Jane Philler Swett, a long-time coastal resident of South Bristol, died quietly in the company of her youngest daughter, Annie Michel, at Cove’s Edge in Damariscotta in the afternoon of Sept. 6 at the age of 84.
Jane was happily married to Leonard W. Swett for 60 years and raised six children: Brian, Stuart, Eleanor, Mary, John, and Annie, living long enough to see all attain 50+ years of age and to see her oldest recently retire from a life of teaching. Together with her surviving children, Jane is survived by her 16 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Jane was a Main Line Philadelphia girl, a stunning, dark-eyed beauty, who at 21 married Leonard, a handsome Naval Air Lieutenant and Midwest lawyer-to-be, seven years her senior.
Over the course of her long and passionate life, Jane, who could not cook toast as a newlywed, eventually mastered every sort of home craft and trade from embroidery, cooking and pickling to felling trees and made the many homes and attendant gardens her family inhabited as lovely and warm as herself.
Jane was a thoroughly remarkable woman of great strength and unending energy. She loved her husband and family without reserve, accomplished all things with meticulous purpose and skill, and left every nook and cranny of life she visited in better shape than it was found. She found good in all things and in all people, and accumulated devoted friends wherever she went; friends who, like her extended family, will never stop missing her now that she’s gone.
As Jane would have wished, her children will throw a private family party in her honor following her cremation, but no public service or memorial is planned. Should any wish to remember Jane Swett, her family asks that donations, in lieu of flowers, be made to The Miles Memorial Hospital Development Fund, 35 Miles St., Damariscotta, ME 04543.
Arrangements are entrusted to Strong Funeral Home and Cremation Center, 612 Main St., Damariscotta.
