Nina C. Trumper

Nina C. Trumper 1932 – 2020 TOPSHAM – Nina C. Trumper died Thursday July 9, 2020, at Mid Coast Hospital, Brunswick. She was born Nina Mary Tucker in 1932 in Dorchester, Mass., the second of five children of Canadian parents. They moved to Merrimack, N.H., where she attended schools and then finished training as an RN at Keene Hospital School of Nursing in 1953. She married Charles Cathcart in 1954; they had three children: Karen Lynch of Jonesboro, Arkansas, “Chip” Cathcart of Portland, Maine, and Lynne Avery of Concord, N.H., all of whom survive, along with eight grandchildren. She is also survived by her present husband John, sister Jackie of Topsham, and brother, Bruce, of Alexandria, N.H. Her first marriage ended in 1978. She married John Trumper, a pediatrician, whom she met at work in Brattleboro Hospital. They practiced together after she trained as a nurse practitioner in 1970 (the first one to be licensed in Vermont). While employed in that role she acquired her BSN degree at Keene State College and, later, MSN at University of Massachusetts. Nina and John worked a sabbatical year on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indian Reservation in North Dakota in 1982. In 1992 she shifted to public health to work as an NP for the Vermont Health Deptment until retirement in 1998. After a visit to the former Soviet Union in 1990, Nina initiated a medical exchange between Vermont and Petrozavodsk, a city in Russia near Finland, which continued annually for the next five years. After retirement, Nina and John lived in Tennessee, South Dakota, New Zealand, and Newfoundland, for several months each year while John worked in hospitals there. They moved to a community in Topsham, Maine, in 2011 where they were living when she died of long term complications of Alzheimer’s Dementia. Nina was very energetic physically, socially, intellectually, even outside of her professional role and rarely sat still for long: She enjoyed the outdoors: gardening, walking everywhere, hiking in the White Mountains, she was on the national ski patrol, She quilted and knitted for many years. She loved classical music, played the piano, sang in the Brattleboro Centre Congregational Church choir where she was a member for 40 years, and in several other choral groups. She especially enjoyed dancing . She was an avid reader and founded a women’s book group in Brattleboro which still exists. She immersed thoroughly in the communities wherever she lived or worked and made many good friends from New Zealand to Newfoundland, in Vermont, Maine and in between. Her patients, and all of us, will miss her greatly and remember her fondly. A private family interment will be observed in Brattleboro, Vt. Memories and condolences can be shared at http://www.brackettfh.com.


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