Joan Kupchynsky passed away at her home in Crystal Falls, MI, surrounded by love, on May 26, 2026.

Joan began developing her charming British accent and her love of Branston Pickle when she was born on July 13, 1947 to Flight Lieutenant John Hardy Douglas and Godelieve Douglas née Deuss, in Chalfont Saint Giles, in Buckinghamshire outside London, England.

She moved to Urmston, Manchester from Chesham at the age of four and attended St. Hugh of Lincoln School. She loved taking the long way home from school with her mother, stopping by the town ponds to watch the orange carp shimmer.

She spent summers in Bruges, Belgium, feeling safe in the love of the extended Deuss family. She adored her doting and indomitable grandmother Julia, who’d purposefully broken Nazi curfews — for which she once spent a night in jail. Her cherished aunts Jeannot, Cecile, and Christine took her blackberry-picking, to the hedge maze at Loppem Castle, and to the beaches of the North Sea, where they’d eat fresh, sugary Flemish doughnuts.

When she was nine, her family moved to Cardiff, South Wales. In the winter, she played in the snow with her friend Diana and their brothers. In the spring and summer, she and her friend Jennifer hiked through the bluebell-covered woods of the Wenallt and bicycled to Caerphilly, pushing their bikes up the town's steep hill and freewheeling down, which was in hindsight probably kind of dangerous.

She harbored a lifelong fantasy of living in a grand library attached to a garden with a donkey-in-residence.

At the age of 19, she enrolled at City of London College to become a bilingual secretary. She never bragged about speaking six languages fluently — English, French, German, Dutch, Flemish, and Italian — and could manage not to starve in Spanish- and Ukrainian-speaking locales.

At 20, she moved to Brussels, where she worked as a trilingual secretary at Danfoss Hydraulics, speaking English, Dutch, and French. There she met bookkeeper “Clairette” Verhoeven and Clairette’s husband Hubert Vierset, who became her lifelong chosen family.

Ever the adventurer, she moved to Italy at 21, where she gave birth to her son Giampaolo and learned to cook Italian food better than most Italians. In Rome, she worked as a bilingual secretary at American Express International Banking, speaking Italian and English, where she was the first woman to be promoted out of “employee rank” to department head.

At 26, she moved to Forest Hills in Queens, New York, working at the British Trade Development Office, then the United Nations, before moving to Staten Island.

Her three daughters, Rachel, Laura, and Vanessa, were born in New York City and spent their early childhoods in Staten Island, where Joan’s backyard rock garden — the family turtle Rummy’s hiding spot — was a source of pride, as was her vegetable garden, which the neighbors often discussed over the fence in envious awe.

There, she also began her decades-long collection of cats — Muffin, Taffy, Bonnie, Lucky, Jasper, Rusty, Buddy, and Cody — which the family supplemented with their dog Ben and a menagerie of other fish, rodents, birds, and reptiles.

In 1985, the family moved to East Brunswick, New Jersey, where she was an ESL volunteer, an avid PTA member, and eventually one of the town’s most beloved Girl Scout leaders. She took a ragtag bunch of oddball girls and whipped them into a cohesive troop that learned such various activities as baking cakes in foil-wrapped wine boxes, milking cows, and changing tires. She gave them a space to be together and to be truly themselves. Many now-grown women are eternally grateful for the skills she imparted in their formative years.

She also cultivated a beautiful English garden with trellises, a gazebo, and about a million flowers.

In 1997, she married Jerry Kupchynsky, who introduced her to Black Russians and dirty martinis, and taught her to play the viola beginning at the age of 55. They traveled to Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina, Switzerland, and Italy. She cared for him loyally until his death in 2009.

That same year, she moved to Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, where she served as a docent at Life on the Edge, an exhibit at the Tuckerton Seaport about the Jersey shore and its ecosystem, and volunteered at the local food bank and nursing home.

She was passionate about marshes, seabirds, drawing and painting, and playing with her string quartet, the Sea Strings.

In 2010, she intertwined her life with that of Ed Monks, a Jersey native who loved deer hunting and bluegrass. They split their time between South Jersey and Cape Coral, Florida, where they spent hours looking for dolphins, manatees, and burrowing owls, and caught crabs in the canal outside their back door. They shared a devoted, contented relationship until he passed away in 2020.

That summer, following her daughter, she migrated north on a new quest to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She developed an affectionate connection with Tom Murphy, with whom she spent a few winters dancing in the desert sunsets of Arizona, and whose handy expertise was a boon to her new house, which required attentive gardening and upkeep.

She spent her time in Michigan serving as vice-president of the Friends of the Crystal Falls District Community Library, and instilling her love of art in her granddaughters, painting and drawing while overlooking the ever-changing waterscape of Gilbert Lake.

She could identify nearly any bird or plant in North America. She delighted in elephants, or “heffalumps” — collecting figurines, artwork, and stuffed animals throughout her life. She loved Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Pavarotti, and the Beatles. She was an insatiable reader and a fierce Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble opponent.

She probably completed over 300 jigsaw puzzles in the course of her lifetime.

She recently visited a local donkey farm to feed and pet the animals. Her face lit up as the donkeys nuzzled her hands in the warm spring sunshine. As she fell asleep that night, she said, “I’ll dream of donkeys,” as though this small excursion had touched something deep — a glimpse of that long-held wish made real.

She will be overwhelmingly missed and ceaselessly loved by Giampaolo Buongiorno (Alessandra and daughter Giulia,) Rachel Rear, Laura Rear McLaughlin (John and sons Malakai and Kaden,) Vanessa Warren (Kyle and daughters Lacey and Sylvi,) her companion Tom Murphy, the remaining Sea Strings players, her dear friends Janet Wagner and Mary Kudwa, her magnanimous neighbors Rose and Randy Heimerl, a gaggle of grown-up Girl Scouts, and innumerable others to whose lives she offered her unique gloss of gleeful humor, candid authenticity, and unquestioning, unconditional love.

For those who wish to express sympathy, please consider a gift to the Friends of the Crystal Falls District Community Library in lieu of flowers.

In accordance with Joan’s wishes, private family services will be held.

Friends may leave condolences and tributes to Joan’s family online at www.jacobsfuneralhomes.com

The family has chosen Jacobs-Plowe Funeral Home and Cremation Service, Crystal Falls, MI, to honor Joan’s legacy of life.