Marilyn A. Schneider

Marilyn Ann (Sucha) Schneider

March 20, 1933 – December 2, 2022

VISITATION: Thursday, December 8th, from 4:30-6:30pm at West Center Chapel, followed by VIGIL SERVICE and ROSARY at 6:30pm. To view a live broadcast of the Vigil Service and Rosary, please visit www.heafeyheafey.com and click the “View Live Cast” button at the top of the home page.

MASS of CHRISTIAN BURIAL: Friday, December 9th, at 10:00am at St. John’s Church on the Creighton campus. Parking is available on the top floor of the parking garage at the Northeast corner of 24^th and California; handicapped parking is just west of the Church.

Interment: Omaha National Cemetery Monday, December 12^th, at 10:00am.

In lieu of flowers, the family would be honored by a memorial gift in Marilyn’s name to the North Platte Catholic Schools Endowment Trust at 500 S. Silber Ave., North Platte, NE 69101; https://apps.npcschools.org/donate-now.

Marilyn A. (Sucha) Schneider died peacefully on December 2, 2022, in Omaha, Nebraska. She was born in Omaha on March 20, 1933, to Lloyd and Vlasta (Klimes) Sucha and spent her earliest years, together with her older brother Gene, on their parents’ farm north of Leigh, Nebraska. Like many during the Great Depression, her parents eventually lost their farm. The family made do finding work on other farms in Nebraska and Iowa, ultimately settling in Fremont, Nebraska, where her dad took up carpentry and built the family home. In 1950, after graduating from high school, Marilyn attended Creighton University. She and Gene comprised the first generation in their family to attend college in the United States. Their immigrant grandparents, Marilyn often pointed out, had lived in dugouts after arriving in Nebraska in the 1870s.

Marilyn graduated from Creighton in 1954. She met her husband, James E (Jim) Schneider (1930-2021), at a dance sponsored by one of the many academic and honorific organizations she had been part of. They wed in 1956. That same year, Marilyn – channeling something from the pioneer spirit of her ancestors – became the third woman in Nebraska to qualify as a Certified Public Accountant. She supported them while Jim finished law school. They moved to North Platte in 1957 and resided there for nearly sixty years.

Marilyn became a mother in 1960 when the couple adopted their first child, an infant son. As required for the adoption at that time, Marilyn quit her job. She learned quickly — and over time adapted to — the reality that mothers did not get evenings or weekends off. The family grew to include six children, both adopted and biological, which brought out another form of the pioneer spirit in her. At the end of every summer, Marilyn canned fruits and vegetables. Her special horseradish sauce kept Jim’s sinuses clear all winter. And her children piled her apple butter by the spoonful on her exquisite homemade bread. One summer, she even sewed actual pioneer costumes for herself and the children to wear during the Nebraskaland Days parade.

In addition to mothering, Marilyn was an active community volunteer. She could be counted on for casseroles for funeral dinners and to take calls from or pay a visit to a new nursing mother as a La Leche League leader. She gamely led 4-H groups and taught her own and other children to cook and sew. The weeks before the county fair turned her kitchen and family room upside down with cake frosting and loose sewing pins.

But there was order too. Her family wore their Sunday best to weekly Mass. The children’s homework got done and college applications sent in, and she kept up with the accounting work for Jim’s law firm. During the holiday season, there was a reliable array of Christmas cookies and often a new homemade dress for the girls to wear to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. In a complicated feat of calendar engineering, and without current digital aids, she managed to attend all (or almost all) her children’s activities, from sports to theater to music and beyond. Once, when Jim took their two sons on a high-adventure scouting trip, she loaded their four daughters in the car and headed west for their own all-female adventure in Yellowstone. When her children became parents themselves, they had a newfound respect for all she did for each of them and the household generally.

The biggest test of her resilience and faith was surviving a brain tumor in 1986 and the stroke that resulted from the surgery to remove it. Though left with life-long physical disabilities, Marilyn soldiered on. She took special pleasure in knowing her grandchildren, whose pictures she proudly hung beside the table where she ate lunch every day.

Marilyn is survived by her six children: Jim (Peg) Schneider, Mary Meehan, Patty (David) Gibson, Michael Schneider (Karen Waddill), Ann Schneider (Ricardo Pradez), and Theresa (Stephen) Fromm; and her twelve grandchildren: Patrick (Tera), Kelsey, and Danny Schneider; Peter (PJ) and Kristen Meehan (Peter Anderson), Allison and Eli Gibson, Jackson Schneider; Oliver and Margot Schneider Pradez, and Sarah and Elise Fromm.