OBITUARY
After I read this obit I just had to share it with you
Marjorie Shelley, an arts conservator, and Doug Adams, an outdoorsman, discovered they were kindred spirits. She was 81; he was 71.
It began with a busted boiler.
Marjorie Shelley was a renowned art conservator who had restored drawings by Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh, deploying tools as precise as a surgeon’s scalpel and materials as exotic as seaweed gel. Nonetheless, she was stymied when the furnace in her 200-year-old stone farmhouse in Ulster County, N.Y., gave out.
It was early in 2022, two years into the pandemic. That may explain why instead of calling a plumber, she called Doug Adams, a financial adviser and town councilman whom she knew slightly from the Historic Preservation Commission of Marbletown, N.Y., where they both served as commissioners.
Mr. Adams was, by all accounts, preternaturally helpful, if not particularly handy, and recently widowed, as was Ms. Shelley. Perhaps that, too, accounted for the call. In any case, he answered the summons and identified the boiler issue. (It needed to be replaced.) They ended up talking all night. In the weeks and months that followed, they became inseparable.
They didn’t issue an announcement, but Laura Shaine Cunningham, a fellow preservation commissioner, realized that they were a couple while attending a board meeting that spring on Zoom. She noted with amusement that Mr. Adams was not in his usual setting, but appeared against another, equally recognizable backdrop: the living room of Ms. Shelley’s New York City apartment. There was her tabby cat, Whistle, winding about him.
At first glance, they seemed an unlikely couple. Ms. Shelley was a diminutive scholar, a conservator emerita at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she had led the paper-conservation department for 25 years, working out of a brightly lit studio; she was considered the world’s expert on 18th-century pastels. Mr. Adams was a burly, kindly outdoorsman, conservationist and preservationist who was happiest rambling in the woods that abutted the Ulster County property where he had lived for 30 years. But once they sparked, they each felt, they said, as if they had known the other forever.
“I still can’t believe the guy next door turned out to be extraordinary,” Ms. Shelley emailed a friend.
Their interests, they discovered, aligned beautifully. He introduced her to classical music, and she introduced him to the print art world. They began traveling for both, to the Bachfest Leipzig, the summer festival in Germany, and to the Salon du Dessin in Paris, the international art fair for drawings, where Ms. Shelley was treated like a rock star. Mr. Adams began to collect works on paper, mostly prints by James McNeill Whistler.
“The fact that she was frequently in the limelight was never upsetting to him in any way,” Eleanor Williamson, a longtime friend of Ms. Shelley’s, said. “And she relaxed with him. Marjorie could never be described as easygoing. But Doug encouraged her to relax and take a deep breath.”
Because Ms. Shelley needed to be in the city during the week, Mr. Adams moved into her Upper West Side apartment, closing his Ulster County office and working from there.
It was a challenge at first.
The sirens kept him awake at night; the trash appalled him. But he bought a Trek racing bike and spent most mornings doing laps around Central Park, the Frederick Law Olmsted-crafted countryside a few blocks from Ms. Shelley’s building. There, he found what the landscape architect had intended: a democratic space that offered, as Olmsted put it, “tranquillity and rest to the mind.”
Marjorie Ann Newmark was born on April 10, 1945, in the Bronx, and grew up in the West Bronx and Roslyn, N.Y. Her father, Benjamin Newmark, was a distributor who sold ingredients for ice cream. Her mother, Lori (Matlick) Newmark, was a teacher.
Marjorie received her undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Oswego, where she studied French, and then went on to earn a master’s in art history and a certificate of conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1974. That year, she joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant conservator. She married Edward Shelley, a psychiatrist, in 1968; he died in the fall of 2019.
Douglas Lee Adams was born on Oct. 4, 1955, in Lancaster, Pa. His father, Richard Adams, was a Methodist minister; his mother, Irene (Kavasch) Adams, was a teacher. The family moved often for Richard’s postings, and Doug grew up in Pennsylvania, Arizona and California.
He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 1977, and then earned a master’s degree in Russian studies from the University of Washington in 1983 and an M.B.A. from Syracuse University in 1992. Around that time, while camping in the Adirondacks, he met Charlotte Sibley, a civil rights activist and Legal Aid lawyer who represented migrant farmworkers and their families. They married and settled in Accord, N.Y. Mr. Adams worked as a financial adviser for Charles Schwab and Ameriprise before starting his own firm in 2016. Ms. Sibley died in late 2019.
In addition to his financial work, Mr. Adams had for decades been nursing a novel set against the Russian uprisings of the 18th century. Titled “Love and Anarchy,” it featured a couple of revolutionaries, Ms. Cunningham said, and some nicely rendered love scenes. (Mr. Adams often turned to Ms. Cunningham, a well-regarded novelist, playwright and memoirist, for advice.)
In early August, he and Ms. Shelley applied for a marriage license at City Hall in Manhattan. A few days later, she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke, and doctors discovered that she had advanced pancreatic cancer. She died on Aug. 24. She was 81.
Mr. Adams died on Oct. 5, three days before her memorial service. He was riding his bike through Central Park — a daily practice that kept him sane, he told friends, after Ms. Shelley’s death — when he stopped abruptly to avoid hitting an unleashed dog. He was thrown over the handlebars and hit the pavement. He was 71.
Ms. Shelley is survived by a son, Edward Bowen Shelley; a granddaughter; and a sister, Susan Newmark. Mr. Adams is survived by a brother, Richard; and two sisters, Cheryl Summers and Carol Adams.
The memorial service that Mr. Adams had planned for Ms. Shelley, at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home in Manhattan, was held, as scheduled, on Oct. 8. The chairs were arranged in a circle, and there were no assigned speakers. (Attendees were invited to get up and speak if they felt moved to do so.) There was also no officiant, though Ms. Shelley’s neighbor Linda Golding, who happens to be a chaplain, welcomed the crowd.
“This gathering we’re in now,” she told them, “was Doug’s gift to Marjorie. He did this for her, and now it’s for both of them.”
As Richard Adams later said of the couple, “They were soul mates. They saw reality the same way. Their romance lasted only a few years, but it seemed like they had been together for decades.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
