Pearline Sealey James began caring for children when she was a teenager in Jamaica and helped raise her sisters and brothers in an extended family that grew to include 21 siblings, of which she was the second oldest.
As an immigrant in Boston, she initially was a hospital dietician before drawing from that early experience and launching a child-care center in her Mattapan home in the late 1970s.
About two decades later, state accreditation required her to take courses every few years. “Or I could go to college,” she told the Globe in 2006. So at 60, she graduated with an associate’s degree from Urban College of Boston — a great-grandmother among younger classmates, and a student with nearly 50 years of experience in her field.
“For some reason, I have this thirst for knowledge,” she said then. “The more I learn, the more I want to learn.”
Mrs. James, who also was an ordained pastor and directed her church’s couples’ ministry, died of multiple myeloma last Monday in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She was 77 and lived in the Mattapan home she and her husband bought in the mid-1970s, a few years after they moved to Boston.
“Her ministry extended beyond the local church to various churches around Boston, to churches across the country, and even internationally,” said Bishop Glen Prospere of Full Life Gospel Center in Dorchester, where Mrs. James was an associate pastor. “The tentacles of her ministry were far-reaching, and she was very passionate about her work.”
Mrs. James “always saw the best in people, and she encouraged me to do the same,” said Pauline Prospere, who is married to the bishop and, like Mrs. James, is a child-care provider.
“Life is going to be different without her,” Pauline said, “but she encouraged me in her final days to be strong, and to do what we do with passion and with love and with care.”
For Mrs. James, ministering to couples at church went hand in hand with ministering to the needs of children at P.J.’s Family Childcare and Transportation, which she and her husband, Evan, operated from their home.
The number of lives that she touched through work and church could be measured in part by the steady stream of people who visited while she was in hospice care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a place she had known for decades.
Upon moving to Boston in 1971, her first dietician job was at New England Deaconess Hospital, a forerunner of Beth Israel Deaconess.
Denella James Clark of Hyde Park said that when her mother was in hospice care, nurses at the hospital “said, ‘We believe she had no less than 300 visitors.’ "
Some who went to sit and pray by her side were part of her longtime church family. Forty years ago, Mrs. James joined the Church of God of Prophecy in Dorchester, which later became the Full Life Gospel Center.
“She was one of our longest-standing trustees,” Bishop Prospere said, “and she was our primary leader in fund-raising for the church.”
Mrs. James filled those roles while running her own business, raising four children with her husband, and returning to school in her late 50s, an endeavor that was no easy task.
At first, she told the Globe, “I thought, ‘I’m too old for this.’ " Health struggles intruded on her studies, and some courses were daunting. In a psychology class, she said, “the first paper I did, I got a C-plus. I was mad.” When she was a child, her family expected her to earn an A in every class.
Buoyed by encouragement from others and a scholarship she received, Mrs. James graduated from Urban College with a 3.8 grade point average as she expanded her academic interests into history and anatomy courses.
“It’s been a landmark, a life dream,” she said on the cusp of her commencement ceremony. “I’ve always wanted to say, ‘I am a college graduate.’ "
Pearline Bernice Sealey was born in Morant Bay, Jamaica, on Jan. 27, 1946.
She was the second of three children whose parents were Vernon Sealey and Estrianna Reid Walker, who divorced and had children in subsequent marriages.
Pearline’s surviving siblings live in Jamaica, London, and the United States, Denella said.
After Pearline’s parents parted and her mother moved away, she “felt sort of abandoned,” Denella said.
Mrs. James helped raise her younger siblings and wanted to go to college, but her father didn’t support that aspiration.
In an essay she wrote for an Urban College class, she recalled that her father considered her “a girl-child and girls will grow up just to have babies. She will live on a hill and remain barefooted and pregnant.”
At 16 she met Evan O. James, whom she married a few years later.
He was the first to move to Boston, and Mrs. James followed. After establishing herself in a job, she brought their children to Boston to make sure they didn’t repeat her experience of being abandoned by a parent.
“What’s always been profound for me is the fact that she didn’t leave us in Jamaica,” Denella said. “I always say to my parents, ‘Thank you for not leaving us there — for giving us a chance and an opportunity.’ She tried to make a better life not just for herself, but for her family.”
In 1989, Pearline and Evan’s only son, Conrad, then 24, was shot by a man during an argument not far from the family’s Mattapan home, and died in a hospital soon after. The family’s grief was all-consuming.
“I didn’t think my mother would make it,” Denella said. “She persevered through things you’d think would destroy her.”
In the late-1990s, Mrs. James became director of the Full Life Gospel Center’s couple’s ministry. While counseling couples, she sometimes drew examples from life lessons she and her husband learned during challenges they endured.
“She was very transparent about not just the great times they had, but the struggles they had also, and how they were able to overcome adversity and not just survive but thrive in the relationship over the years,” Bishop Prospere said.
In addition to her husband, Evan, and daughter Denella, Mrs. James leaves two other daughters, Rosemarie of Milton and Debby of Dorchester; 10 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
Family and friends will gather to celebrate her life at 4 p.m. Friday in Concord Baptist Church in Milton, where a service will begin at 6 p.m.
A homegoing service will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday in Full Life Gospel Center in Dorchester. Burial will be Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park, where Mrs. James’s son is buried.
“She had this drive that was unmatched,” Pauline Prospere said. “She was very loyal to what she did, and was very dedicated to children.”
Mrs. James, she added, “just loved people and did whatever she could to make them comfortable and happy and safe. That was her calling.”
Even as her health failed, Mrs. James “was so strong for us,” Denella said. “Through all of this she would say, ‘Denella, we’re going to get through this process.’ "
Denella said that as her mother comforted others from her hospice bed, she would invoke the lyrics of “It Is Well With My Soul,” a gospel hymn whose words include:
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well, with my soul.
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.