Uldene L. Fisk

FISK, Uldene L., 91, passed away peacefully, at home, on June 25, 2014 in Tampa, FL. She was surrounded by her loving family. Graveside services were held on Saturday, June 28, 2014 at Sunset Memory Gardens at 3 PM. Uldene is survived by her adoring husband of 68 years, Richard E. Fisk; daughter, Marcia Luckey; son Richard P. Fisk; and daughter Vivian G. Fisk., as well as ten grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren.

If you ask anyone who knew Uldene Fisk to describe her, their response will be: kind. She was the kindest, most generous (to a fault, it was often said), patient, and compassionate person you could have ever known. She always saw the potential for good in everyone and the positive side of any bad situation. She never said a harsh or unkind word to, or about anyone and always, always put everyone’s needs before her own. From the countless baby birds fallen from their nests that she hand-raised, to so many friends and family members needing rescuing, Uldene made her home a place of refuge and comfort, and all were welcomed with an open heart. She was happiest when she was making other people happy. She hated injustice and unfairness and firmly believed that people should be judged by their actions. She loved people and embraced anyone who crossed her path, indiscriminately and unconditionally. If you showed her the slightest consideration, you had a friend for life.

Although born in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, Uldene grew up and lived the greater part of her life in Panama, the place she would always consider home and the setting for the happiest years of her life. After the sudden death of their mother, Uldene and her only sibling, her beloved sister Marie, went to live on their aunt Jul’s remote coconut plantation on the Caribbean coast of Panama. The girls were still pre-school age and, with Kuna Indian children from the nearby San Blas Islands for playmates (none of whom had ever seen white children), they lived the life of storybooks, even learning the Kuna language. Uldene spoke of this as the happiest time of her childhood. Indeed, it was a remarkable beginning to the life of a woman who would be anything but mundane.

By school age, the girls moved to Colon, Panama, where they lived for many years and where Uldene married her first husband and had two daughters, Constance and Marcia. Eventually, Uldene met her soon to be husband Richard, then an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy. They would move briefly to Richard’s hometown of Clarendon, Pa., but eventually back to Panama, where they would live until retirement from the Department of Defense, in 1983.

Panama was a source of great nostalgia and reminiscence for Uldene and her family. She remembered her life there, especially her years living with her husband Richard and raising their family in the Canal Zone, as charmed, and she treasured the memories of that idyllic life. The only place Uldene loved as much was Grand Cayman, her birthplace, which she finally returned to in the early 1970s and continued to visit for the rest of her life. She and her family spent many happy vacations there, in South Sound, reunited with her beloved Aunt Jul, who had moved back there from Panama many years prior. Those were idyllic times, as well, on their little piece of paradise on the beach, and the time Uldene spent there with her dear aunt, including an extended stay when she was quite elderly, was very precious to her.

Uldene lived life with a sense of innocence and wonder, easily delighted by the simplest things and finding beauty in the everyday world around her. Nowhere was this more evident than in how she fussed and cared for each plant in her garden as if it were the rarest specimen. She had a great sense of adventure, too. In her twenties, in the1940s, she took flying lessons and learned how to fly seaplanes; had she continued and earned her pilot's license, she would have been a pioneer in the field as one of the first women to do so, at least in Latin America. She never lost her love of air travel, especially in small planes and, in later years made frequent trips on small prop planes with her husband from Panama City to the San Blas Islands, a place she held very dear in her heart. She and Richard spent their honeymoon in San Blas, and they went back for several anniversaries and vacation visits over the years.

Uldene loved ideas and learning and was a voracious reader. But you would never find her reading a work of fiction, or even a magazine. She was a great believer in medicine, also very interested in psychology and philosophy, and she loved reading medical, science, and health-related books and journals--even pharmaceutical dictionaries! Most of all, she would immerse herself in anything philosophical that explored theories on the origins of life, human nature, and our place in the universe. She was always enthusiastic and ready to share her new-found knowledge with anyone willing to listen. Anyone who knew her knows that she was quite the armchair philosopher, and she loved nothing more than to hold court and discuss the existential issues of life. She would have been a great counselor or therapist.

Uldene never had the privilege of a formal, higher-education, however, what she did learn she learned thoroughly and excelled at. She owned and operated her own beauty salons (as they used to be called) since the 1950s, first with her sister, Marie. Later, she owned and ran a day spa (a very modern concept at the time) through the 1970s and early 1980s, on her own. She was the rare, self-employed, business woman among a community of military officer’s wives, and assorted Department of Defense and other civilian housewives, in a place with little opportunity for entrepreneurship. Still, she was successful, and became a very highly regarded and sought-after esthetician, well known for innovation and cutting edge techniques. Through her spa, she introduced many “firsts” in hair and skin care technologies and products to Latin America. She had an interest and a knack for chemistry, and developed her own formulas for skin care products for which she still holds patents. She never stopped researching her field, taking continuing education to maintain her professional licenses, even long after she was no longer able to work.

Uldene was a deeply spiritual person. Ultimately, she believed deeply in God and in the teachings of Jesus Christ. But she was not closed-minded or dogmatic, and she also embraced principles taught by other disciplines and philosophies, including non-religious ones. She was adamant in her view that all religions are imperfect, but also that they shared basic truths and tenets of goodness and harmony; “take the good, and leave the bad” was a familiar mantra of hers. She believed very firmly that there was no exclusivity to attaining spiritual enlightenment—whatever that might be, since, as she always made the point, no one really knows—and absolutely rejected the ideology of one true church or religion. This is why, after several disappointments with organized religion, during the latter half of her life she never again attached herself to a specific church or religion. She believed in the eternity of the soul, but she did not believe in eternal damnation, because the God she believed in was too loving. She was fascinated by the possibility of reincarnation and confounded by the notion that in all of the vast universe, we could possibly be the only life; she considered this preposterous and foolish. To her, all things were possible, until proven otherwise. And, finally, she believed very strongly in the reality of karma, or what she would often refer to as the “Law of the Universe.” This was a concept she embraced profoundly. In short, Uldene loved the questions and the mysteries of life as much as the answers, which she always, always questioned.

Uldene’s life had a difficult beginning and she never really had a childhood. She lost her mother at a very early age and, through circumstances beyond her control, become an adult, caring for others, far too early. But she never looked backwards for excuses, only forward for opportunities, ever optimistic and excited about life. Perhaps a bit eccentric at times, definitely with a unique approach and style, she lived her life with imagination, romance, elegance, grace, and dignity--a real lady. That spirit and joy in living will always be with everyone who knew her and whose lives she touched, which was many. She will be profoundly and forever missed, and never, ever forgotten.