Patricia Ruth (Jarrard) Levine passed away on Friday, January 17, 2025 in Columbus, GA with family at her side. Patsy, Patricia, or Pat, as she was called by the different people who knew her at various times in her life, was born in Pontiac, Michigan on June 29, 1938, to the late James and Ruth (Kelly) Jarrard. She lived most of her life in Michigan. The city of Ann Arbor, where she spent close to 40 years, remained her home in her heart even after she moved to Pinckney, Florida, and, eventually, Georgia.
In her youth, Pat was a competitive roller skater, winning her first national championship in speed skating at the age of ten. After that, she focused more on artistic skating, winning numerous medals at the state and national levels in pairs, figure, and dance. She gave lessons to younger skaters to help pay her training and educational expenses.
Pat spent her later adolescent years caring for her ill mother and helping to raise her younger sister, Sandy, through infancy and toddlerhood. She balanced these tasks with her skating, education, and teaching, taking time off from each as needed. Her mother was determined to survive to see Pat graduate from high school and hid the seriousness of her cancer diagnosis from her daughter.
When she was nineteen, after her mother had passed, Pat received substantial assistance from the Kresge family to attend Albion college. She took then-four-year-old Sandy to school with her. The two stayed with a family off-campus for the entirety of her college education.
Pat graduated from Albion in 1961 and moved to Ann Arbor for graduate study at the University of Michigan. She received her Master of Social Work degree in 1963 and began a short career at Washtenaw County Juvenile Court.
Pat also met and married her husband, Michael Robert Levine, in Ann Arbor in 1963. Two children, Ruth and Matt, soon followed. The couple adopted a third child, Molly, through Spaulding for Children, an organization founded to provide adoption and fostering services for children who are otherwise considered hard to place. Passionately committed to finding families for such children, Pat served as an active member of Spaulding’s Board of Directors for several years.
For the first decade of her marriage to Mike, Pat determined to live as frugally as possible in order to support the family as her husband put most of his earnings into an eventually successful business. The majority of her time was spent raising children, sewing and mending their clothes, and growing the family’s vegetables in a backyard garden. Although trips to the Pontiac Rolladium were infrequent for her son and daughters, they have fond memories of those outings, holding her hands as their mom skated backwards, gliding them around the rink.
Once her life permitted more leisure time, Pat enjoyed a variety of hobbies. She became a Master Gardener and spent hours each week nurturing what friends considered her “mini botanical gardens,” considering those days her “play days.” She tended to her dogs, happy to have at least one, if not several, around the house at all times. Always the athlete, she played tennis several times a week until she could no longer do so physically.
Pat was profoundly affected by having to devote so much of her young life to caring for a loved one without palliative support. She was grateful to see the foundation and establishment of hospice care in the last decades of the twentieth century. She supported the organization and ensured that hospice was a part of end-of-life care for her father and in-laws. Pat’s own illness was too brief to enlist the support of hospice services.
In addition to her husband, Michael Robert Levine of Boca Raton, FL, Pat is survived by her children Ruth Dickens (Andy) of Fortson, GA, Matthew Charles Levine of Boca Raton, FL, and Molly Richardson (Jerry) of Chelsea, MI; her sister Sandra Colleen (Jarrard) Hesano of Leesburg, FL; her sister-in-law Judith Levine Greenbaum of Ann Arbor, MI; ten grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews. Pat’s family would like to express their deep gratitude to her caregivers and the staff at Spring Harbor in Columbus, GA, which was her home for the past seven years.
In later life, Pat lived with a variety of medical conditions, including heart failure and Alzheimer’s. So in lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to one of the following: an organization whose aim is to fund Alzheimer’s or heart disease research, your local hospice, an agency that provides fostering and/or adoption services, or your local humane society.
A memorial service will be scheduled at a later date according to McMullen Funeral Home and Crematory, 3874 Gentian Blvd., Columbus, GA 31907.
To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Patricia Ruth (Jarrard) Levine, please visit: mcmullenfuneralhome.com/obituary/Patricia-Levine/sympathy-landing