Maryse Haan Anderson

A singular fusion of Caribbean, French, and American culture, Maryse H. Anderson left this life peacefully after 89 years surrounded by family on November 19, 2024.

Born in the French West Indies in 1935 on the island of Guadeloupe, Maryse loved to swim and be by the sea. She found joy in art, travel, journaling, gardening, the changing of the seasons and the trees outside her window.

Maryse left Guadeloupe in 1946 at the age of 10, together with her two younger sisters, Madeh and Claudine, and her parents, Mireille and André Haan, to immigrate to the United States. They started their American adventure in Great Neck, New York, just outside of New York City, where her father worked for the United Nations and as a French radio correspondent. An excellent student with a love for languages, Maryse attended Great Neck High School and prepared for the French Baccalaureate at the Lycée Français de New York.

She was studying language and translation at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where she met David R. Anderson, who would be her husband for 25 years. After a spell in Cambridge, Massachusetts while David studied law, the couple returned to D.C. with their first son, Marc, and soon thereafter settled in Arlington, Virginia, where they had another son, Charles, and a daughter, Catherine.

Melding Caribbean and French with the best of American traditions, she was a devoted Arlington soccer mom. When she wasn’t broadening her family’s palettes with her cooking, which always included a green salad and a pucker-inducing vinaigrette dressing, she was broadening their horizons with trips to museums, trips to the mountains, trips to the beach, trips to Maine and trips to France. Never one to complain, her favorite maxim was, if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all. If one were to say something negative, she would stop them in their tracks with “I’d rather hear that than be deaf.”

As her children grew older, Maryse would volunteer as a bereavement counselor with the Hospice of Northern Virginia before taking an administrative position with the organization. Maryse moved to Falls Church Virginia and became a dear friend and companion to retired Arlington police officer Clyde Embry. She closed out her work life making use of her language skills as a secretary at the World Bank.

Maryse will be greatly missed by her three children, her sister Claudine, her cousin Evelyne, her niece Marie-Estelle, her nephews Aymeric and Nicolas, her grandchildren Rachel, Parker, Sam, Marcel, and Muriel, her daughter-in-law Jennifer, and countless others to whom she endeared herself in her journey through life. In keeping with her wishes, the family will hold a private celebration of life. In lieu of flowers, a donation in her memory may be made to UNICEF.