Michael Shulman

Michael Shulman, b. 1946, died at home, under hospice care, on November 14, 2025. He leaves behind his partner of 23 years, Maj-Britt Johnson, his standard poodle Shotzie, nephews Peter Weinman of Staten Island NY, and Sam Johnson of Santa Fe NM, nieces Ashley Flood of Cincinnati, Emily Perez-Johnson of Santa Fe, Natalie Johnson of Ann Arbor Michigan, and Eleanor Maj Johnson of Dallas TX, great nieces April, Piper and Emmita, and a great nephew Nicholas, as well as brothers-in-law Alexis Johnson of Santa Fe N.M, Laird Johnson of Dallas TX, sister-in-law Kim Arrington of Bethlehem KY, and last but certainly not least his 97 year old mother-in-law Cynthia Johnson of Pleasant Hill TN. He was preceded in death by his parents, Phil and Etta, his sister Harriet Weinman, his father-in-law Forrest Johnson, his nephew David Weinman, and his first wife, Elaine Morrow, who remained a life long friend to him, and later to Maj-Britt.

In 2008 Michael was dragged down south, from New York, by Maj-Britt, when she accepted a ministerial position in Chapel Hill. While it took a good year before he was able to understand what people were saying he soon grew to love North Carolina, and call it home. Brooklyn, nevertheless, remained his axis mundi. He was, almost right up to the end, in close contact with a small, scattered, collection of childhood friends from the neighborhoods of East New York and Flatbush, who may as well have been his biological brothers. The guys rarely ended a phone call without saying “I love you.” Something Michael said he learned to do when the first of his old friends, Mark, died of cancer twenty years ago.

Michael graduated from Pace University in NYC with a degree in business and did a brief stint in the Manhattan accounting office of the Office of Economic Opportunity, but an office job was most definitely not for him. Always on the move, he was a hands-on kind of guy, though he was an INFP on the Meyers Briggs Personality Inventory (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceptive). Not ordinarily into touchy feely stuff, Michael was quick to tell Maj-Britt his MBPI type on their first date, which, as it turned out, was the same “type” as hers. Perhaps one of the (many) reasons two people, so seemingly un-alike, so quickly created and sustained a deep, sometimes hilarious, respectful, and loving bond.

After that brief stint in the accounting office at The Office of Economic Opportunity, the next fifty-four years of Michael’s working life (and he worked all the time) was about wood, brick, nails, grit, long days, people, and landscapes. At the age of 22, in the late sixties, Michael and Elaine bought a brownstone in Park Slope Brooklyn for a song, he renovated it, they sold it, and bought another, and another. He might have been the first real estate “flipper” in Park Slope. He loved that neighborhood back then, with its wild diversity - in every way - and particularly enjoyed attending lively potluck dinners with his neighbors.

After his divorce at a young age, Michael admits he went through a “dark time,” when he became addicted to alcohol and drugs. But he got clean and sober in 1987, went into therapy with a great therapist, wrote copious heart-rending entries in a journal (something he only let Maj-Britt read after ten years of her badgering him) and never wavered in his sobriety.

Michael spent about eight years in San Diego, in his forties, where he made some rest-of-his-life friends, and worked as a real estate agent. After an economic downturn during which he lost many rental properties, he returned to New York and for many years, managed the outdoor work crew at his cousin’s Day Camp, Blue Rill, in New Jersey. In 2002, at the age of 55, he met Maj-Britt, who had also lived a peripatetic life, and returned to real estate sales. Together they bought, lived in, (he) renovated and they sold, no less than ten (but who’s counting) houses in New Jersey, New York and North Carolina. When they moved to N.C. during the Great Recession, Michael painstakingly, patiently, mastered a new territory and a new culture, built a successful sales business, made numerous new connections and eventually started his own successful, property management company, Preferred Realty Services. For an introvert Michael was unbelievably well able to connect to people’s best selves, able to enter a roomful of co-workers, insult every one of them equally, and leave them all laughing helplessly.

Had it not been for a massive stroke at age 76 Michael would have kept on working until he dropped, as his father did, when Michael was sixteen. Raised in a blue collar family of Jewish immigrants from Belarus who were forced out of their homeland by terrorist anti-semitic thugs, he said all he knew how to do was work. His retirement plan, he always insisted to Maj-Britt, was a quick death, like his father’s. He fully expected that to happen. Death had other plans however, and he struggled for three years, after a series of strokes, a TBI, and hop-scotch potshots of vascular dementia left him with little to “do,” except work hard at P.T. and O.T. Those efforts did not bring the results he wished for. 

Dying is not easy. And even with the attentive care of amazing hospice workers, it is not always “peaceful.” A man who rarely acted out anger, ever, Michael was angry that he could no longer drive (due to a “left visual field cut”), kayak, boat, deep sea fish, lake fish, or shore fish, tend to his aquarium of tropical fish, walk without a walker, much less ever train a new poodle or Irish wolfhound again, fix and buy and sell houses ever again, or even focus on his computer, or phone. He hated that he could not take care of his own house and grounds. He hated that his wife had to “do everything.” He hated that he could no longer be there for us, his little family, in all the ways he had always been, so utterly faithful, so completely and so lovingly and laughingly here. He did not want to go. We did not want him to.

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Michael’s memorial service will be held at the Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist, 106 Purefoy Rd. Chapel Hill, on December 12th, at 5:00 p.m. An ample nosh to follow. Michael loved that congregation, and even enjoyed his brief five years in the role of “first gentleman,” (another thing he would never admit, but was absolutely evident every Sunday). He especially remembered, always fondly, working with a crazy passel of women (you know who you are) at the Interfaith Council - cooking and schmoozing and serving up meals to the unhoused, as well as working with a crew of old dudes on the Buildings and Grounds Committee who (he said) were absolutely nuts to be climbing ladders at their age. He was the young one, at sixty-something. He loved all a y’all.