‘From diagnosis to heaven in 12 days.’’

That’s how Peter Lynch, the famous — and ardently Catholic — Boston money manager describes last year’s startling death of his wife of nearly a half-century.

One Monday last September, 69-year-old Carolyn Lynch was gardening at her daughter’s Brookline home, vigorous and enthusiastic after returning from a trip to Ireland the day before. That Friday, after visiting a doctor for what seemed to be symptoms of a cold, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Within a week, she was dead, leaving behind a shellshocked family — and a $110 million charitable foundation she created with her husband in 1987.

Carolyn Lynch’s premature death has triggered a generational changing of the guard at the Lynch Foundation, one of the city’s most visible family charities, especially in educational and Catholic circles. She was president and chairwoman; since she died, for the first time all three of the couple’s adult daughters are serving as foundation trustees.

“I think they thought they had a lot of years ahead of them before they had to think about getting the next generation involved,’’ said Katie Everett, the foundation’s executive director, who has worked for the Lynches for 18 years. As trustees, she added, the Lynch children “will be a next generation of leaders created much within the culture and mindset of their mom: willing to take risks and ask curious questions.’’

Peter Lynch may have been the more recognizable name behind the Lynch Foundation, but Carolyn was both its president and spiritual leader, an in-the-trenches philanthropist who did site visits and research that guided the foundation’s grant-making. Her husband invested its assets.

“Occasionally, I’d have an idea I’d pass up to the boss,’’ joked Peter Lynch, 72, who retired in 1990 after running the legendarily lucrative Fidelity Magellan Fund for over a decade, “but she did everything. It was simple: She was it.’’

For most first-generation philanthropists, like the Lynches, there comes a time when they must decide whether to pass the baton to their children or give away nearly all their money in their lifetimes, as Bill and Melinda Gates have vowed to do.

Peter and Carolyn Lynch, who were raised in modest homes and became one of the state’s wealthiest couples — their estimated net worth is $352 million — knew they wanted their foundation to outlive them.

“We both know we’re mortal,’’ said Peter Lynch, still referring to his late wife in the present tense, “and we hope it will be around for our children and our grandchildren.’’ Lynch has, in his words, “seven-and-a-third grandkids’’ — the eighth is due later this year — including one born in March and named Carolyn.

Lynch’s recent interview with the Globe at his Back Bay home is the first time he has spoken publicly about his wife’s death.

Philanthropic risk-taking was a quality Carolyn Lynch prided herself on. The Lynch Foundation, for example, was one of the earliest donors to two organizations that grew to become major players in education and health reform: Teach for America, which recruits recent college grads to teach in low-income schools, and Partners in Health, which provides health care in the developing world.

The foundation is credited with giving a lifeline to struggling Catholic and inner-city schools, and the couple’s name is emblazoned on Boston College’s Lynch School of Education in honor of their gift of more than $10 million. They gave another $20 million to create BC’s Lynch Leadership Academy, a training program for principals.

The foundation has also funded the Lynch Family Skatepark along the Charles River and other less conventional nonprofits that it believes could make positive change nationwide.

“What you’re always trying to look for in a charity is: Can this be replicated?’’ said Peter Lynch, who is now president and chairman of the foundation, which also has a three-person staff and five unpaid nonfamily trustees. “We’re trying to fund charities that really can make a difference and then grow, like a growth stock, like TJX or Staples.’’

In interviews with the Globe, all three Lynch daughters said they plan to carry on that practice and to treat their philanthropic work as not simply making donations, but investing in promising ideas.

“My mother had a great way of being analytical but also asking, ‘How do we do things differently?’?’’ said the Lynches’ oldest daughter, Mary Witkowski, 41, a former Bain & Co. consultant who lives in Brookline and graduated last month from Harvard Medical School.

“She would roll up her sleeves and do research, look at the numbers and talk to kids, doctors, patients, social workers,’’ the Lynch’s middle daughter, Annie Lukowski, 38, said of her mother’s philanthropy.

“My aim . . . is to not change the direction of the foundation,’’ added Lukowski, who lives in Los Angeles, where she cofounded a virtual-reality production company, Vanishing Point Media. “We still have her formula and process in place, and now that we’re in flux I actually hope that doesn’t change.’’

When a younger generation becomes more involved in a family’s charitable giving, “issues they care about may rise to the fore a little more, and you might see more diversity of grant-making,’’ said Ellen Remmer, a senior partner at the Philanthropic Initiative, a nonprofit Boston advisory firm. “They may stretch their wings and introduce the board to other areas and organizations.’’

Each of the Lynch children said the foundation’s four primary areas of giving — education, health care, culture, and religion — are likely to remain the same. But they acknowledged that their interests may influence grant-making.

Witkowski, for example, said she would be inclined to fund initiatives that address substance abuse. And the Lynches’ youngest daughter, Elizabeth de Montrichard, 33, who lives in Boston after having worked in Paris at Fidelity International for several years, is drawn to land conservation.

“I imagined I’d have more time with my mom to be able to learn the ropes,’’ said de Montrichard, who recently became the foundation’s secretary, “but we understand her long-term goals.’’

Peter Lynch, who now mentors young Fidelity analysts in what he calls a “big brother/big sister role,’’ will continue to help invest the foundation’s assets, although he is now assisted by an outside money manager. A major change in the investing business since he retired 26 years ago, he said, is that “information is better now’’ and more widely available, narrowing the gap between amateurs and professionals.

But there is, he said, a downside to that flood of information: “There’s overkill. There’s so much data that you could spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just studying the trucking industry, never mind insurance and biotech and everything else.’’

Lynch said he remains acutely aware of his wife’s absence, especially when he’s “doing things when I know she should be with me, like when I go to Mass now at our church I think of Carolyn. And I have a really hard time watching ‘Downton Abbey’ because we watched it together. Even ‘Desperate Housewives’ and all those fix-it-up [home renovation] shows; she loved those crazy shows, and I kind of miss them.’’

The couple’s TV system continued recording Carolyn’s favorite shows after her death, and that proved an entirely unexpected source of pain for him — a reminder of another thing they would never again share. “I’m almost crying about it as I say this,’’ Lynch added, “but I had to stop recording them because I couldn’t look at the TiVo and see shows she wanted to watch tomorrow.’’

He is grateful that his wife had time, however short, between her diagnosis and her death.

“Some people have auto accidents or a stroke and they’re gone, but at least she got to talk to her daughters and her grandchildren [in her final days],’’ he said. “Those were meaningful conversations.’’

Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @SachaPfeiffer.