the chance to say goodbye to his life companion. Marion is survived by her brother, Joseph Shein (Françoise) of Larchmont, N.Y.; three sons, Michael (Amy Silberkleit), of Gilboa, N.Y.; Alexander (Sharon Richman), of Napanoch, N.Y.; and James (Kirsten Delegard) of Minneapolis, Minn., and six grandchildren, Isis Shiffer, Elijah Shiffer, Jasmine Shiffer, Violet Shiffer, Annika Shiffer-Delegard and Malachi Shiffer-Delegard.