Dolores Marie (Boudreau) Abbott

Dolores Marie (Boudreau) Abbott of Trumbull passed away peacefully, with her family at her bedside, on September 7, 2026, after a life filled with love for her family, nature, and the teeming world. She was born in Fairfield on October 4, 1957, to Dolor Boudreau and Irene (Evanko) Boudreau, attended St. Thomas Elementary School, Tomlinson Middle School, and Roger Ludlowe, class of 1975. She completed two years at Barrington College, in Rhode Island, and finished her undergraduate at Fairfield University, where she met her husband, Tony, when she became secretary to the Head Librarian at Nyselius Library. She later built a career as a copywriter at Greenwood Press in Westport where she worked for many years in both the editorial and marketing departments, and afterwards as a freelancer, when she began her family.

Over the years, Dolores sang in many vocal groups and choirs from Ludlowe onwards, including the Barrington College BC Company, at Fairfield University, Trinity Nichols, and most recently at St. Paul’s in Fairfield, while maintaining years-long commitment to local groups including the Mendelsohn Choir and the Connecticut Chamber Choir.

Her children, Jane Emily and Lucas Marion, from the moment they were born, were the undying focus of her love and support. They and her husband will miss her to the end of their own days, for what she gave them of her soul, energy, and wisdom. Over the last decade, she struggled with metastatic cancer, enduring many treatment programs, but was in the brightest spirits to the very last.

Her loves and interests spanned continents and centuries; she loved to travel, listen to and play music, visit house and art museums, and read broadly and deeply. From Tasha Tudor to Cormac McCarthy to Ovid, her literary interests were broad in the extreme. Bulgakov, Dickens, Munro. Her constant companion was Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf; she was delighted to discover the novels of Barbara Pym, at a time when it was difficult to find them; Jane Gardham was a happy later find; Walt Whitman since college; A. A. Milne, when her children were small; George Macdonald, to recapture some of the wonder of her own young reading. On her nightstand to this day are books by Michael Ondaatje, Mark Twain, and Epictetus. She loved the Stoics, as espousing a needed sense of perspective on our modern life. She collected mid-century volumes of personal and household etiquette, enlarging her bookshelf each year at the Pequot Library Book Sale. She was fascinated by the history of language and how mass migration both reflected and influenced the movings of the violent world.

Her musical tastes were just as universal. Joni Mitchell, Patsy Cline, The Alabama Shakes, Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, Renaissance choral music, Chicago, Neil Young, Django Reinhardt, Stan Getz, any samba music; a special love were the novelty songs of Noel Coward, whose plays she adored, and she was happy to know that his estate still stands in Sasco Hill. She liked musicals, dramas a bit more, comedies perhaps the most.

Art, the same. Monet, Maxfield Parrish, Edward Hopper, Van Gogh, whose final house in Auvers-sur-Oise, she and her husband visited, part of one of the several European journeys they took over the years, traveling across Italy, France, and the UK, the last trip being a three-week sojourn on the Suffolk coast.

She loved Julia Child, her recipes, her writing, and her intriguing life. Dolores always claimed that together with Mr. Rogers, the two PBS stars were like parents to her, when she watched TV after school as a latch-key kid. She was a keen lover of ospreys, gold-finches, grackles, seagulls, and many other birds, and was delighted in the influx of spectral ravens that have come of late to our neighborhood.

Truly, it would take a dozen lifetimes to describe her one.

Most of all, she adored people, for Dolores’ fondest memories stem from the enduring love she held for her family, her many friends, and for the whole world, big and small: walking home from school in old Fairfield, swimming at Jennings Beach, strolling the Larsen Wildlife Sanctuary, bicycling around town, the Marina, her many gardens, her Trumbull home, and the dogs she shared with her children and husband: Comet, Kip, Betty, and now Cody. All who knew her will miss Dolores and love her always.

Friends may greet the family on Friday, September 18th from 4-7 p.m. in the Spear-Miller Funeral Home, 39 South Benson Road, Fairfield. A funeral service celebrating Dolores’s life will be held Saturday, September 19th at 11:00 a.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 661 Old Post Road, Fairfield.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Roy and Margot Larsen Wildlife Sanctuary at the Fairfield Nature Center, 2325 Burr Street, Fairfield, CT 06824.