Caroline Adams Muller

A Life of Giving

Caroline Adams Muller (November 27, 1949 - May 13, 2025) of Stonington, CT, died peacefully in Los Angeles after a courageous battle with ALS. She was surrounded by her family.

Born Caroline Severance Adams to Braman and Marjorie Adams of Greenwich, CT, Caroline was a 1964 graduate of Greenwich Country Day School, where she met her future husband, Scott Muller, at the end of their 9th-grade year. A 1967 alumna of the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT and an alumna of Pine Manor Junior College in 1969, Caroline graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in 1971, having majored in Art History. After working as a layout artist at Vogue Magazine in New York, Caroline married Scott in 1972.

Named for the pioneering suffragist, abolitionist, and activist Caroline Seymour Severance, also known as the "Mother of Clubs" (her maternal great-great-grandmother), Caroline continued her namesake's legacy of service. After working as a legislative aide in the DC office of a Michigan Congressman from 1972-1975, Caroline served for five years in the New York office of former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and for three years thereafter as a fundraiser for New York's Equity Library Theatre before becoming a mother in 1980 and a full-time homemaker in 1983.

While in DC, where she moved with her family in 1985, Caroline worked as a volunteer with a number of international humanitarian causes, including the international relief organization C.A.R.E, with whom she travelled to Ecuador in 2001 to visit water treatment facilities. In 2011, after climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, Caroline visited the Rift Valley Children's Village, a unique orphanage in northern Tanzania where, for the first of many times, she experienced the joy of walking the Village's smiling children each morning to their local school. In the ensuing years, Caroline became an active ambassador, donor, fundraiser, and volunteer-recruiter for the Children's Village and the Tanzanian Children's Fund. In 2019, on the occasion of her 70th birthday, a classroom building at the nearby Oldeani Secondary School was dedicated to Caroline for her "warmth and generosity."

Closer to home, Caroline volunteered for activities big and small, in her children's schools in Washington, with the Citizens' Committee for Children in New York and as a regular visitor to patients at Bellevue hospital and elsewhere in New York with her Labrador retriever Penny, whom she trained and had officially qualified as a "therapy dog" for this purpose. A longtime hospice volunteer in New York and Connecticut, Caroline also saw dozens of patients through their final days, listening to their stories, organizing their affairs, and calming their fears.

While a resident of Stonington, where she and Scott relocated full-time in 2015, Caroline served on the Board of the Stonington Village Improvement Association and of the Stonington Community Center (COMO), where she led the effort to restore the community tennis courts. She also chaired a charity devoted to providing financial support to the local community and was an active member of the Stonington Garden Club.

Until her death, Caroline maintained deep and meaningful personal relationships from every phase of her life. An avid tennis player, she remained active well into her otherwise debilitating illness, and never once turned down the opportunity to engage in physical activity. Caroline approached everything she did with a deep sense of purpose, an infectious smile and compassion, sensitivity, and kindness. She loved flowers and flower arranging, entertaining, travel, backgammon, and animals, including especially her Labrador retrievers (first Wendy, then Penny, then Lily). She was most exceptional at the quiet, and difficult work of being present. An unusally generous listener, Caroline had a preternatural ability to make anyone, anywhere, feel "at home." Her house on Water Street in Stonington became a home-away-from-home for her friends and children, as well as for her children's friends and her friends' children and grandchildren. She welcomed loved ones and strangers alike with hospitality and openness.

A loving, supportive mother to her three children, Caroline never missed a sporting event or school play. Even as her grown children moved to New York and Los Angeles, she remained her family's center of gravity, hosting dinners, planning trips, offering advice, and becoming a beloved playmate to her granddaughter, Billie, to whom she was "Nana."

Caroline is survived by her husband of 53 years, Scott; by her son Christopher (44) and his wife Clare; by her daughter Robin (43), her partner Erick, and their daughter, Billie (2.5); and by her son Peter (39). She is also survived by her brother, Bob Adams and his wife Jen of Adelaide, Australia.

Caroline's family plans to celebrate her life in Connecticut in late summer or early Fall and with a gathering in Washington, DC. In the meantime, they ask friends and loved ones to honor Caroline's memory through acts of service. In lieu of flowers, donations are welcome to Caroline's beloved cause, the Tanzanian Children's Fund, earmarked for the Caroline Muller Fund.