Lowell Terry Anderson

Lowell Terry Anderson lived a long and happy life during a golden age of American prosperity. He was born in 1943 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to an Army Staff Sergeant and his wife. After the war they would settle in Southern California. Terry (as he was called by almost everyone) would often claim that there was no better time or place for a person to grow up. Imagine walking out your back door, telling your mother you’d be back in a week, and then disappearing off into the High Sierras on a camping trip. This was childhood for Terry and his younger siblings. He was a champion swimmer and an excellent baseball player and graduated from Pasadena High School in 1961. In 1963 he met Donna LaMotte, in the choir at Pasadena City College. They married in 1967 in Pasadena, and Donna and Terry would be side by side for almost all of the next 59 years. Terry earned his PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1971, and he and Donna made their way to New York City for what would be the next long chapter in their lives. If Pasadena was the best place for him to be a kid, New York City was truly the best place for Terry to be a husband and father. Here he and Donna made great friends, enjoyed an unparalleled amount of art and culture, and, eventually, raised two children. Keith and Karin had a father who would do anything for them: showing them how to ride the subway, rescuing school projects from certain disaster, and teaching them both how to drive. After 37 years working at NYU Medical Center as a psychologist, Terry finally retired. Over his long career he enjoyed a wide range of professional experience--publishing research, teaching graduate students, and providing psychological counseling to just about any kind of person who might pass through Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Terry and Donna spent most of their retirement in upstate New York, blessed with good health and the ability and inclination to travel near and far. Nothing made Terry happier over the last 18 years than spending time with family and friends, especially the time he had with his granddaughters. Until his final day he was thinking clearly, and deeply. He remained constantly excited by the most important and perplexing questions in life and closed his time on earth as well as anyone could hope; with ideas for how to make the world better, and ruminations on a life well lived. Lowell Terry Anderson died on June 19th, 2026, in Middletown, New York. He is survived by his wife Donna; by his son Keith and his wife Michele; by his daughter Karin and her husband Brandon; by his granddaughters, Anna and Lily; and by his sister Elaine and brother Greg. We hope you will honor Terry by taking a moment to recall a happy memory of him.

Lowell Terry Anderson

December 25, 1943 - June 19, 2026