MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, Mass. – Catherine Dennis Grafflin, formerly of Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., died April 15, at Schooner Estates in Auburn.

Born Catherine Emeline Dennis, June 29, 1914, in Washington, D.C., she was the daughter of international attorney William Cullen Dennis, later president of Earlham College and sister of attorney David Worth Dennis II, U.S. representative from Indiana, and a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings for Richard M. Nixon, and wife of Dr. Allan Lyle Grafflin, second-in-command of the 105 (Harvard) General Hospital in the Pacific Theater during World War II, subsequently head of the department of anatomy of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and later a clinical ophthalmologist with a private practice in Danvers, Mass.

Never having completed high school, due to extended residence abroad, including China and Chile, accompanying her father’s practice of international law, she finished her formal education with a B.A. from Earlham College, study at the Middlebury Language Schools and an M.A. in French language and literature from Radcliffe College. She cut short an early career as a writer of children’s literature in order to support her husband’s professional life and raise her own children, whose upbringing was enriched by her steady output of verse (often illustrated), drawings and short stories.

A woman with a strict personal code that was never allowed to interfere with the insights of a loving and generous heart, she enjoyed a wide circle of friendships, both human and animal. All of this was gradually and irrevocably taken from her by Alzheimer’s disease, in the grip of which, over the last decade of her life, she slipped further and further away from everything and everyone she had ever cared about, with her accustomed gentleness of spirit. Her loss is felt, and her life celebrated, by her children, Mary Grafflin of San Francisco, Calif., Dennis Grafflin of Lewiston, and David Grafflin of Richmond, Ind.; her daughters-in-law, Vicki Grafflin of Richmond, Ind., and Jan Phillips of Lewiston; her grandchildren, Jonathan Grafflin of Coppell, Texas, Matthew Grafflin of Richmond, Ind., and Calder Phillips-Grafflin, of Lewiston; as well as her nephew and niece, Bill and Ellen Dennis. A great-granddaughter, Sofia Isabella Grafflin, of Coppell, Texas, was born shortly before her death. A memorial tribute is planned at the ecological field station given by her family to the Earlham College Department of Biology.