Jayne I (Meyer) Gombach

Jayne Isabel Meyer Gombach  October 6, 1936 – May 11, 2026 

Jayne Isabel Meyer Gombach, beloved daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, and friend, passed away on May 11, 2026, at Windmere in North Haledon, NJ.

Jayne was born on October 6, 1936, in New York City and grew up with her older sister, Sondra, in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, on the shore of New York Harbor. From her earliest years, the city shaped her: she traveled to Harlem with her beloved caretaker, Lilly, studied dance in Manhattan beginning in middle school, and discovered the wider world at summer camp at age ten. Her childhood love of the arts came fully alive in high school, where she choreographed her school's production of Finian's Rainbow.

At Bard College, a broken bone redirected her from dance to drama, a pivot that proved to be a gift. While there, she deepened passions that would define her for the rest of her life: religion, spirituality, theater, and painting. She was a woman of deep and wide spiritual curiosity, as comfortable in the pew as she was exploring the mystical, the esoteric, and the edges of what can be known. It was also at Bard, while touring New England to perform one-act plays at high schools, that she began seriously dating Raymond Gombach, a fellow member of the touring group. Their relationship solidified when she successfully directed Raymond in her senior thesis production of Waiting for Godot.

Jayne and Raymond married in 1959 and made their first home on East 89th Street in Manhattan, where they welcomed their son James in 1961. When daughter Elizabeth arrived, the family moved to Port Washington, New York, a town they chose deliberately for its thriving community theater scene. Those years were rich ones: their circle grew to include a wide and remarkable array of creative, accomplished people, and their home became known for its warmth, laughter, generous hospitality, and the lively mix of arts and spiritual inquiry that animated their lives. Son Alexander was born in 1972.

In 1986, Jayne and Raymond moved to Allendale, New Jersey, where they poured themselves into family life and community. They were active members of West Side Presbyterian Church in Ridgewood, NJ, where Jayne worked with youth in musical theatre projects, served twice as a deacon, and was committed to the prayer ministry and several small groups over the years.

Jayne defied easy description, and she would have had it no other way. Warm-hearted and tenacious, she felt things more deeply than most: beauty, loss, longing, all of it. She had a gift for seeing what others walked right past and a lifelong instinct for expression through movement, color, theater, the way she told a story, or welcomed someone into

her home. She was drawn to what was singular and strange, resistant to the ordinary, and never quite comfortable in a world that kept asking her to be more conventional than she was. Wonderfully kooky and avant-garde in spirit, she was both deeply lovable and delightfully difficult. She was a woman who kept people on their toes and made them feel alive in her presence. Even through her final months at Windmere, she seemed to squeeze every last drop from the life God had given her.

Her devotion to her children never dimmed, as grandchildren arrived, she embraced that role with the same fierce, attentive love. She took grandmothering seriously, showing up, staying present, and making each child feel known. In her later years, she learned to use an iPhone and stayed in close touch with each of her seven grandchildren by text and phone call, refusing to let age or distance thin those bonds.

Jayne was preceded in death by her beloved husband, Raymond Gombach, who died in 2016.

She is survived by her three children: James and his wife Cristina, Elizabeth and her husband Laurent, and Alexander and his wife Jenny; her seven grandchildren: Jack, Priscilla, and Sammy; Lilly, Liam, and Luke; and Ray; dear sister-in-law, Barbara Gombach Weinstein, and a wide circle of family, friends, and acquaintances who will carry with them always the memory of her generous and loving spirit.

A memorial service celebrating Jayne's life will be held on Sunday, May 31, at 2:00 pm at West Side Presbyterian Church, 6 South Monroe Street, Ridgewood, New Jersey, and via livestream. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Capital Campaign of West Side Presbyterian Church for the youth barn restoration project.

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