Former SHARE Outreach Inc. co-directors Carolyn Momenee (center) and Mariette Facques (right) shown outside St. Patrick Church, Milford, with Christine Janson, SHARE executive director, in 2018. Momenee died Jan. 27.
Former SHARE Outreach Inc. co-directors Carolyn Momenee (center) and Mariette Facques (right) shown outside St. Patrick Church, Milford, with Christine Janson, SHARE executive director, in 2018. Momenee died Jan. 27.
MILFORD — Former SHARE Outreach Inc. co-director Carolyn Momenee is remembered for her boundless generosity, kindness and care that touched the lives of thousands of Milford area residents. But Momenee, who died Jan. 27, perhaps is best known for believing miracles still happen.
“She had a very deep faith in God and she always reminded the (SHARE) board of directors when we had a need that ‘God will provide.’ And you know what? He always did,” Mariette Facques said of her longtime friend with whom she served as SHARE co-director for 20 years.
“Her life is such an example of what a difference a person can make,” Facques said.
Momenee, 80, held leadership and volunteer roles with SHARE for more than 30 years beginning as a volunteer in the 1980s. The Milford-based charitable organization founded in 1979 helps residents of Milford, Amherst, Brookline, Mont Vernon and, most recently, Wilton, with food, clothing, emergency financial assistance and a variety of other supports. Anyone who came to SHARE for help getting transportation to get to work, clothes for their kids, putting food on the table or finding a job most likely met Momenee.
“Carolyn touched so many people in such a personal way,” said Christine Janson, who has been SHARE executive director since 2009.
“She always went back to the basics. ‘This person is a human being. This person needs to have food. This person needs to have water.’ She sort of touched people individually. Those things have a collective impact on a community,” Janson said. She estimated Momenee touched the lives of tens of thousands of Greater Milford residents.
Yet it was through food — the sharing of it, the breaking of bread with others and the community that grew from this — that Momenee seemed to have had her greatest impact, those who knew her said.
Momenee focused many of her efforts working in SHARE’s Food Pantry and managed it after she stepped down as co-director, Facques said. Facques said the two also coordinated the annual Thanksgiving turkey drives that delivered holiday food baskets to hundreds of area families.
More than 20 years ago, Momenee also initiated a “Lunch Bunch” program to reach out to elders who lived in Milford’s three senior housing facilities. Volunteers made meals which, on a rotating basis, they delivered, served and shared with residents of each facility once monthly.
“She loved elderly people and a lot of them were very lonely in these complexes. Some of them never left their rooms,” Facques said. “Carolyn loved to gather people around food.”
Sharing meals with others was important to Momenee, a mother of nine children, grandmother of 21 and great-grandmother of 3, her husband, David Momenee, said. The couple moved to Milford in 1980 and would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary May 23.
He described his wife as someone who “treated everybody as equals. She just valued everybody” and, for those in unfortunate circumstances, sought to “restore their dignity.”
“She was always looking for ways to help people or to make them feel better,” David Momenee said, adding, “She was so much to me.”
In an effort to continue his wife’s spirit of generosity and thoughtfulness, David Momenee announced he and the couple’s nine children will launch a program, called “Carolyn Cares.” SHARE has agreed to host the program and will work with the family to finalize the details during the next few months.
“We urge your readers to watch and follow what it will be,” David Momenee said, noting it will focus on his wife’s life-long work to help those in need.
“We’re all for it,” Janson said. “He wants to do something to keep her spirit active with us and with the community. Honestly, we would do anything for the Momenees.”
SHARE volunteer and former board member Kathy Sharkey of Milford remembered her interactions with Carolyn Momenee for “just feeling her sense of peace and her sense of loving people and outreach to everyone and wanting everyone to feel comfortable rather than lonely and separated from each other.”
Momenee was a faithful Catholic and communicant of St. Patrick Parish in Milford, where she served as a eucharistic minister and lector. Friends described her as humble, genuine, funny, kind and non-judgmental.
“She was an amazing Christian,” Janson said. “She touched all these people. She was put on this earth to do something and now she’s done it and the Lord is taking her.”
A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 11 a.m., Saturday, in St. Patrick Church. Calling hours will be 5-7 p.m., Froday, at Smith & Heald Funeral Home.
