Marie Elizabeth Brown

Sandwich--Our beloved Marie passed quiety into eternal peace early Tuesday morning December 17th 2013. As in life she was in the comforting presence of her loving family.

Born in Cambridge, Marie grew up in Newton Lower Falls with her brother John and her devoted parents John and Mary Conlon. Marie was a graduate of Newton High School and The Katherine Gibbs School. After graduating, she married the love of her life, Maurice Brown of Mission Hill, to whom she was happily married for 58 years and with whom she raised a loving family with three children, Janet, Suzanne and Edward.

Together, Marie and Maurice, a WW2 Navy Veteran lived a professional life of constant enterprise and entrepreneurship. Beginning with a single coin-operated laundromat in Newton Highlands, their business grew to include as many as seven dry cleaning stores and/or coin operated laundromats in Newton Highlands, Brighton, West Roxbury, Norwood, Braintree and others--as well as several income properties around the Boston area. The entire family could vividly recall piling into the family station wagon to do the nightly collections at all of the laundromats, which routinely concluded with a last minute visit to the Needham House of Pizza.

Retiring to Barnstable Village in the early 1990's, Marie and Maurice could not resist the urge to reignite their enterprising spirit by restarting the highly successful Steam-Away Carpet Cleaning Company--a business they had originated in the 1980's . Steam-Away grew to include hundreds of residential and commercial clients West of Boston and then on Cape Cod.

Yet and almost despite all of Marie's and Maurice's entrepreneurial accomplishments, her and her husband's greatest satisfaction and the true measure of their success came in form of their loving family. Always a kind, gentle and loving force in the lives of her children and grandchildren, Marie's greatest pleasure came when she was surrounded by the ones she loved. Her immediate and extended family will forever remember the warm and loving get-togethers she so often created.

Marie was predeceased by her loving husband Maurice in 2008, and is survived by her two daughters Suzanne and Janet and their husbands and son Edward, as well as two grandchildren Ronald and Jennifer Arra--along with many friends and extended family members.

Funeral arrangements at Nickerson Bourne Funeral Home on Route 6A in Sandwich. Visiting Hours from 9am to 11am Friday December 27th, followed my a mass at Corpus Christi Church at 11:30am. Shortly thereafter, Marie will then join her loving husband in eternal rest at the National Cemetery in Bourne.

In Lieu of flowers, please send donations at Beacon Hospice of Cape Cod. Notes of sympathy and sorrow may be sent to www.nickersonbournefuneralhome.com.

My Mother's Garden

In my mother's garden, velvet pansies grew,

Lifting little faces to the morning dew;

Purple morning glories, Hollyhocks so tall,

Whispered endless secrets against the garden wall.

In my mother's garden, lilacs, pink and white;

Made of latticed arbor, pathways of delight.

In my mother's garden, there is grief today,

Pansies hide their faces in the shadows gray,

Hollyhocks are silent, as they mourne a friend,

She who loved the blossoms has reached January's End.

Sometimes in the twilight when I dream of her,

In the lilac arbor, there's a gentle stir;

And I seem to see her, radiantly fair,

Flowers all around her, keeping vigil there!