Shirley Paris

Shirley Helen Paris, 91, of Gainesville, Florida, died October 22, 2021. She was born Shirley Helen Freedman in Baltimore, Maryland on August 20, 1930. She was the youngest child of Samuel and Jenny Freedman. She graduated From Maryland State Teachers College at Towson in 1951. Afterward she was briefly an elementary school teacher but was primarily a housewife and mother. She married Bernard J. Paris on June 15, 1949, the beginning of a long and loving marriage of 70 years until his death in November 2019. Her husband was a professor of English, first at Michigan State University and then, after 1981, at the University of Florida, from which he retired in 1996. She was not only his partner in life but the first and, as he said, most important reader for his writings as an academic. She was a very intelligent and astute reader whose feedback he valued highly. She was also a loving and supportive mother throughout her long life. She will be dearly missed.

In addition to her husband, she was preceded in death by her parents, her older brothers Harold and Leon Freedman, and by her older sister, Molly Gottlieb. She is survived by her daughter, Shoshana Paris, of Hollywood, Florida, and by her son Mark Paris and his husband, Franz Epting, of Gainesville, Florida.

Burial will take place at 2:00 PM, Sunday, October 31, 2021, at Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery. For those who wish, contributions can be made to the World Wildlife Fund or the Sierra Club.