Ledes from the Land of Enchantment

Denise Warren Obituary (2022) – Albuquerque, NM

Denise Warren

On 16 August 2022 Denise Warren (Berthold) died peacefully, her body simply worn out after 86 years of life. She is survived by her five children, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, her loving husband and her dog, Jane Seymour.

Denise was born in Pittsburgh – and thus a Steelers fan – in 1936, and her childhood was spent in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where her Cornish father was an Episcopal minister. In the late fifties she served as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where she met her first husband, Doctor William Warren. They moved first to the west coast and finally to Albuquerque, where she spent her life and raised her children.

In the late sixties she began studying Classics at UNM, earning a BA and a Masters in Comparative Literature and completing her comprehensive exams for a Ph.D. As a graduate student she taught freshman English and beginning Latin and spent a month in Iceland on a Fulbright. She then worked at the university library well into the nineties. In 1972 she met her second husband and love of fifty years, Professor Richard Berthold, whose heart she easily captured.

Denise was a hearty walker, regularly making the three-mile round trip from home to work. In her younger years she traveled alone by train and with backpack in the UK from Cornwall to the Hebrides, and in the eighties she joined a camel trek across the Sahara, surviving the hostility of Arab men in Algiers (an unaccompanied American woman) and delighting in the warmth of the nomadic Tuareg guides.

She loved cats and dogs, most of hers named after English monarchs, and she was an avid reader, especially of mysteries. On the screen it was British mysteries and police procedures and the great BBC costume dramas, such as the 1975 Poldark, which she and her husband watched repeatedly over the decades. She also, perhaps surprisingly, followed a number of soap operas, first on the radio in her childhood and then through the years on television.

And she was a world class knitter, producing endless numbers of sweaters with complex designs and throws with lines from her favorite movies, some of which were framed and hung in Kelly’s Pub. Surely, no one else has knitted a pair of socks adorned with the opening lines of Beowulf!

She is already sorely missed and will live on in our memories.

There will be a requiem mass and reception at the church where she occasionally served, the Cathedral of St. John at 318 Silver Ave. SW, at 11 AM on September 10, 2022.

Published by on Aug. 28, 2022.

34465541-95D0-45B0-BEEB-B9E0361A315ATo plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

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