Sheila Watson Coutin

Sheila Watson Coutin, 89, died October 19, 2024 in Flemington. 

Sheila Watson was born on March 24, 1935, in Gosport, a small village on the south coast in Hampshire, England. When she was 10, her family moved to South Africa to be with her father, who had been invalided out of the RAF in 1945. He had served in the air-sea rescue. The family lived in South Africa for about three years and eventually moved back to the UK to the picture postcard fishing village of Bosham on the south coast of West Sussex. She stayed with her family there until she left for nursing school in London. 

In 1960, she emigrated to the United States and worked at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. After a few years in New York, she headed west to San Francisco, supposedly forever. But she returned after only six months to New York City, where she worked for the next 15 years in the operating room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital.

Always very active, Sheila skied and scuba dived. It was on a trip scuba diving off the Jersey Shore in 1981 that she met Pierre Coutin, an architect from Princeton, NJ. They married in 1983, and Shela moved to Hunterdon County, NJ, where Pierre has his practice. She continued her nursing, again working in the operating room, this time at St. Francis in Trenton, NJ.

After five or six years, she joined the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), now part of the Rutgers School of Biomedical and Health Sciences. There she worked on cutting edge AIDS research. She ultimately went to the Chandler Health Center, an inner-city health center in New Brunswick, operated by UMDNJ, where she ran the AIDS clinic. She often said this was the high point of her nursing career.

She retired in 2005 and concentrated her prodigious energies on her painting, ceramics, and her garden. She and Pierre lived in a small quirky house, a remodelled farm building by a stream that –on occasion–  flooded. Sheila, a Master Gardener in Hunterdon County, designed separate gardens on the grounds of their house that created a series of outdoor rooms.

As beautiful as her gardens were, pottery was her greatest love. She was a member of the Covered Bridge Artisans, as well as other arts groups in the area, and exhibited at juried shows at the Prallsville Mills, among many other arts venues in the Delaware Valley. 

In 2022, she and Pierre moved to Frenchtown, NJ, to live along the Delaware River, next to the tow path. She was happiest near water. 

Sheila Watson Coutin leaves behind a sister, Val Evans, who still lives in Bosham, UK; her beloved husband, Pierre; three stepchildren, and six grandchildren. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her and cherished in loving memories.

There will be a celebration of life held in the spring. 

Donations in lieu of flowers may be made to Hunterdon Hospice, 215 NJ-31, Flemington, NJ 08822.

Cremation services are private under the direction of the Holcombe-Fisher Funeral Home, 147 Main Street, Flemington, NJ 08822.

For further information or to send an online condolence, please visit her page at www.holcombefisher.com.