Jane Afton Barry Flynn

Jane Afton-Barry Flynn, 75, of Acushnet, Massachusetts, passed away unexpectedly on Monday, November 25th, 2024. She was the wife of the late Richard Joseph Flynn, with whom she shared 39 years of marriage until his untimely death in 2010. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 2, 1949 to the late John F. and Virginia S. Barry, Jane lived a long, accomplished life of devotion to her community and family.

After graduating from the Putnam Catholic Academy in Putnam, Connecticut as a class president and an award-winning orator, Jane went on to study Sociology at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts where she would meet the love of her life, then a United States Military Academy Cadet, named Richard J. Flynn, while attending a dance at West Point in 1968 with her fellow Regis classmate, and Richard’s sister, Marilyn Flynn. From that night forward, Dick and Jane would go on to build a world travelling life full of love and laughter, with Jane planting a rosebush in every home the two would live in on their journey through life together.

After countless letters sent back and forth from Weston to Saigon, Jane and Richard married on June 20th, 1971, just a year after his return from Vietnam. Before beginning her beloved time as an Army Wife, the two moved to Bloomington, Indiana to study side by side and pursue their masters degrees at Indiana University, where Jane, in 1975, would receive her MA in Social Work, a calling evident in the endless letters Jane wrote to Richard while stationed in Vietnam. “Ya know Richie…it's a fight and a struggle - ya get beat down and disillusioned over and over so many times. But I just have this feeling…this feeling that people are good.” - July 17, 1969, Goose Rocks Beach, ME.

By October of 1977, Jane was described by her boss, the psychologist George Popper, PhD., as having “a keen understanding of the problems of the developmentally disabled and…the ability to direct this understanding in meaningful ways” in a reference letter to the Yale Psychiatric Institute at Yale University, where she would work for the next four years and meet her co-worker and dear friend Connie Perelson. While in Connecticut she gave birth to her first and beloved son, Miles Eamon-Barry Flynn in 1980 before relocating to Germany with Richard on assignment in Munich, where her beloved daughter, Teresa Afton-Constance Flynn was born in 1983.

By 1985, Jane was a mother of three, now with Patrick Morgan-Barry Flynn, and was the clinical director of Ramsey Canyon Hospital in Sierra Vista, Arizona until relocating to Columbia, Maryland in 1990 for two years with Richard on assignment at the Pentagon, before returning to her native of Massachusetts in 1992. For the next 32 years, Jane would serve the New Bedford community as a dedicated social worker and therapist while raising her three children to be as unceasingly compassionate as she was for her patients and employees.

On the rare occasion that Jane was not sacrificing herself for her family or community, she enjoyed reading the New Yorker, tending to her garden, and being pleasantly surprised by the sight of a cardinal on one of her bird feeders in her backyard.

Jane was a deeply loved wife, mother, sibling, aunt and grandmother. In addition to her three children, Jane is survived by her three siblings Virginia Barry McCrae of Kennebunkport, ME; John F.X. Barry and his children Carolyn, Matthew and Kathleen Barry of Franklin, MA; Martha Barry Caron and her daughter Catherine Afton Barry of Canterbury, CT; and her two grandchildren, Richard William Flynn and Fiona Parker Flynn.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Jane Flynn Foundation for Women’s Education, a scholarship program for women seeking to improve their lives through the vehicle of education in the link below: https://gofund.me/3761649f

Jane’s wake will be held on Sunday, December 15, 2024 from 12:00 to 4:00PM in the Waring-Sullivan Home at Dartmouth, 230 Russells Mills Road. Relatives and friends are invited. Her Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Monday, December 16, 2024 at 10:00AM in St. Francis Xavier Church on 125 Main Street in Acushnet, MA. To leave a note of condolence: www.waring-sullivan.com