In Remembrance: Carol E. Gupta ’80MBA Died on February 3 2025

View full image

Carol Gupta passed away peacefully at home in Concord, Massachusetts, on February 3, 2025. She was 77.

The life she led, the work she did, was an inspiration to all whose lives she touched—and she touched many. Over a period of 30-some years, Carol fought off inflammatory breast cancer and metastatic brain cancer, and recovered from two brain surgeries and, later, a series of strokes. Through all her arduous treatments and therapy, she kept moving forward uncomplainingly, working in service of her community, her church, her friends, her family. Her illnesses did not define her. Her indomitability and incandescent smile did. She lived her plain-spoken Midwestern mantra: “Give it all you got, ’cause all’s all you got.”

Carol, the daughter of Rose (Foreman) and Lowell Klute, grew up on a farm in Bradshaw, Nebraska; attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln (where she met this cute Indian guy named Gautam); graduated from the University of Minnesota with BA/MA degrees in social work and special education; married Gautam; and started her professional life. She worked with Down syndrome children, and later with deaf-blind children born in the rubella (German measles) epidemic of the 1960s. (Rubella is now almost eradicated thanks to vaccines.) She went on to get her MBA from Yale and moved to Boston to work for Oxfam, an international development agency. She traveled to Somalia, Kenya, and all over India, from remote rural areas to the poorest slums, helping disadvantaged women workers form cooperatives, obtain financing, and gain independence.

Moving to Concord in 1985, Carol immersed herself in community affairs, heading up the Human Rights Council, organizing the town’s first United Nations Day festival, working with the Musketaquid arts and environmental group (her Earth Day vegetarian chili for 200 people was legendary), leading the diversity committee in daughter Maya’s school and serving on the Hugh Cargill Trust for the town. She served as a deacon at Trinitarian Congregational Church (Tricon) and offered lay care as a Stephen Minister. In between, she found time to write and publish Concord’s Great Meadows: A Human History—an ode to her home for 20 years.

Carol had an abiding love for the outdoors. She was an avid hiker, environmentalist, and birder. She climbed many of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers, crossed England via Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast walk, and hiked the Cornwall coast (some six weeks after brain surgery!). She loved art, music, dance, theater—summer visits to the Berkshires for Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, Shakespeare & Co. were an annual ritual—and travel all over the globe: long car trips through the Midwest, Maine, Canada, family vacations all over Europe and India, and a memorable one to the Galapagos. She was indefatigable. 

Carol leaves behind her husband of 55 years, Gautam; their daughter Maya (’14PhD) and son-in-law Martin Devecka ’12PhD; her beloved aunts Joan and Gertrude Foreman and Elizabeth Currie (husband Gary Currie and son, Malcolm) of St. Paul, Minnesota; her uncle Don Klute of Bradshaw, Nebraska; brothers-in-law Udayan Gupta of New York City and Ashis Gupta (wife Swapna) of Calgary, Canada; and many cousins, nephews, and nieces. 

Memorial donations may be made to: Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Brigham & Women’s Hospital or Trinitarian Congregational Church of Concord, Massachusetts.

—Submitted by the family.