Patricia Stuntz's Obituary
Patricia Gerry Stuntz died on April 30 at the age of 69, after an eight year battle with breast cancer. Pat grew up in Cherry Hill, NJ, the eldest child of Judge John F. Gerry and Jean Gerry. As her father said, she inherited her “mother’s pretty figure” and his “brilliant mind, universal appeal, compassion, and modesty.” Although she spent her falls, winters, and springs in central New Jersey, she was a child of the Jersey Shore, living each summer in the family home at Seaside Park where she over-indulged her love of sunbathing on the beach.
Pat graduated from UC Berkely in 1976 with a degree in Political Economy of Natural Resources, the beginning of a life-long effort to protect the environment: from leading the development of the environmental chapter of the 1990 National Energy Strategy, to reaching out to the Maryland agricultural and conservation communities to improve the 2007 Federal Farm Bill during her tenure at the Chesapeake Bay Commission, to spending her ten years at the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment doing a deep dive into “chicken s***,” as she said in private conversations, or “technical evaluation and testing of manure to energy technologies,” as her resume reads. Her colleagues will remember her uncanny ability to be pleasant yet firm, her ability to find win-win solutions, her partnership with diverse communities, and the strength with which she pursued her commitment to conservation. Defying even cancer to slow her down, she was still working part-time weeks before her death.
Her many professional successes were punctuated by the rich joys of family life. She married and moved to Massachusetts for seven years and had two lovely daughters - Lisa, who inherited Pat’s love of language, the outdoors, and loungewear, and Jenny, who carries on Pat’s humor, style, and passion for vegetables - and returned to Annapolis in 1998 where she remained thereafter.
How do we capture her spirit? Her strength, determination, playfulness, and joy for life. Honest, funny, smart. A love of physical activity - she believed that exercise and fresh air were the antidotes to any ailment. A love of music and dancing. And perhaps her greatest gift, a gift for friendship. Pat had an extraordinarily wide array of people who considered her one of their closest friends. As her mother wrote to her, “If you weren’t my daughter, I would cherish you as my friend.”
Pat is survived by her sisters, Kathy and Ellen; her daughters, Lisa and Jenny; nieces, nephews, and extended family. They will think of her whenever they hear “Queen Bee” or Bob Dylan, read West with the Night, eat an enormous salad … and then a full dinner right after, stay in their bathrobe well into the afternoon, spend hours in the garden elbow deep in dirt, or get up to dance even when they don’t have a partner. Pat, in the words of Mary Karr, “could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.” We’ve been blessed to have had so many years to share and so many warm and happy memories to savor. We will miss her terribly. We will remember her always.
A private celebration of life will be held. In lieu of flowers, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation would welcome a donation in memory of Pat.
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