Birth date: Mar 15, 1925 Death date: May 18, 2024
Audrey E. Hildreth passed away peacefully on May 18, 2024 at age 99. Audrey was born in Middletown, Connecticut and raised in Alabama, where she met her lifelong love and husband of 67 years, Dalton. Their courtship was interrupt Read Obituary
Mrs. Hildreth was such a sweet lady. The family are in our thoughts and prayers.
Surely part of a person’s impact on the world at large can be found in one’s children and grandchildren who will continue to honor their memory in the lives that they live and the people they help and support along the way. My mother-in-law, Audrey, was someone who dedicated her life to her family and friends. Luckily, she had an amazing partner in Dalton, and there could not be a greater love story than their marriage. They were literally next-door neighbors who grew up together and shared every single aspect of their life working side-by-side. Audrey, being raised in the country, was a lover of flowers and birds and animals. Whenever you talked of gardens, she would brighten and want more details. She liked you to describe things outside her window. Even in her last moments, she spoke of her children and grandchildren and always wanted the reassurance that they were safe. She always worried about you getting home safely. I remember once when Danny, Marshall, and Weston were little, she and Dalton staged a treasure hunt for them. They had bought toys from local yard sales and buried them in a field nearby the house. They led the expedition to the delight of all three of her grandchildren. She liked a homemade cookie, something that did tempt her to indulge herself in the smallest way. Who could argue with that pleasure? Of course, there are a thousand memories of things that illustrate her undying loyalty and devotion to her children and grandchildren, but they are known by them and I am sure that they will continue to model the high standards she set for anyone lucky enough to know and love her.
Beth Myers
My mother was surely the most patient person who ever lived, and I say that not only because she put up with me as she was raising me. (If she saw that sentence, she would have reminded me that you raise livestock, and you rear children.) She was the subject of struggle between her parents' families and lost her birth mother as a child. She grew up in rural Alabama during the Depression with her father rather than in cosmopolitan Connecticut with her mother's well-to-do relatives. She endured the uncertainty of a wartime engagement, and began life with my father and then me, in a trailer parked outside the University of Illinois campus while my father went to college She moved my brother Don and me from state to state as my father's jobs required, and made new friends and neighbors in Indiana, Illinois (twice,) Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New Jersey (twice.) She was a stay-at-home mom when that was the norm, but she had left home as a teenager to work as a typist, had joined the Women's Army Corps - my parents' wedding pictures are both in uniform - and although she was modest about it, my father was proud to tell us that she had learned to fire a Thompson submachine gun, so there was more to her than just the apron in the kitchen, and this came out when she opened a business with my father. While he operated the print shop in back, my mother worked the front counter. This was probably the most rewarding period of her life before the business was sold, because she worked every day with my father - we always referred to them as swans, which mate for life and are always side by side - and because she had a role that was entirely her own, dealing with the public in an old-school, friendly, courteous way that was good for business.
Finally, without my father, she waited join him, as she often said, for far too long, in darkness and silence. This was the greatest test of her patience, but she never complained. She was a lesson for us all.
David Hildreth
Sending love to David, Beth, Dan, Joanna and the whole Hildreth family. Your mom/grandmother was such a lovely lady. Wishing you comfort and peace. The O' Family.
