Fanny Gelpieryn

1938 - 2020
Fanny Gelpieryn was 81 and healthy. Her death on April 12, 2020 was a result of the Covid-19 virus. She was described by the doctors in the hospital as one of the sharpest minds they'd met. She stood out to several doctors so much that they contacted her daughter, just to say she touched them.

Fanny immigrated to the US in 1965 from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her husband James, also from Argentina, left first and lived in New York for a year before Fanny and their four-year-old daughter followed. Fanny, who spoke both Spanish and English, worked as a Telex operator in Argentina. Only in her twenties, she'd made friends from all over the world. Settling in the Bronx, it proved to be a struggle at first.

She described the 1965 blackout as a very scary and odd experience. In Buenos Aires, her neighbors all looked out for each other. In her Bronx apartment building everyone stayed inside, only peeking out. It was a transitional time for the Bronx, the beginning of "white flight." Fanny never left.

She had a second child, a son in 1969. Once both children were in school, she returned to work. She spent the next three decades at Rite Aid, where she rose to become a pharmacy technician. She had the smarts to be a pharmacist, but not the education or means to achieve it while raising her family. She knew the customers by name, was stopped often in the street just to say hi or be asked a question.

In 2000, her husband died. She stayed in her two-bedroom Bronx apartment and eventually discovered Facebook. Again, she made friends from all over the world. She started learning Italian after turning 75 because she'd always wanted to speak it.

Fanny was a life-long learner, a liberal, loving person who touched hundreds of people in small and large ways. To her daughter, son and four granddaughters she was their source of strength, their example for perseverance.

She survived breast cancer at the age of 60.

But her life ended, alone, in a hospital with no visitors, except for one final "come quick" end-of-life visit due to the coronavirus. There was no funeral. Her family was quarantined and could not attend her burial.

She did not write a book, or solve a world problem, or play an instrument. But she lived a life that should not be forgotten.

Amid a growing clamor for moving on, with its whispered undercurrent of "acceptable losses," Fanny is an example of an unacceptable loss, whose brightness was darkened all too soon.

Fanny is survived by her daughter, Sandy Gelpieryn and her husband Dean Tomasula, her son Danny Gelpieryn and his wife Barbara Gelpieryn, and four granddaughters: Aubrey, Chloe, Faith and Grace.

Donations in her honor may be made to any coronavirus or breast cancer- related charity.