Marilyn Louise Hamerlynck

Marilyn Hamerlynck's life voyage began in Jerome, Idaho. born to her single mother, Dora Jensen, on July 9, 1938, and ended almost exactly 88 years later in Portland, Oregon, in the early morning hours of July 14, 2026. Along the way, she was a bit of a rebel, a friend to many, an educator both formal and informal, a wife, mother, and grandmother; facets of her life that she embraced fully and with panache.

Marilyn was adopted by Arthur Thompson when he married Dora in 1940. Her early childhood was spent on farms and small towns in southern Idaho, often under the loving eye of her grandmother, Anna Martina Jensen who cared for Dora and Art's four children while they were working. Throughout her adult life, Marilyn always recalled her grandmother with great affection and respect. When she was a teenager, her family moved to Fresno, California, where she graduated from Fresno High School. In the mornings before school, she said she would pick ripe avocados for lunch from an avocado tree she discovered near the bus stop, a hint of her adventurous spirit. She and her friends even ventured to San Francisco to visit jazz clubs.

Shortly after graduating, she moved to Pocatello, Idaho where she worked in a record store, hung out with local musicians, listened to a lot of jazz and folk music and developed a sense of style that stayed with her the rest of her life. One evening, she agreed to go on a double date with one of her girlfriends; she could never recall the name of her own date, but she married the other guy, Gus Hamerlynck, who had been hired by Idaho State University to set up the first student counseling center at ISU. They married in Portland, Oregon on Sept. 28, 1958, then started their 32 year voyage together by moving to Eugene, Oregon where Gus completed his doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Oregon, and they became parents to their two sons, Mark and Erik. From there, she went where Gus's work in higher education or state government took them, including La Grande, Oregon, Calgary, Alberta Canada, Missoula and Helena, Montana, Logan, Utah, and Lander and Riverton, Wyoming. Exploring and travelling throughout this broad swath of country imparted to Marilyn, and her family, a deep and abiding love for the landscapes of Western North America.

When she first married Gus, Marilyn by her own admission could not cook, and she immediately set about teaching herself to do so - and successfully at that. She felt her hard-earned skills as a chef deserved the respect of the family sitting down every evening for dinner, a ritual they never deviated from. More than feeding her family, the conversations she had with Gus at the dinner table were the basis for her training as an educator and a social worker. In Calgary and Helena, Marilyn worked effectively with young children and teens from, as she described it, some of the direst domestic circumstances imaginable. When asked how she succeeded, Marilyn said, "I paid attention and I listened. I don't talk to kids like they are kids, I talk to them like I respect them. I don't go for any of that 'goo-goo-gaa-gaa' s**t.". Her hands-on experience, willingness to try new methods - one project in Calgary was one of the first to use computers to analyze classroom behavior in Canada - ready wit and intelligence made Marilyn a colleague to many of Gus's academic peers, not just a faculty wife.

With Gus's passing in 1996, Marilyn was at loose ends for a while before winding up on the Oregon Coast in Florence. There she formed, as she always did, a circle of friends, and also caught the heart of a rakish architect, Paul Jensen, who treated her like a queen for 12 years before his and her declining health demanded the kind of full time care that separated them. Throughout this and to the end, Marilyn remained a brassy and independent spirit, sometimes to the consternation and/or delight of her family and care-givers. She is preceded in death by her mother, Dora and adoptive father, Art, brother Stephen Thompson and sister Joyce Tubbs. She is survived by her sister, Rosemary and husband David Lauria, her eldest son Mark Hamerlynck, his wife Susan and their children William and John, and youngest son, Erik and his wife Isabelle Fleuraud, and their children Roxane, Leo, Felix and Amelia. The family wishes to extend heartfelt thanks for the unstinting care and friendship many of the staff of Laurelhurst Village gave Marilyn. Marilyn was a good-hearted broad of the old school: intelligent, kind, opinionated, quick to laugh, always ready to stand up for those she loved. As her sons shared with her passing, her death leaves them with great sadness, but also with the gratitude that of all the interesting women they knew, this one was their mother.