Victoria VerPlanck

In life you may come across that rare person who does not merit a death notice; not for want of virtue but because obituary etiquette arches toward paying obeisance to the beginnings and endings of things and these very rare people genuinely transcend that. Vicky (Evanoff) VerPlanck was one such rare person as everyone who met her will know. She was born January 26, 1949 and won a full ride academic scholarship to the University of Michigan where she studied English and Drama. She was a first generation Macedonian. She married Alan VerPlanck and convinced him to compete for a Rhodes Scholarship which he unaccountably won. They dated long distance for the next two years, married, and lived together in Oxford. Vicky encouraged him to try law school at the University of Michigan and they spent 3 happy years in Ann Arbor with weekends (and huge meals) at the family home in Lansing. After graduating, they landed back in Ft. Wayne where her mother emigrated from Macedonia. She quit her career as an educator to devote her time to raising her three children, Carl, Anna and Zoe. Decades later she repeated the feat by adopting Andy Kennedy a friend of her daughter's, whom she embraced as a son. She was the definition of selfless, taking care of both her mother-in-law and her own mother, a total of almost ten years of care taking with less than a year in between. Vicky eventually took up her teaching career again with a special affection and patience for some of the more difficult students. We will remember her dancing Macedonian horos on the beaches of Lake Michigan, dishing out wit and sarcasm from behind a hedge in her garden and belting out Springsteen from behind the wheel. And here is the point at which the obituary writer generally says she is “survived” by her children, her dear sister Yvonne who helped care for her during her long, bitter, battle with Ewing’s Sarcoma, by her husband, daughter in law Nicky and grandson Alan and by brothers Eric and Carl Evanoff Jr. But she is not a person you survive from. A longtime member of the Orthodox Church in America, she embodied all of the virtues, intelligence, and imagination the Christian Church wants to foster. She was an ideal mother and wife. Ideals, of course are eternal and don’t belong in obituaries which is why this version is a bit unorthodox. She worked on a very big canvass and with uncommon modesty, kept her very bright light hidden under the proverbial bushel but it shines out in her children, students and myriad private acts of kindness.

Services will be 11am Wednesday November 23, 2016 with visitation one hour prior at St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church 3535 Crescent Ave. Visitation will also be 2-4 and 6-8 Tuesday November 22, 2016 at the church with a Trisagion Service at 7pm.

In lieu of flowers preferred memorials are to St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church or Cancer Services of North East Indiana.

www.klaehnfahlmeltonfunerals.com