Barbara Irene Zappini

My mother, Barbara Zappini, died peacefully in her sleep the way we would probably all like to go early yesterday morning, October 20, 2016, at the nursing home in Clearwater, Florida, where she had been a cherished resident for the last three months. She is survived by me, David, the middle of her her three sons, my younger brother, Danny, his wife Sandra and two daughters, Kaley and Averie, our cousins, Barbara Ashlock Boyd and her younger brother Alan Ashlock. She was preceded in her passing by our older brother, Vinnie, who died in Vietnam, our Dad, Joseph Zappini, and her sisters, Mary Ashlock and Ruth West. She, along with the rest of us, save Dad, was an Orlando native, born and raised in a sleepy little central Florida town long before the rest of the world even knew it existed, graduated from Orlando High School (now Howard Junior High) in 1944, and in 1946 married the Army Air Corps soldier from South Philadelphia she had met and won many dance contests with three years earlier while he had been briefly stationed in Orlando on his way to the Pacific theater, and with whom she would spend the next 59 years, Dad. In the early 1960’s she went to work as a secretary in Orlando City Hall before transferring a few years later to the Orlando International Airport, where she often said she had the best job in the world as the Executive Assistant to the Director of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, until she retired in the early 1990’s. She was immediately liked by those who met her, soon loved by those who stuck around, and I can’t imagine anyone being more blessed in life with a kinder Mother who loved and was completely devoted to her family than my brothers and I. In her retirement she traveled the US, Canada, Europe, and other parts of the world with Dad, her sister Mary, and even me, read two complete newspapers a day while always having a book going, and since moving to Belleair Bluffs in the late 1990‘s, was a member of the First United Methodist Church of Clearwater, and rarely missed a RAY’S baseball game on TV. In my entire life I can’t remember seeing her get truly angry, except for that one dark day during the Eisenhower administration when Vinnie, Danny, and I did our level best to, unsuccessfully I’m happy to report, sabotage her meeting with a woman from some lady’s organization she was trying to join.

As I write this on October 21st, in four days she will be laid to rest between Vinnie and Dad at Woodlawn Cemetery, surrounded by the graves of everyone in our family born since 1885 who isn’t still breathing, before those of us who still are will drive away to negotiate the rest of our lives in a much emptier and far paler world with her no longer in it. A task that, speaking for myself, I hope I’m up to. So if you have a minute, wish us luck.