Sean J Couturier

Sean Joseph Couturier, age 57 of Largo, Florida passed away after a battle with colon cancer on January 8, 2020, also his birthday. Since birth at 1 pound 14 ounces, Sean has always been a fighter and he continued that approach during his year and a half battle with the disease.

He was born at St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. Blind in one eye due to complications of being born 3 months premature, he did not let that stop him from participating in anything boy. He loved to climb, jump, swim, get into mischief and in general never sat still. During his middle years at the Cathedral School of St. Jude’s he convinced his mother to allow him to play football with his limited vision and small size. He proved the naysayers wrong by being a fast running back and successful scorer on the field. After graduating from Seminole High School and college he began his career as an engineering technician with a medical device company. This job kept him very busy all over the world, with one project sending him to Japan for 6 months. This brought him back to the United States with a deeper appreciation for the Japanese culture.

Drawn to working with his hands, as was his father, he became a field service specialist with medical device companies. Always on the road, he would decompress from the demands of his profession with tinkering on his cars, his boat…anything with a motor. Tinkering was his passion. That is unless he was fishing….

An avid fisherman from his years of living in Key West….his happy place was to be on a boat in the Gulf with his friend Bruce and AC. As the owner of stone crab traps for years, he used this to create a killer fish dip he took pride in. His experience with fishing was greatly appreciated on a recent deep sea fishing excursion for his niece Brett’s wedding with many novice fishermen from the UK.

Due to his love of fishing, his culinary fish cooking skills needed to come up to speed. He quickly enlisted the help of Crystal and Bruce Corwin, chefs extraordinaire, who masterfully showed him the ropes of any cooking challenge he encountered regarding fish. They were always very inventive together and Sean loved to be the recipient of Crystal’s creative dishes. These times always provided him with great joy and respite during his hospital stays.

Sean’s good soul and kind heart were a result of a caring mother who would not take “No” for an answer to the blindness in Sean’s one eye. Spending decades looking for a cure to this blindness and taking him on numerous trips to Boston’s Children’s Hospital in hopes of providing Sean with 20/20 sight, sadly,a cure was not to be had. Sean adjusted and provided himself with a full life.

When both parents began to fail physically, his mom with colon cancer in 2005, his dad with colon cancer in 2007, Sean was the stand up son who became their caregivers and saw both of them through the darkest hours of their disease. Knowing now that colon cancer also took their son Sean’s life, there is a wonder about painful parallels. Sean would give the shirt off his back if he knew it would positively impact someone in pain. He was that type of human being…. not too far askew from his mom. Always putting others first, Frances Nora Coneys Couturier set a wonderful role model. She was always very proud of her son and thankful and grateful for his hard-fought life.

During his later years, he spent many a celebration in Spring Lake, NJ, a Shore town with a beach vibe similar to his Florida roots. It was here that he taught two of his nieces to Shore fish and explored the Northeastern variety of crab trapping. He embraced the boardwalk culture and enjoyed this time with nieces and nephews.

A favorite prayer of Sean’s, even as a young boy was the Serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. The maturity to understand the depth of this prayer at such a young age speaks volumes to an intricate understanding of human nature.

Sean is survived by two sisters, Gail Couturier Walztoni (Mark) and Collette Foley (Mike), three nieces Elizabeth Walztoni, Brett Foley Sharland, Shannon Foley and two nephews Connor and Dylan Foley.