Jean ANDERSON

July 28, 1928 - March 1, 2025

Spokane Valley - Jean Shirley Engeldinger was born on July 8, 1928, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the youngest of three children to Lester Engeldinger and Sylvia C. Rhodes Engeldinger. All her life, she retained memories of a happy childhood in Sandpoint, despite the grueling circumstances of the Great Depression. Her neighborhood was poor. People had electricity but not indoor plumbing.

Nonetheless, the neighborhood functioned as a closely interconnected community, exchanging the produce and small livestock (rabbits and chickens) necessary to maintain a healthy diet that kept children and adults well fed. For medical emergencies, families relied on the one household that owned a car, which became in effect the neighborhood ambulance. Winters were hard in northern Idaho in those days. In some years, men and older boys tramped with great effort down the streets creating tunnels underneath the snow to gain access to buried homes. Or at least, that's how Jean remembered it.

Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother married Clayton Dalton in February 1940. During WWII, she lived with her mother and stepdad in Bend, Baker, and Portland, Oregon, where her parents worked in the war effort. After the war, she moved with her parents to a small farm in Bonner County, Idaho. She began her career in retail at the age of 16, in Newport, Washington, first at Grautner's Market, then at the Newport Safeway that is still doing business in its original location.

Jean married Fred Voos on April 9, 1947. Their first son, Keith, arrived on February 26, 1948, and their second, Mike, on July 31, 1951. She left the labor market till her sons were nearly grown, then resumed employment at the Shadle Park Safeway in Spokane and later at Payless Drug, where she worked until her retirement.

She and Fred were divorced in 1965. In 1967, she married Ray Anderson and acquired a stepson, Tom, a stepdaughter, Diana and an entire new family of Anderson relatives that became as dear to her as her relatives on the Engeldinger side of the family tree. In 1989, she and Ray moved from Spokane to a condo on Puget Sound in Olympia.

Most family members know of Jean and Ray's devotion to ballroom dancing on that side of the Cascades. They sometimes attended dances four times a week! Fewer people know that before that they could be heard zooming around the hills and backroads of eastern Washington on nifty new motorbikes, two middle-aged people innocently, if noisily, engaged in living their lives to the fullest.

They also become accomplished cruise line explorers, making trips to Mexico, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and Europe. A highlight of their travels was a trip by air to Sweden, where they visited Anderson family relatives. Jean, always one to make the most of all occasions, taught herself rudimentary Swedish in order to make a stronger connection.

A year after Ray died in July 1998, she moved back to Spokane, where she lived on her own for a number of years, then briefly in a retirement community, and finally from 2021 to 2025 with a great-niece and her husband, Kathy and Jim Cooper, until her death from pneumonia on March 1, 2025. While living with Jim and Kathy, she was often surrounded with members of her large, loving family and entered into holidays and celebrations with gusto. She could not have had a better quality of life in her final years.

Nonetheless, an account of her life would be woefully incomplete without an account of her daunting medical history. This began at 12 years old when she suffered a never well-understood bout of paralysis on the right side of her body that resolved in a few weeks as mysteriously as it began. But her medical challenges continued on and off, it is sad to say, for the remainder of her life.

These included breast cancer, three spinal surgeries with later onset of disabling back pain, a dysfunctional gastro-intestinal system, bad (bad!) knees, the need for a hysterectomy, another mysterious attack of paralysis, mistakenly diagnosed at the time as multiple sclerosis, installation of a cardiac pacemaker, a heart-valve replacement, a fractured hip, too-many-to-count episodes of pneumonia, three bouts of covid in her nineties(!), macular degeneration, and encroaching hearing loss.

As the foregoing list makes clear, most of these problems required surgery, making Jean as time went on a woman who could speak with authority on modern hospital procedure. What is remarkable about this is not, of course, the list of maladies and their surgical corrections, but the way she dealt with them. Time and time again, over the course of her life, she was knocked to the ground by some devastating diagnosis and then forced to undergo a grueling and painful treatment regimen, only to rise with her spirit unbowed and her love of life intact. She gradually became known to family and friends alike, acquaintances new and old, as "Auntie Jean."

While struggling with vastly more than her fair share of life's woes, Jean scarcely ever ceased to be a caring and important presence in the lives of the people she loved and who loved her. In the last 16 years alone, she welcomed an entirely new generation of family and contributed in countless ways to their welfare. Her generosity and loving kindness, her resilience, helpfulness and sense of humor in situations familiar and unfamiliar, and most of all her abiding authenticity as herself gave her a treasured place in many, many hearts. She had the remarkable ability to turn casual and even business relationships into enduring friendships.

She would not want to see a distinction made between her biological and her married-into families. Understanding this, it is accurately said that she is survived by two sons, Tom Anderson and Keith Voos; two grandsons, Chris Anderson and Mark Shreck; and four granddaughters, Johanna Voos, Michaela Voos, Amy Anderson, and Marcy Shreck. Her younger son, Mike Voos, died in August 1985.

Jean maintained strong ties to six nieces and nephews and to their spouses and children. She was, and always will be, truly loved and kept in cherished memory.

Funeral services will take place at the Hazen and Jaeger Funeral Home, 1306 N. Pines Road, Spokane Valley, WA 99206, on Tuesday, March 11, beginning at 11:30 am, followed by a brief reception at the site and interment at Greenwood Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to her memorial fund via checks to Jean S. Anderson. These will be deposited and used to commission a plaque with the words, "Auntie Jean's Garden" at her last home, 609 S. Oberlin Road, Spokane Valley and to keep her garden thriving and beautiful in years to come.