Call her what you will, Evelyn Jean Manrique (née Lasher) passed away in her Rockford, IL home on April 6, 2017. As the 1970s children's song goes: "Mommies are people, people with children.  Mommies are women, women with children.  Busy with children, and things that they do. There are a lot of things a lot of mommies can do." Mike, Sam, Dave, and Marie started drooling on her long before they could get out the word mommy and in the following years, she was the simple--but never conventional - mom. Ms. Jean ("Why do people need to know if a woman is married or not?") was what her daughter-in-law Anne originally called her.  As the decades passed, Jean seemed more fitting. Her daughter-in-law Colleen and her grandsons Miles and Max called her "Grandma in Rockford".  Until the end, many of us held out the hope that one day she would be Grandma in Chicago. Her only sister Jo-Anne called her… and unsurprisingly she did not always pick up.  Much to our general frustration and later concern, she did the same to everyone. Her nieces, Jennifer and Pam, called her Aunt Jean and sometimes even AJ, although they know that family moniker is already taken. Their spouses, Al and Rob, respectfully (they are upstanding gentlemen, after all), called her Jean. Their kids (Brad, Kyle, and Bret, as well as Cade, Alex, Anissa, Ryan, and Jackson) learned early that she was Aunt Jean and this despite them not seeing her as much as she would have liked. She decidedly accepted that the health care professionals and home care workers called her Evelyn. Not even her own mother, who recently passed away and the person for whom she was named, called her this. There could only be one feisty independent woman in the family with the name Evelyn. Only the people who really knew her, she stated, knew that Evelyn was not her name of choice. Starting from her days in Roseland—the stories of her Dutch enclave abound—to her large Italian family, she was Jean.  As the years passed, her co-workers in different locations in downtown Chicago, Rogers Park, and Mt. Prospect knew her as nothing else. Whatever you happened to call her, celebrate the life of a headstrong woman who belonged to no one at the same time was a part of all of us.