Margaret Danborn

Margaret (Grace) Danborn, the last of three Irish American matriarchs from a hardscrabble North Denver family whose descendants now number in the hundreds, has died. She was 82.

Danborn died Nov. 22 at Collier Hospice Center in Wheat Ridge, where she had briefly received care following a long illness. She passed moments after her faithful husband finally stepped outside. Her oldest daughter was holding her hand.

Known as Peg or Peggy since she was a girl, she was born in Chicago and spent a short time as an Indiana farmgirl before heading west with her parents, Jack and Mary Grace, and her older sisters Mary Kay (Connor) and Eileen (Golesh) just days after World War II ended. The family settled in North Denver, building a full life in a span of a few blocks. They worshipped at Holy Family Catholic Church and the girls attended its elementary and high schools. Peggy held a summer job at the old Elitch Gardens amusement park on 38th Avenue, spinning cotton candy. The smell of it made her sick for the rest of her life.

With her sisters starting their own families, Peggy enrolled at Loretto Heights College. She took a road trip with a friend to New Orleans. She saw Harry Belafonte at Red Rocks in 1959 and thought he was positively dreamy; she’d occasionally break out into his songs for many years afterward.

When her parents’ health declined and her father lost his job, Peggy quit school and went to work to help pay the household bills. Among her jobs: teaching at a parochial grade school, a position for which she felt totally unprepared. She never gave herself credit for being much of a teacher, but that changed a bit when she learned many years later that she had inspired one of her students to become a teacher herself. She took particular pride in that. Though she never got to finish college, she remained well informed and a voracious reader of books and newspapers throughout life, and fomented those traits in her children.

It was at a Loretto Heights afternoon social mixer at Lowry Air Force Base that she met a lanky freshman cadet from Chicago named Don Danborn. He asked for her number as she boarded the bus to leave. A few years later, they wed at Holy Family, honeymooning in San Francisco.

So began two decades and change as the co-commandant of a military family, making lifelong friends at stops in Alabama, Florida, back in Colorado Springs, Florida again, abroad to West Germany and back to Virginia. They were witnesses to history, living in Craig Air Force Base housing that backed onto the highway taken by the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marchers. Their bags were packed for Tehran when the shah fell, so instead it was off to a still-divided Germany.

Peggy knew loss. Her mother died months after the wedding, her father in 1982. In between, she lost the second of her five children, 14-year-old Claire, with whom she will be interred. Later in life, Peggy buried her sisters and her best friend.

Through it all, she led her family with abiding faith and well-timed bits of Irish wisdom, many inherited from her off-the-boat father, others she made her own. One favorite: “God, give me patience — and I want it right now.”

She mothered with love and matter-of-factness. Listening to one son moan about what turned out to be appendicitis, she understandably questioned whether his underage drinking was just getting the better of him. Fetching the other son from a grade-school party where he’d broken his arm, she met the host parents in the parking lot of a medical center but eschewed that in favor of the cross-town trip to Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center, where the cast wouldn’t cost as much. When a game of one-on-one between the two boys produced a gusher of a broken nose, she returned from a grocery run and demanded to know who was going to clean the blood off her driveway.

Peggy’s faith was devout but never pious. A lifelong Catholic, she prayed with conviction and more or less adhered to Rome’s teachings while focusing her own actions where the rubber met the road. She was deeply involved in parish life, first at Holy Family and for many years afterward at Shrine of St. Anne. Witnessing all she’d seen in Selma, she spent the rest of her life donating to the Edmundites, an order of priests that ministers to underserved Black communities in the South.

She was disappointed that none of her kids turned out to be practicing Catholics, even as she kept a sense of humor about it. When one son joined an Irish club that marched on the feast of St. Patrick, she quipped, “Well at least now I know you’ll make it to Mass at least once a year.”

She was proud nonetheless of what her kids chose to do with their lives: the caregiver to elders, the family practice attorney, the social worker — heck, even the journalist. She was equally proud that her kids grew to become such good friends, and couldn’t say enough about her daughters- and son-in-law. She enjoyed being a grandma, no-nonsense with the little kids but a big fan of their exploits once they got older. And good luck trying to get a sleeping grandbaby off her chest.

In her later years, Peggy enjoyed contemplative retreats at the Abbey of St. Walberga, reuniting with old Holy Family classmates and Air Force friends, and hopping with Don on a bicycle built for two and pulling out of the driveway of the Arvada home where she spent the final 37 years of her life. An amateur family historian, Peggy also liked flipping through old photos and photocopies of vital records. She was passionate about making sure her kids all knew where they came from, that they appreciated the hard lives that had been lived to make theirs more comfortable. She unreservedly loved her family, who were blessed in having her.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donation to Arvada Community Table, 8555 W. 57th Ave, COTABLE.org .