Jean A. Thomas

Daughter, sister, friend, aunt, dedicated wife, devoted mother, grandmother and great grandmother and participant in life, Jean was born in 1924 in Eagle Grove, Iowa and passed in 2016 in her home in Olympia, Washington. She was the last surviving child of the nine children born to Jesse and Nellie Mae. She didn’t like being the last one. Think of them all now eating ice cream together at a picnic on a hot day and laughing. Jean was a 1946 graduate of the Kahler Nursing School in Rochester, Minnesota. She married Ray Thomas in December 1948. She worked as a Registered Nurse for her whole life, with time out to raise children. Upon retirement, she worked as a volunteer with children, aging adults and with her local senior center. She was called an “Angel of Seattle” in 1995 and she was awarded a certificate from the Retired Senior Volunteer Program organization for 15 years of volunteering in 2005. Jean was always an active person, gardening, walking, taking up hiking at age 69, and skiing with her senior center companions. She loved the ocean, walking and digging for razor clams, and she continued enjoying beachcombing as an older adult, eventually buying and staying in her own beach cottage in Ocean Shores for vacations in her middle age. She enjoyed traveling around the continental United States, but she also went to Denali, Hawaii, Ecuador and Europe. She made habits of good diet and health and she was still walking the occasional three-mile stroll during her final spring, “an inspiration to us,” said some fellow walkers at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. She quit breathing on her last morning with the morning sun shining on her face after a sudden and brief decline in her abilities. She was preceded in death by her husband, Ray, and her daughter, Ann. Jean asked for any remembrances to be made to the Northwest Harvest and your local food bank. Her ashes and her husband’s ashes will be cast into the waters of the Pacific Ocean offshore of Ocean Shores, Washington. Please leave memories of Jean or condolences for her family in the Guestbook below.