Patricia Eileen Keefe, 94, passed away peacefully at her home in Half Moon Bay, California, on June 3, 2024, surrounded by family members.
She was born February 4, 1930, in San Francisco, to Michael B. and Inez W. Monahan, a tool salesman and homemaker, respectively. The Depression and the Second World War defined her childhood, but she also recalled later in life that San Francisco in that era was a magical, innocent place, with Golden Gate Park, the museums and the Japanese Tea Garden as her playgrounds. In 1937 she was among those first San Franciscans to walk the span of the newly opened Golden Gate Bridge. And she was especially fond of summers spent on the O’Keeffe Ranch in the high desert of eastern Oregon, where she learned to drive a truck and rattle the surly ranch hands with her gift for mischief.
Attending the University of San Francisco as a nursing student, she met Robert Joseph Keefe, a WWII veteran and medical student and soon the two newlyweds found themselves living in a garage in Omaha, NE, while Bob attended Creighton Medical School on the GI Bill and Pat paid the bills through a series of odd jobs, all the while planning their return to California.
While raising six children in South San Francisco and later Hillsborough, Pat returned to school, earning two master’s degrees, teaching art therapy to developmentally challenged students and pursuing a lifelong passion for the arts as a painter and sculptor and becoming a protégé of the revered landscape painter Galen Wolf. After her husband’s death in 1993, she made Half Moon Bay her home, where she was a longtime member of the Coastal Arts League, The Sculptor’s Guild and the Women’s Caucus for Art, exhibiting her own work throughout the Bay Area while serving as a juror in countless other shows. She was an enthusiastic volunteer in many civic undertakings in Half Moon Bay, even serving as docent at the historic Half Moon Bay Jail. A devout Catholic, she was a parishioner of (successively) All Souls Church in South San Francisco, St. Catherine of Sienna in Burlingame, and Our Lady of the Pillar in Half Moon Bay.
She is survived by her children, John Patrick Keefe (Danita), Robert Matthew Keefe, Daniel Thomas Keefe (Jessica), and Kelleen Keefe Lanting (Daniel); daughter-in-law Shelley Keefe (widow of Joseph Michael Keefe); her grandchildren, Joelle, Jake, Nicole, Christopher, Gabrielle, Caroline, Charlotte and Michael; and three great-grandchildren, Aiden, Bryce and Myles John.
She was predeceased by her husband Robert, her daughter Constance Anne Hicks and her son Joseph Michael Keefe.
Funeral mass and interment services will be private. A memorial mass and celebration of Pat’s life will be announced at a later date.
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