Alicia Francine Dunbar-Gronke's Obituary
Alicia Francine Dunbar-Gronke, 65, crossed over peacefully among friends, family, prayers, and music on Thursday, November 13, 2025 in San Francisco.
Alicia was the proud descendant of fighters and survivors, of farmers and healers, of adventurers and scholars. She was born on January 14, 1960, at San Francisco General Hospital to Alice Modesia Fleming-Dunbar. By the time Alicia was five, she and her mother had moved to Oakland. Alicia found a deep and earnest love of music and the written word early on. She attended Oakland public schools, where she learned to play the violin and viola before Proposition 13 gutted funding for the arts in California public schools and where she became smitten with classical music.
She attended California State University, Hayward for a few years before she met and married her husband, Edward Gronke, in 1986. The two moved to Amsterdam, back to the Bay Area, to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and then settled for 20 years in Portland, Oregon before moving back to the Bay Area in 2012. Her life was bold, exciting, and included so many things that she was proud of: she delivered a paper on copyright law at a conference in Vienna while employed at Sun Microsystems and pregnant with her first born; she started two businesses─an organic cotton and hemp clothing line and a tongue-in-cheek greeting card line─through which she exercised her creative spirit and met life-long friends; she played in an orchestra conducted by Ennio Morricone; she raised two children─Anneke and Peter; and she finished her bachelor’s degree later in life at Georgetown University while battling the Stage 4 uterine cancer that ultimately took her life.
She was preceded in death by her mother, her aunt, Nettie Louise Washington, and her cousin, Mendy Holland. She is survived by her husband, her children, her child-in-law, jes godinez, and a legion of loving chosen family and friends. She will be remembered by the joy and laughter she brought to the lives of those who knew her and her strength and indomitable spirit.
Funeral services celebrating Alicia’s life will be held at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Sunday, December 7, 2025 before she is laid to rest at Mountain View Cemetery.
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