Michele Heenan Salisbury

Michele Heenan Salisbury was born on November 10, 1944 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the eldest child of Ada May and Charles T. Heenan. She grew up in Olean, NY and graduated from Olean High School in 1962. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Spanish from University of Wisconsin in 1966 where she met her future husband and fellow upstate New Yorker, Richard V. Salisbury. While in college, she spent her junior year abroad in Madrid studying at the University of Madrid while Spain was still under the control of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. She received her Masters degree in Spanish Literature from the University of Kansas in 1969.

Michele and Richard married on December 30, 1966 in Olean, NY. Richard was a history professor specializing in Central American history. Together, he and Michele shared and pursued life-long passions for all things associated with Central and South America. Both fluent in Spanish, they traveled extensively throughout Central and South America, and eventually lived for a year in Costa Rica in 1982 (long before Costa Rica was cool) where Michele worked as a nurse at the United States Embassy in San Jose and Richard taught at the Universidad de Costa Rica. Some of their best times were spent scrambling over Mayan, Aztec, Olmec and Toltec ruins throughout Latin America. Michele continued this pursuit after Richard’s death by finally having the opportunity to visit Machu Picchu in the summer of 2004.

Michele had an incredible appetite for learning and education. Her daughter used to joke that she collected advanced degrees like some men collected cars or wives: always trading up for a better model. The pinnacle of her educational odyssey was when she obtained her Ph.D in Nursing from the University of Texas at the age of 49.

She used her education and degrees well throughout her life in the service of others. She was a practicing nurse, working in the labor and delivery and neonatal units at the Medical Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky for over a decade. She taught Spanish at the high school level for many years when she was younger, and then later taught nursing for over twenty-five years at the college level, first at Western Kentucky University and then at Vanderbilt University. She was a phenomenal teacher gaining the respect and love of her colleagues and students. In 1997 she was chosen by her students to receive the Julia Hereford Award from Vanderbilt University in recognition of her contributions in the classroom. Professionally, she focused her research on health behaviors of adolescents as well as health care in Central and South America. She worked with local health organizations, wherever she was, as a medical translator/interpreter, which allowed her to combine her love of Spanish and nursing.

In 2013, Michele retired from Vanderbilt and moved from Bowling Green, Kentucky (where she had lived for over thirty years) to live near her grandchildren in Denver, Colorado. Her children were worried that she would be lonely and/or bored moving away from the tight-knit community of friends that she had developed in Kentucky and Tennessee. They were wrong to worry. Michele threw herself whole-heartedly into her new Colorado life by volunteering at the public library; becoming an active member of the Alianza de las Artes Americanas, an organization associated with the Denver Art Museum; heading her HOA; playing cards with her new neighborhood friends; and attending every activity possible in which her five grand-children were involved: baseball, basketball, soccer, swimming, tennis, school plays, musical recitals, etc. Also, she traveled extensively throughout the Southwestern United States as well as to over a dozen countries, ranging from Cuba to Finland to Argentina.

Michele’s family and friends will remember her best for her zest for life, for her strength, for her hard-headedness, and for her love for her family and friends. She worked incredibly hard and her life was not easy. In the ‘80s, she worked full-time on the night shift as a nurse in Bowling Green, traveled during the day to Vanderbilt to take classes to obtain her masters in nursing science, while at the same time raising three children. In 2002, she was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and in 2003, Richard, her husband of over thirty-five years, died suddenly. Michele had an inner reservoir of strength that she was able to draw upon to soldier on, teaching classes and living her life to the fullest, notwithstanding devastating grief and twenty years of intermittent chemotherapy. Indeed, when she was diagnosed with cancer, she was given (at best) ten years to live. She beat that prognosis, living with cancer for twenty-three years, and becoming the poster child for new treatments for the disease. She was on an experimental regimen up until three weeks before she died. Her oncology doctor of over a decade described her well shortly before her death: she was the most stubborn patient he had ever had, but also, his favorite.

Michele died in her home on May 2, 2025, with her family by her side. Less than a month prior to her death, she was living independently and driving by herself around Denver. Her children, Jennifer, John, and Michael, are incredibly grateful for three things that made the last month of her life much easier and better. First, they are grateful for Michele’s unsurprisingly blunt advanced directives (“no feeding tube” - all caps, underlined five times - with multiple references to “pull the plug”) which made, what could have been a series of agonizing decisions, no decisions at all. Secondly, they are grateful for the amazing professionals from Bristol Hospice and First Light Home Care, who helped them ensure that her wish of dying at home in comfort, surrounded by her art collection and international tchotchkes, looking out at Marston Reservoir and the Rocky Mountains, came true. Finally, they are grateful for all of her family and friends who came, from either two condos down or thousands of miles away, to ensure that her last weeks at home were full of laughter and love.

Michele is survived by her daughter, Jennifer Salisbury, and her husband Lee Davis, of Lakewood, CO; her son John Azbill-Salisbury and his husband, Scott, of Minneapolis, MN; and her son Michael Salisbury, and his wife Kelly Miller, of Lakewood, CO; as well as her brothers Sean and Thomas Heenan and her sister Gabrielle Heenan; and her grandchildren Luke, Patrick and Aaron Davis and Anson and Aviana Salisbury. She is predeceased by her mother and father, Ada May and Charles Heenan, and her husband, Richard Salisbury.

In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the Jefferson County Public Library Foundation

A visitation is scheduled on Tuesday May 13th from 6:00 to 7:30 pm at Horan & McConaty Funeral Home at 3101 S. Wadsworth Blvd., Lakewood, CO 80227.

Another visitation is scheduled to take place on July 12th from 1:00 to 3:00 pm at the Christ Episcopal Church at 1215 State St in Bowling Green, KY.