Jean Carol Ropp

Born September 3, 1959, Jean grew up in the suburbs of southeast Michigan. She was a towheaded, dimpled spitfire who grew into a young woman with fluffy center-parted hair, aviator eyeglasses that were forever slipping down her nose, and a beaming smile that was somehow mischievous and utterly guileless at once. She radiated joy, kindness, and humor. No one’s voice was louder, and no one’s heart was more pure.

At 18, Jean met the love of her life, Phil, while she was on a college trip to Chicago. By chance, they re-encountered each other on the Alma College campus six months later and were inseparable from that moment on. At 19, Jean married Phil in a field covered in lilies of the valley in Ithaca, Michigan on May 20, 1979. At 20, she gave birth to the first of their seven girls. Jean leaves behind her adoring husband Phil, who was her best friend and dearly beloved; her daughters Rebekah, Rachel, Sarah, Abigail, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Martha; her grandson, Zef; her brother, Jim; and her sister, Lynne.

Life for the perpetually expanding young family was not often easy, but Jean always insisted that she was “blessed beyond measure.” After spending the newlywed period in central Michigan, Phil and Jean moved to Ft. Myers, Florida for several years before settling into a 150-year-old farmhouse in Leelanau County, a spectacularly beautiful peninsula on Lake Michigan. Together, and later with the help of their kids, they built a vacation rentals business called Bass Lake Cottages from the ground up over the course of 15 years. In 2003, the family sold the farmhouse and bought a boutique hotel in Sebring, Florida. When the town was battered by sequential hurricanes little more than a year later, the hotel was destroyed. Jean and Phil, rather than flee, staged a makeshift soup kitchen out of the hotel restaurant and kept the community fed and sheltered through a month-long power outage. They returned up north to Alma, where they spent 10 years, before migrating back down south in 2015 to make their last home together in Clearwater. Through frequent changes and occasional unimaginable challenges, Jean was indomitable. “We’ll figure it out,” she always said. And they always did.

Besides being a business owner and restaurant manager, Jean frequently worked second (or third) jobs as a waitress or a short-order cook throughout her kids’ lives. In 2016, she became the Parish Administrator at the Light of Christ church in Clearwater, working closely with Father Bill Wilson, who became her very dear friend. She taught her daughters in both word and example that any work that serves others and is done with integrity is noble work and that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Jean respected and understood children as full, complex people; she considered it a privilege to share time and the eucharist with elderly folks; and she could never ignore any animal in need of care. She loved to laugh, she loved to read, she loved to sit outside at dusk with her husband and a glass of whisky or wine and talk, talk, talk. She possessed a rare capacity for joy, boundless compassion, and a profound appreciation for the beauty of God’s creation (as well as His sense of humor). She made a mean fried egg.

Jean will be honored by a funeral mass at Light of Christ Church in Clearwater at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 15, 2023.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Light of Christ Catholic Church.
http://locchurch.org/