Lorraine Clinton Lordi

1952 - 2024

Lorraine Clinton Lordi-a flinty child of the Tygart Valley River and vibrant mother, sister, writer, musician, wife and friend-was born on Jan 31, 1952 in Philadelphia, PA. She was the third of seven brilliant, free-spirited kids born to Dr. Thomas Haymond and Doris Anne Clinton, and the center of gravity for all her siblings. She grew up in Freeport, IL, and spent summers at her family's modest yet cherished house on the river (known as "camp") in Fairmont, WV. She graduated from Saint Mary's College in South Bend, IN with High Honors in English, where she studied Dante, Faulkner, and Nikki Giovanni, and paid her own way by waiting tables at the University Club on the campus of Notre Dame. There she met Lawrence (Larry) Lordi, whom she married in 1976. The couple spent 31 years in Londonderry, NH, where they raised their three children, Emily, Joe and Jeff.

During those years, while attending countless baseball and basketball games and dance competitions, she earned her Masters in Education, and became a life-changing writing instructor at Rivier College in Nashua, NH. She also worked for two decades as a weekly columnist at the Derry News, writing stories about happenings in the community, the world and her family (which are collected in the books Passing Showers and Passing Showers Too). In 2000, her breast cancer treatment became the subject of another book, Waiting, which she distributed to local waiting rooms to offer solace to other patients.

She was enormously gifted, yet took all her talents in stride. She played piano expertly, gardened so well as to make a neighborhood attraction of her fence at 21 Shasta Drive, and made friends easily-perhaps because she laughed and cried so freely, and was quick to share wisdom, gossip and compliments. She walked several miles a day until the end of her life, in part to manage the MS with which she was diagnosed in 2004. Once she had relocated to Asheville, NC, to be closer to her son Joe and his family, she taught herself a new instrument, the hammered dulcimer-so well that she played at church services, for weddings, and at Biltmore Estate events. She loved thunderstorms and embraced nature, hiking through Scotland with her sisters Bar and Annie; taking long walks around the Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, KY which she visited for silent retreats 28 times; and creating a sanctuary on her sun porch in Asheville, where she could watch birds at her feeders and greet the occasional bear "friend."

She called herself a "B+ kind of person," by which she meant that she wasn't professionally ambitious and couldn't be bothered to organize her dresser drawers or bake a cake. In practice, this meant she intuitively poured her energy into what really mattered, extending her kindness and talents in as many directions as possible. She worked as a hospice volunteer for twenty years, served at MANNA FoodBank in Asheville, and assisted the church in every community where she lived, most recently as a Eucharistic Minister at St Eugene's Catholic Church.

In addition to being a beloved mother to Emily, Joe and Jeffrey, she was "Nanni" to her six grandchildren Sam, Alex, Michael, Annalise, Stokely and Nelson, sister to Suzanne, Frank (Judge), Tom, Barbara, Marikaye and Annie, and "Auntie Lo" to numerous nephews and nieces. She was a fervent cheerleader, confidant and mentor to them, and to countless others whom she took into her big heart and treated like kin.

Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer in April 2023, she learned, the day before Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, that the cancer had spread to her brain. In the last weeks of her life, she received an overwhelming outpouring of love and affection, including incredible around-the-clock care from her three sisters Annie, Barbara, and Marikaye, to whom her immediate family is eternally grateful. She spent her last weeks at home with her family, smiling serenely, suggesting St. Paul's words: "I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith." She told her family she would've liked to do it all over again. Those who loved her would want the same. But her spirit stays with them.

A memorial mass will be celebrated at 2:30pm on Friday November 22, 2024 at Saint Eugene Catholic Church, 72 Culvern Street, Asheville, North Carolina.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in her memory to MANNA FoodBank of Asheville at https://donate.mannafoodbank.org/ - or via membership to the Cloud Appreciation Society.