Obituary
In the care of Solemn OaksMarjorie Koster, 93, of Maple Bend, died Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at home, in a bed made up with one of the thousand quilts that passed through her hands. For sixty years she was the quiet engine of the Ladies Aid at Maple Bend Reformed Church, and there is a quilt of hers folded in a cedar chest in something close to half the households in this county, whether they know its maker's name or not.
She was born August 15, 1932, in Maple Bend, the daughter of John and Henrietta Bloem, and she learned to sew before she learned her multiplication tables, at the elbow of a mother and grandmother for whom idle hands were a genuine moral concern. She married Herman Koster in 1952, a dairy farmer with a good singing voice and a bad back, and she spent the next several decades keeping the books, the garden, the children, and the farmhouse, in roughly that order of difficulty.
But it was around the quilting frame that Marjorie became most herself. For sixty years she was at every Tuesday Ladies Aid, cutting, piecing, and running a frame full of chattering women with the gentle, absolute authority of someone who had noticed you had dropped a stitch and was too kind to say so out loud. The group made quilts for every wedding, every new baby, and every family burned out or laid low in three townships, and Marjorie saw to it that not one of those occasions passed unmarked. She kept no count of how many she made. The count, had anyone kept it, would not be believed.
She could quote the whole book of Psalms and most of the hymnal, made a rhubarb custard pie that won the Newaygo County Fair four separate years before she gracefully stopped entering to give someone else a chance, and wrote a card — the right card, at the right moment, in a hand like copperplate — to more grieving and celebrating people than anyone will ever tally. She believed in showing up with food and staying to do the dishes, and she taught three generations of Maple Bend women to do the same.
She quilted until her eyes and hands finally would not, and then she threaded the needles for the younger women and supervised, which she was frank to admit she enjoyed even more. The last quilt she had a hand in is going to a great-granddaughter's wedding this fall — unfinished by Marjorie, but not, the family insists, unblessed.
She is survived by her children, Gary (Janice) Koster of Maple Bend, Carol (Fred) Ondersma of Grandville, and Nathan (Beth) Koster of Fremont; nine grandchildren; twenty-one great-grandchildren; four great-great-grandchildren; and a Tuesday quilting circle that will keep her chair at the frame.
She was preceded in death by her husband of sixty-four years, Herman, in 2016; her parents; her sisters, Gertrude and Wilma; and her son, Douglas, in 2011.