SOUTHBURY – We mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Lena Braren Norton, who died peacefully at her home in Southbury, Connecticut on November 4, weeks after hosting her 100th birthday party for friends and family. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Ingwert and Clara Braren on September 24, 1922, she had lived in Southbury since 1986, and previously in Bedford, New York, and the Bay Ridge and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

Lena was a 1943 graduate of Barnard College, worked as a laboratory technician at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn during World War II, and spent much of her life as a homemaker and volunteer for church and charitable institutions. Later, she worked as church secretary at the Pound Ridge Community Church in Pound Ridge, New York, and as a legal aide in Southbury. Lena was a joyful, spiritual, optimistic person with a quick, lively, and curious mind and a formidable memory, deeply interested throughout her life in current events, history, music, and religion. She kept in touch with a wide network of friends and relatives, who remember her for her empathy, kindness, and humor, right up to the end of her life.

She was preceded in death by her devoted husband, John T. Norton (a World War II combat veteran and attorney who married Lena in 1944 and died of cancer in 1976), and her son John T. Norton, Jr (killed in a Navy accident while serving in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War in 1969). She is survived by her loving children, Elizabeth Lasley (William), Kenneth, and Robert Norton (Candida), and by her granddaughters Mary Lasley and Ingrid Norton.

A memorial service for Lena will be held at North Congregational Church, 11 Main Street North, Woodbury, Connecticut, on November 26th at 11:00 A.M.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the USS Frank E. Evans Association https://www.ussfee.org/support-the-uss-fee-association/ , which works to have the names of the 74 sailors lost in the 1969 accident added to the Vietnam War Memorial Wall.

To leave online condolence please visit www.munsonloveterefuneralhome.