Marian Heilbrun

Marian Kirkpatrick Heilbrun

(1927-2025)

Marian Kirkpatrick Heilbrun was born and raised in Worland, Wyoming and died on September 19, 2025 in Austin, Texas, where she and her husband Al (1924-2022) moved for their retirement after living in Atlanta for 43 years. Growing up in Wyoming, she was unconventional-she loved books and mastered the piano-and attended college at the conservatory at Oberlin. It was there she met Al. They would have celebrated their 75th anniversary this past June. She loved children and teaching; one of her fondest memories involved teaching in Traverse City, Michigan while Al was serving in Korea. Later in her life she earned a master's degree in library science from Emory, and served as a librarian for many years in an Atlanta-area public school.

She lived an extraordinary life. She was the kind of mother who would discover the work of J.R.R. Tolkien before most of the rest of the world-and read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud to her children. While the family moved from Iowa City to Berkeley (one year) to Atlanta, she was the social heart of the family, neighbors, her children's friends, and her husband's faculty colleagues.

She was honored by a generous family gift establishing the Marian K. Heilbrun Music and Media Library at Emory. This library was always an enjoyable topic of conversation among Marian, Al and Mark (and no doubt countless others) during dinners for the Emory Board of Governors.

The memories are many. She would play beautiful piano renditions of Mozart and Beethoven on her 1930 Steinway Grand on Sunday mornings in the Atlanta home. She loved spending time with her visiting grandchildren, showing them how and where to pick wild berries and mint, and walking them through the flowers and plants in her garden. While saddened to leave her many friends in Atlanta when she and Al moved to Austin in 2009, she quickly made new friends, organized a library in their retirement community, and loved entertaining her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren when they visited. She was an amazing story-teller, and lit up every time she spoke about her family. She always carved out special time for each grandchild every time they saw her. She loved being at Seaside, where the family gathered in Florida for many years at Thanksgiving, and would take walks on the beach and make it a special point to talk with everyone in the growing family.

Marian is survived by a large, loving family, including her children Kirk Heilbrun (Patty Griffin), Lynn Stahl, Kim Heilbrun, Leigh Hines (Michael), and Mark Heilbrun (Amy), as well as fourteen grandchildren and sixteen (soon to be seventeen) great-grandchildren. She is also survived by generations of friends, neighbors, and former students, all of whose lives she touched. We celebrate an extraordinary, loving life, and feel so fortunate to have been a part of it. May she rest in peace.

Heilbrun, Kirkpatrick, Marian