Alice Hajenian Stephen died in Cambridge on Nov. 30, 2019. She was 89.

She was born in Boston in 1930 to Armenian immigrants who fled Armenia in 1917 after the genocide. She graduated from Hood College in Maryland in 1952 and completed a teacher training program at Shady Hill School in 1953. After that she traveled to France and taught at the American Community School in Paris for several years. She returned to teach at Shady Hill School for eight years and then moved to New York city where she taught at the Cathedral School at St. John the Divine from 1966 to 1968, and where she helped to establish their K-6 elementary school.

Following the death of her brother Henry in 1968, she moved to the Vineyard, where she lived and taught in Edgartown for three years. She concluded her 45-year teaching career in New York at the United Nations School, retiring in 1977.

Alice was a consummate teacher, both in and out of the classroom. Her nieces fondly recall that she never wasted a chance to create a learning opportunity.

She loved the Vineyard and enjoyed living in Edgartown, on Menemsha Pond in a cabin owned by friends Agnes and Sally Swift, and later in Vineyard Haven. She was fiercely proud of her enduring ties to the Island, and was a devoted birder and avid reader. She was intellectually curious, kind, humorous, and deeply spiritual.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2014 and moved to Youville House, Cambridge in 2017. When it was discovered in 2019 that her cancer had spread, she moved to Elizabeth Evarts de Rham Hospice Home where she died in the company of loving friends.

She is survived by her sister in law Karin Thorbecke Stephen, and three nieces.