- Date Of Birth: October 14, 1926
- Date Of Death: April 8, 2017
- State: Massachusetts
Patricia M. (McCann) Pothier, 90, of Haverhill, passed away on April 8, 2017, at the Merrimack Valley Hospice House. A nurse told her children that it had been “an honor to care for Pat,” whose own nursing career spanned more than half a century, and came to a close only after her 80th birthday. For a good portion of those years, she provided comfort to people in their final weeks and months, at Prescott House Nursing Home in North Andover. She also cared for her husband of 53 years, Lomer J. Pothier, who died in 2006 after gracefully living with Alzheimer’s disease for 10 years. Before that, she worked overnight shifts as a private-duty nurse to help finance her children’s college education (and would sometimes remind them that those sleepless nights paid for more than few semesters). Pat was raised in Lowell, where her marriage to Lomer was the talk of the town in November 1952. The Lowell Sunday Sun headline over a six-column picture of the wedding party read, “Pothier-McCann Nuptials Among Most Brilliant of Season.” They started a family in Melrose, but true “home” was Andover, where for many years the Pothiers lived on Ivy Lane and built lifelong friendships with neighbors, before moving to Haverhill. In Andover, Pat and Lomer were the unofficial social coordinators of the neighborhood, regularly hosting elaborate parties that featured scallops wrapped in bacon, Manhattan cocktails, parlor games, and off key singing to an out-of-tune piano Pat salvaged from a dump. She insisted on ordering tea in restaurants – mainly so she could complain that it was not hot enough. She willingly signed on to Lomer’s frequent camping and mountain climbing adventures, tolerating a damp tent or wind-scraped summit when she would have rather been fireside in a country inn. And she never tired of recounting the time in 1977 when John F. Kennedy, Jr., then a student at Phillips Academy Andover, offered to load her groceries into her Buick station wagon. Pat was often described as a “strong” woman, and and though she never acknowledged it, she was in some ways a ground breaker in 1960s suburbia. She worked outside the home at a time when it was not the norm, and at backyard “cookouts” she freely expressed her opinions on such incendiary subjects as politics, religion, and her sons’ hair length with or without an invitation. She is survived by Jamie M. Taylor and her husband Ian of Chedworth, Gloucestershire, England, Mark J. Pothier and his wife Elizabeth of Plymouth, and Shawn M. Pothier of Rowley. She deeply loved Shawn’s wife, Suzie, who passed away in 2014, and was a source of unwavering strength for Suzie, Shawn, and their sons, Matthew and Ryan. Pat also is survived by five other grandchildren: Holly and Lewis Taylor; and Alexandra, Justin, and Laura Pothier.
