Losing a Treasure: Marilyn Shannon

Anyone who has followed CCL for any amount of time is likely familiar with our best-selling book, Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition by Marilyn Shannon. The 5th edition was just released a few months, and was a complete re-write (not just an update) with as much solid, new information on the connection between nutrition and fertility as Marilyn deemed significant enough to include.

Marilyn and her husband, Ron, became a teaching couple for CCL in 1982, and it wasn’t long before her professional expertise as a professor of physiology influenced her volunteer work as she and Ron guided couples in understanding their fertility. She could spot cycle irregularities on charts she was reviewing, and started giving nutrition and lifestyle suggestions to the women on how they might improve that particular issue. She was getting such good results that then CCL executive director John Kippley asked her to write a book. In what we soon learned was typical Marilyn fashion, she said yes. The first edition of FCN came out in 1990, and she never turned us down over the years whenever we asked for updates or rewrites or to give talks and presentations. She literally has helped thousands of women achieve more healthy fertility cycles, and God only knows how many babies are here thanks to the knowledge she shared.

I’m very sorry to share that Marilyn has passed away after battling a rare abdominal cancer for just over a year. She died peacefully at home on Sunday, surrounded by family. It’s hard to fully articulate the blessing she has been to our ministry. She was quite the dynamo, ever determined to get this newest edition finished while in treatment….and she did. Unknown to me, her health began declining quickly in the last few weeks. Yet she graciously accepted an interview by a writer I sent her way just a couple of weeks ago for an article that will be in the July-August issue of Family Foundations…amazingly generous and giving of herself.

Thank you for keeping her soul and her family’s comfort in your prayers. Please click through to read her obituary, and if you been in any way helped by her book, consider leaving a message for her family to see by clicking on Share a Memory.

Ann Gundlach
Former Director of Communications