Suzanne Tillinghast Bulkeley

1933 - 2025

Suzanne Tillinghast Bulkeley died on September 6, 2025, her 92nd birthday. Born in Philadelphia in 1933, she was the only child of Eleanor Wistar Garrett and Paul Hudson Sangree, and the youngest of eight girls in their blended family.

Suzanne was raised in the Quaker faith within an extended community of Quaker family and friends. She attended Germantown Friends School (Philadelphia, PA), The Out-of-Door Academy (Siesta Key, FL) and Westtown School (West Chester, PA). Following graduation, she moved to Boston, a city she cherished for over 50 years.

Suzanne met Carlton Wilson Tillinghast Jr. at Friends Meeting at Cambridge, and they married in 1955. Their marriage was happy and full. They had four daughters, and shared many interests including music and travel to such places as Iran, Cambodia, India, and Ethiopia as part of Carl's job. They lived in Brookline, MA and spent summers at their beloved family retreat in Mount Washington, MA where Suzanne's great-grandparents had built a home in the late 1800s.

Following Carl's death from cancer at the age of 36 in 1969, Suzanne raised their daughters as a single mother and returned to school, receiving her B.A. Summa Cum Laude from the University of Massachusetts (Boston) and her MSW from Simmons College School of Social Work. She pursued a career as a psychiatric social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1970s and '80s, where she cared for, among many others, young men dying of AIDS during the early years of the epidemic.

In 1987, Suzanne married Edward Root Bulkeley. They spent 27 wonderful years together in Brookline and the Berkshires until Ed's death in 2013. Their marriage was filled with family, travel and the many daily pleasures of city life and summers in the mountains.

Suzanne was a longtime member of Wellesley Friends Meeting and, later, of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, where she co-chaired the committee that drafted a legal framework for same-sex marriage. In 1996, during her tenure as Presiding Clerk, Friends Meeting at Cambridge issued the first same-sex marriage certificate in Massachusetts, risking criminal prosecution at a time when such marriages were illegal nationwide.

Suzanne died of pancreatic cancer. She leaves her four daughters Eleanor Tillinghast, Elizabeth Tillinghast, Rebecca Tillinghast and Pamela Tillinghast Dubitsky, her six grandchildren Emma Blair, Samuel Blair, Nathaniel Tillinghast-Raby, Amory Tillinghast-Raby, Schuyler Dubitsky and Hamish Dubitsky, her great-grandson Jackson Huck, and her sons-in-law Morgan Bulkeley IV and Alex Dubitsky. She also leaves her stepchildren Edward Bulkeley and Thomas Bulkeley and their families, as well as the family of her late stepdaughter, Nancy Bulkeley Crocker.

Suzanne treasured her family above all and found great strength and spirituality in the natural world and her Quaker faith. She lived a life of meaning and purpose, with tremendous competence, moral clarity and integrity, kindness and grace. She was beloved by her family and will be deeply missed.

A celebration of Suzanne's life will be held at a later date.