Joyce DeMuro
Joyce DeMuro, 87, of Toms River, NJ—beloved wife, cherished mother and grandmother, adored sister, and dear friend to many—left this world on
April 3, 2024 after a many months’ long illness.
Born Feb. 24, 1937 in Hackensack Medical Center,
Hackensack NJ, and raised on West Lane in Lodi,
NJ, Joyce attended the Lodi Public School District where she met her eventual husband, Dr. Vincent
A. DeMuro, in their fifth grade classroom. As is the way with many small town romances, Joyce always said, “We hated each other in grade school, dated each other in high school, and married each other in college”. After marrying, Joyce and Vincent eventually settled down in Jackson, NJ, where they raised their four children, spending summers in Lavallette, NJ, snowbirding to Highland Beach, Fla., and finally moved to Toms River last year.
To say Joyce lived a colorful life was an understatement. A member of the Red Hat Society, and one of the founding members of the Green Thumb Garden Club in Jackson, NJ, the prism of light that shone through her was evident to the many civic organizations which benefited from her groups’ philanthropic activities. A patroness of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, Joyce also sponsored one child for every grandchild that God gave her through the Unbound Program, one of whom recently sent her a letter writing that they graduated college through that program’s assistance. A devout Catholic, Joyce was a parishioner of St. Aloysius in Jackson, NJ, St. Bonaventure in Lavallette, NJ, and St. Lucy’s in Highland Beach, Fla.
Joyce worked in a governmental secretarial pool helping to support her husband’s college and medical school degrees, then after raising their four children, earned her certification in ornamental horticulture from Rutgers
University and opened her own business, Joy’s Design and Maintenance (JDM, Inc.), until she retired in the late 1990s. Be it gardening for herself or others, Joyce’s passion was dirt under her fingernails with bountiful vegetable gardens, and blooming plants, especially her prized orchids, which she would bring from home to home, some decades old, flourishing under her nurturing hand. The 50-year-old fig tree at her Lavallette home came from a cutting of her father’s fig tree on Henry Street in Lodi, and its cuttings will continue on through her children’s gardens—and hopefully her grandchildren’s too.
Joyce is predeceased by her father Eugene Guerriero, her mother Vincenza “Jenny” Guerriero (nee Graziano), her brothers Eugene Guerriero, Jr. and Peter Guerriero, and her brother-in-law August DePreker. She is survived by her husband of 66 years, Vincent, her sisters Thelma DePerker, Eugenia “Jeanne” Leone and her husband Vincent, her daughters Jeanine DeMuro-Pagano, Patricia Mazejy and her husband Robert, Susan Carstensen and her husband John, and her son Vincent, Jr. and his wife Jennifer. She has eight beautiful grandchildren; Joseph Pagano and his wife Amanda, Robert Mazejy, Jarek Carstensen, Jena Pagano, Kyle Cartensen, Kathryn DeMuro, Jack Mazejy, and Meredith DeMuro.
Services will be held Thursday, April 11 at Quinn Hopping Funeral Home, 26 Mule Road in Toms River from 2 PM to 4 PM and from 7 PM to 9 PM. A funeral mass will be held 10 AM Friday, April 12 at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, 685 Hooper Avenue in Toms River, NJ with interment to follow at St. Mary of the Lake Mausoleum, 1 Honey Locust Drive, Lakewood, NJ. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Joyce’s name to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital