Brooklin
Mary Meek Semler died peacefully in her sleep at home, early in the morning of Oct. 23, 2021. She was over halfway through her 100th year.
Born April 11, 1922, in Richmond, Va., to John Dorsey Brown of Richmond, an attorney, and Mary Cabine Meek of Nashville, Tenn., Mary Meek (known as “Meek” to her Richmond friends and family) graduated from St. Catherine’s School in 1940, where she excelled in all sports, especially field hockey. Mary was the granddaughter of the Episcopal bishop of Virginia, William Cabell Brown, who served as a missionary in Brazil and translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to Portuguese.
In 1942, she married George Semler of New Canaan, Conn., whom she had met at the University of Virginia. A lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard, Semler was assigned to duty in the Western Pacific until the fall of 1944. The couple eventually settled in Salisbury, Conn., in 1947, where they lived until 1979, when they retired to Brooklin. George Semler, a career teacher of Romance languages, died in 2001. Mary was the senior warden at St. Francis-by-the-Sea for many years and was one of the original founders who moved the church from North Penobscot to its present site on Hinckley Ridge. She designed and organized the production of the church’s more-than-100 needlepoint kneelers depicting scenes from around Blue Hill. She was also a talented sculptor in clay and portraitist in pastels.
“I have given great love and received it,” Mary said recently. “I have led a charmed life.” She is survived by her three sons, George, Jack and Derrick Semler, their wives, nine grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren. Celebration of life will be held next summer. Her granddaughter Hannah Meek Semler wrote this farewell:
“Her lines are now my warrior lines.
A one-handed heart draws its broken wings,
Poised to regrow around the enormously beautiful scar of her absence.
Stronger, bigger, slower, infused by her long earthly presence…My Grandma.
Her roots, my roots, two branches of the same familiar tree,
One fallen back gently into the earth,
The other stretched tall reaching up
into the open blue sky.
I’ll find you
at every mountain top,
and in every horizon,
Lingering gently between the lines,
where the love
you give so generously Still sits.”