Barbara Hope Ahern

April 30, 1938 - June 21, 2025 April 30, 1938 - June 21, 2025. Barbara Hope Ahern (née Wilkening), beloved mother, grandmother and wife, passed away on June 21, 2025 in Nashville, TN at age 87. She was born April 30, 1938 in New York, NY, to Howard Wilkening (d. 1995) and Mary-Louise Wilkening (d. 1982), the first of four children. She spent most of her youth in the Glendale and Silverlake areas of Los Angeles, CA. She attended Marshall High School, and studied French and Spanish at UCLA and UC-Berkeley, and also spent a year at the Sorbonne in France. In her adult years, she and husband Norman Ahern (d. 2021) raised two children in the canyons of Los Angeles. She was an ESL teacher at several high schools in the Los Angeles area, and later a counselor at Venice High School. She suffered an AVM brain hemorrhage in 1990 that left her with permanent vertigo. She is remembered for her love of family and friends, her lifelong passion for traveling, and her ever-positive outlook on life, despite its occasional setbacks. She is survived by her children Erica Valerie (b. 1967) and Sean C. Ahern (b. 1969), and her two grandsons, Aidan R. Lamb (b. 2008) and Brett P. Ahern (b. 2013).