I came to meet Gerry in Greenwich Village where she was doing her internship.  She generously treated me, as she always had, to dinner in an area restaurant.  There I tasted my very first Spanish Boullabais.

I know she must have very much enjoyed her father’s appreciation of pride in her accomplishment.  After her choice of specialty as anesthesiologist, he once exclaimed to me, “Do you know that she is even responsible for the life or death of the patient?!”  Not understanding the distinction my grandfather was making, I foolishly thought candidly to myself, “Yeah, well aren't all doctors responsible for the lives of their patients?”  It wasn't until years later I understood that anesthesiologists are especially responsible, monitoring that precarious space between life and death while the other doctor is busily preocupied with performing surgery.

Over the years, I highly regarded her expertise in medicine and health and felt fortunate to have her in discussion to make clear the distinctions I needed to understand. As family and as friends, we can all say how proud and glad we are for Gerry's service to God and humanity, and especially for the joy in knowing her in the special way we did.

My grandfather, being a loving father to Gerry, had a lumber business in partnership with the Yoounkerie family with a shop located right there in the Bronx. That partnership was started even by their fathers.  So to my generation, they would have been our great- grandfathers.  I was told that my grandaddy, as he was called, once provided screens to be placed in all of the monasterie windows to offer the sisters defense against the mosquitos which previously had free entry into the building.

I eventually became a New York City public school teacher and, coincidentally worked in a Hunts Point school which neighbored that same monasterie where Gerry once stayed.  It had been decided years earlier that monastic, cloistered life wasn't the best placement for aunt Gerry.  So she went out from there.  Now here I was, years later, working at a school practically next door.  I decided I would visit.  The nuns were quite cordial and I enjoyed speaking with them. One particular nun remembered Gerry fondly.  She insisted, however, that the cloister couldn't have been right for her.  “She was just too intelligent,” she said.

Upon choosing a different direction for her life to go in, I wonder that Gerry must have been experiencing quite a few revelations after nine years of absence from the outside world.  Gerry exclaimed to me later that at the time she was just reaching for knowledge and information of every kind.  This thirst she was having must have been satisfied to a degree when she entered Fordham University and then New York Medical College.  She became  a physician at a time when women were not largely represented in the medical profession.

Aunt Gerry lived on Heath Avenue off the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx.  Home was a brick walkup apartment building with the nice landlord, Mr. Stricts, living up above.  The buildings there had these brick booth structures in front by the stairs. I remember seeing the neighbor next door would pour water on her booth so that strangers wouldn't come along to sit there and make conversation like they owned the place.

Gerry lived with her parents, my grandparents,  Charles Warren Ahneman and his wife, Geraldine whom Gerry was named after.  The name Gerald came down to me but my parents chose to address me by my middle  name, Richard. 

As a child, my very first recognition of my dear aunt Gerry was to have mistakenly interpreted the very large painting  on the living room wall of their home. It was a portrait of a blond woman.  Pointing at it, I exclaimed to my Grandparents, “That's an angel!”  Afterwhich they laughed at my foolish remark, as they had been accustomed to doing. “ No,” they said, “She's your aunt Gerry.”

Gerry as a young adult and being of a religeous Catholic upbringing somehow had chosen to serve God by entering a cloistered monastery at  Bronx’s Hunts Point.  On making family visits there, we would view her smile through a small partition at the reception.  She would be dressed in nun's habit, all black and white, looking nothing like the angel I once imagined her to be.

I have had the honor of knowing Gerry for over 10 years. For many years, we were Eucharistic ministers in Hudson Valley Hospital in Peekskill New York. We shared a common interest in religion,,God, and the Catholic faith.. in the past few  years I have helped Gerry by driving her to PT and many errands that she wished to go on. We enjoyed many conversations we had lunches and my life is much richer just knowing Geri.  I’ll miss her tremendously ,I know that she is in the arms of our Lord.

OBITUARY

Geraldine Louise Ahneman

December 21, 1931 – August 27, 2026

Edward F. Carter Funeral Home

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