Anna Marcia Swenson - Davis

She is survived by her immediate family—her son Jim, her daughter-in-law Inge, and her granddaughter Osa. Marcia has one surviving sibling Sandras Dippel, brother-in-law Larry in Amarillo, Tx. She has a niece, Carrie, in Amarillo, a nephew Jason in the San Antonio area. She also has nieces (Sally Grace and Kathleen Maloney) and nephews in Florida (mainly in the Pensacola area).

Marcia received her BA from Texas Technological College in 1963. She received her MA (1967), and her PhD in American Culture (around 1980) from the University of Michigan. Marcia taught English first at the Whitmore Lake school in 1965-66, and then in the Ann Arbor Public Schools from 1967-1990. She started teaching at Forsythe Middle School and then Pioneer High School. She taught abroad at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz Germany in 1967, at Sichuan University in China 1987-88, and at Robert College in Istanbul from 1991 until about 2000. Marcia loved to travel. One summer in either 1966 or 67 she went around the world (India, Japan, Thailand). She made numerous trips to Europe, at least one to South Africa, once to Russia. While she lived in Turkey for about a decade, she made numerous trips inside Turkey, and to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Austria.

Marcia was a fantastic cook and she loved to entertain. Living in Ann Arbor with no relatives nearby, she started a tradition of inviting other people with no local family to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. She was key in building community for her family in Ann Arbor.

Marcia also made deep connections to many of her students, many of whom she stayed in touch with.

For a girl who grew up on a ranch miles outside of a tiny West Texas town, her life was truly an expansive, successful adventure.

---From Osa about her Grandmother: There is a proper way to write an obituary, but I do not think my grandmother Marcia would want an ordinary obituary, for she was no ordinary woman. A wonderful and stubborn person, born of Swedish-Scottish-descended folk in the south, as the twelfth of thirteen siblings, on a farm that raised bulls and where rattle snakes would worm their ways into houses and lie in wait in dark shadows.

Marcia often told me that her first great love was school, and of the joy she found in learning. I sometimes wonder if she already knew she would devote her life to learning, even at the age of five. As she would write later in life, she always "looked forward to September and Mondays". Marcia was one of the first of her family to attend college, which begun at Texas Technical College and ended at the University of Michigan in 1980, when she received her Ph.D. in American Studies. She began her career as an English teacher in California in 1963, and worked in four different countries (America, Turkey, Germany and China) until 2000. Within her teaching career, Marcia taught AP English courses, ESL courses, and basic writing courses. What made her a remarkable teacher though, was the attention and devotion she gave to every one of her students, several of whom became great friends of hers later in life. While going through her house and everything she kept, we found dozens of letters from former students, parents of students, and colleges, all writing about how she had touched or changed the lives of her students. Marcia was devoted not only to nurturing the knowledge of her students, but their lives as well. Marcia was a proud feminist and an anti-racist, and believed in equality for all minorities of our world. As she would put it, she would not stand for a 'bully'.

Marcia died suddenly in her home on March 8th of 2023. We, her family, miss her dearly. We believe Marcia was not ready to go yet-- she was still planning for when her granddaughter would come visit, sending texts to family members telling them what to do, meeting new people, and more-- but we know that this is how she would have wanted to go. Marcia told her family, quite plainly, that she would never want to go to a retirement home or be kept alive by machines (in her living will, she wrote, "breathing is NOT living!"). She told her daughter-in-law, she would only leave her house "two-feet first". Marcia would often tell her granddaughter a list of things she would not miss after dying, which included cleaning her teeth, paying taxes, and getting lip from her family.

Reader: what I want to impress upon you, is that my grandmother was the most wonderful, stubborn, ferocious, and loyal person you could ever meet. As a friend of hers said, people always talk about a person being their most authentic self, but no one was more authentically herself than Marcia. She is loved and missed by many, and has touched the lives of most, if not all, of the people she met.

Jim and Inge are holding a Celebration of Life gathering for Marcia on June 24 of 2023 in Ann Arbor Michigan. Anyone who has loved or known Marcia is welcome to come, and if you would like details of the service, please email [email protected].