Ana Maria Illsen

July 5, 1950 – July 23, 2026

Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Friend & Author of "Perfectly Imperfect" & “My Adventures’

Ana Ferrer Illsen — beloved mother, grandmother, wife, sister, and amazing storyteller — entered Heaven’s glory as she passed away peacefully in her sleep on July 23, 2026, in the home she loved so much. She was 76 years old.

Ana was born on July 5, 1950, in Havana, Cuba, to José Manuel Ferrer and Olga Leguina Almeida, and granddaughter of José Emilio Dalmau and Dolores Almirall, and of Lorenzo Leguina and María Almeida. She was preceded in death by her beloved husband of 43 years, Alex Illsen, in 2024. Her first ten years in Havana — sunlit afternoons on roller skates, an American school she loved, a beloved nanny named Tata who never left her side — were, in her own words, a happy childhood. That chapter closed in 1960, when her family fled Cuba and settled in Madrid, Spain. The adjustment was hard: a darker apartment, no friends, and a longing for her home country of Cuba. Then, in April 1965, her father died suddenly at just 48 years old. Ana would later say that loss marked the true end of her childhood — but it was also the beginning of a lifelong resilience that would define her.

Madrid became Ana’s coming-of-age city. She arrived at San Patricio School in October 1961 and introduced herself to a girl — Maria, forever known after as Cocola or "Coke" — with the line "My name is Ana Ferrer, and I know the entire Mass in Latin." It was the start of a lifelong friendship, one of the two she treasured most, alongside her dear friend Isa; the three of them lived decades of adventures, heartbreaks, and inside jokes together. At the American School of Madrid, Ana found her footing, and many other great friends such as Sarita and Bettina, and her sense of humor — a wit that stayed sharp and irreverent for the rest of her life.

Music and dancing ran through Ana’s whole life like a soundtrack. As a teenager, she and her brother Jose and their friends danced through Madrid’s discotecas to the Top 40 hits of the sixties. She loved to recall the night Jose’s band invited her onstage to sing at a school dance. She kept dancing through every decade that followed — through her first marriage, and later with Alex, on dance floors from Madrid nightclubs to a memorable night in a club in Zermatt. She always had the radio on, and she said more than once that music was one of the truest threads running through her life, with a song tied to nearly every place and person she loved. To the end, she kept a soft spot for the golden oldies of the sixties and seventies, while still making the effort to keep up with the new hits, too.

Ana built a career as an executive assistant across a series of international companies — from a Madrid bank to the trading firm Philipp Brothers to, decades later, a Chicago legal publisher where she worked as the regional sales manager based in Florida. She was resourceful and unflappable, the kind of person who could talk her way into a better job, negotiate her own severance, and still make you laugh describing how she did it.

Ana’s first marriage in 1970, to William Maclean, produced her two eldest daughters, Veroushka and Vanessa. In 1981, she married Alex Illsen in Waukegan, Illinois, with her daughters — then 8 and 6 — standing as witnesses. Their daughter Veronica was born in 1986, completing what Ana called her "three Vs." Ana loved her daughters fiercely, and her smile beamed as she held their hands and watched them grow into beautiful women with their own families. Ana and Alex’s marriage spanned 43 years, until his passing in 2024. In the pages of her memoir, Perfectly Imperfect, Ana wrote about their life together with awe striking honesty: the early years of friction as two strong-willed people learned to bend toward each other, and the quiet grace that grew between them over four decades of Broadway season tickets, delicious restaurants, AMC movies, shared laughter, and steady companionship. She credited her personal growth and optimistic view of life due to her faith in God and Al-Anon — which she entered ten years into her marriage and never left. It taught her to set boundaries, release her grip on controlling outcomes, and love more freely. She cared for Alex devotedly through his final years, and she noted that the patience it required was nothing less than “forgiveness in action”. After he passed, Ana often said the miracle was that she remembered him not as he was at the end, but young, strong, and full of life — the man she fell for on the dance floors of Madrid.

That capacity for growth was, in many ways, Ana’s defining trait — and at the heart of it was her deep, hard-won faith. She often said that her relationship with God, and her relationship with herself, were the only two that would last her whole life, and she tended to both with real devotion. She came to believe that God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and she leaned on that belief through every hard season. She came to see her own imperfections not as something to hide but as something to be gentle with — she used to say she’d fired the critical voice in her head and hired a kinder one, the one that reminded her she was a precious, fallible, beloved child of God whose best was always good enough. That grace she extended to herself, she extended just as freely to everyone around her.

Ana believed her life’s purpose was to help others who wanted to help themselves, and she lived that out for decades through Al-Anon. She sponsored many women in recovery, volunteered for years on Al-Anon’s information line — answering calls from strangers in crisis and walking them toward hope and help — and showed up, meeting after meeting, for a fellowship that changed her life and, through her, changed countless others. In her later years, she found deep joy attending services and the wonderful musical events at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church with her family. Her love, her humor, and her hard-won wisdom touched more people than she ever fully knew: the family members and friends she brought together and kept together, the strangers on the other end of the phone line, the newcomers she guided gently toward their own recovery. She believed, always, that the best was yet to come — and she spent her life helping other people believe it too.

Above all, Ana was a mother and grandmother who adored her family with her whole heart. She raised her daughters — Veroushka, Vanessa, and Veronica — through moves across continents, financial uncertainty, and the ordinary chaos of childhood, and she watched them become women she was immensely proud of. She delighted in her grandchildren, Isabella, Valentina, and Sebastian, and in recent years found deep joy simply being present in their lives watching them grow, swimming in her pool with her, Dunkin Donut runs after school, and telling them stories . She loved the ocean, worldwide travel, a good book, a well-told story, and gathering the people she loved around a patio table.

In the last years of her life, Ana turned to writing, compiling decades of memories — funny, tender, unflinching — into Perfectly Imperfect, a memoir for her family that traced her journey from a little girl in Havana to a woman who found peace with her own contradictions. It is, in its way, the truest possible portrait of who she was: someone who never pretended to have it all figured out, who kept growing until the very end, and who left behind a family that loved her exactly as she was — perfectly imperfect.

Ana is survived by her daughters, Veroushka MacLean Volkert (Charles Volkert), Vanessa Maria Genet (David Genet), and Veronica Illsen Winninger (Andrew Winninger); her grandchildren, Isabella Nancy Volkert, Ana Valentina Volkert, and Sebastian Hunter Genet; her brother, Jose Emilio Ferrer; her nephew, Maximillian Jose Emilio Ferrer (Kaitlyn Cole), and nieces, Tatiana Giordano (Mickey Giordano) and Alexandra Michelle Ferrer; her sister-in-law, Susana MacLean, and her children, Natacha Falzoni and Douglas Goullet; and her dear friends Maria “Cocola” Drake and Isabel Murga along with countless others whose lives she touched with her humor, her honesty, and her hard-earned wisdom.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Al-Anon Family Groups, in honor of the program that changed Ana’s life forever. www.al-anon.org

The Service will be held at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church on Saturday August 1st, 2026

Family Greeting and Visitation from 2pm to 3:30pm and the Celebration of Life Service at 3:30pm

Address: 5555 N Federal Highway Fort Lauderdale, FL 33308