She was travelling with her sister-in-law Patricia Cushing on a long-anticipated trip to San Francisco. The two lived a few streets apart and often took day trips together. She raised six children, lost one son in Vietnam and another to AIDS, and went into New York weekly after retiring to show her six grandchildren the shops and theatres and museums she loved.

Killed aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the morning of 11 September 2001. The aircraft had left Newark forty-two minutes late, which is the only reason those aboard learned by telephone what had already happened in New York before theirs was taken. They had about thirty minutes. They voted, and they went forward at the cockpit door. The aircraft never reached what it was aimed at.