Kathleen Tarrant Kirby passes peacefully at 97

Kathleen Tarrant Kirby, who like tens of millions of Americans was a child of early 20th century immigrants assimilating into the American dream, peacefully died on Saturday in Sun City Center, Florida. She was 97.

She had been taken to intensive care after respiratory failure and then to a hospice center earlier in the week. There she unexpectedly awoke and spent the rest of the day bantering with the hospice staff and telling her children who had gathered from across the country, "We love you," using the royal we, because she was, indeed, the queen. Her last words were, "I'm tired". She fell asleep and passed away two days later.

In a family memoir, Kathleen describes growing up in Worcester, Mass., in a struggling, working-class home during The Great Depression. She remembers the "kitchen rackets" the Irish community organized to welcome newcomers from the Emerald Isle. "The relatives of the newcomer invited all their friends. One room was stripped of its furniture and a fiddler and accordion player played fast Irish jigs, which some of the grownups, but most of the children danced to, while in the kitchen, women prepared mounds of ham sandwiches, cakes, Irish bread and coffee."

Kathleen was especially close to her father, Thomas O'Brien, who played the fiddle and sang at the rackets. She was devastated when he died in a work accident when she was 16. That also meant Kathleen had to forego a college scholarship and her goal to become an Army nurse and instead go to work as an office clerk to help her mother care and provide for the younger siblings.

She met her husband of 51 years when she was 19 at a dance at Worcester's Holy Cross College, which James J. Tarrant, also a child of Irish immigrants, was attending on the "GI Bill" after serving as a medic in the Navy during World War Two. Two years later, after his graduation and their subsequent marriage in 1949, he took a job with Westinghouse at its headquarters in Pittsburgh in the new field of computer programming.

Kathleen recalled being filled with anxiety at moving away from her family to another state far away, an experience shared by so many newlyweds in the post-war American age of job mobility. She took a job in the "Steel City" with a commission charged with cleaning up pollution and driving Pittsburgh's "Renaissance." Her unflagging humor and social skills made her a favorite among the "Pa Pitt" commission's wealthy and staid members.

Kathleen would leave that job after the first of her six children were born, the young family returning to Massachusetts after her husband was transferred to Westinghouse's Springfield, Mass. plant. There Kathleen gave birth to three more children within four years, keeping a teeming vegetable garden in the expansive yard around the white clapboard house bought for just $5,000. The enlarging family would return to Pittsburgh at the brink of the 1960s, moving to the mostly Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. She formed lifelong friendships with her Jewish neighbors, exemplifying to her children – now six of them after the birth of two daughters – the values of tolerance and love for those of different ethnicity and religion.

By this time, her family was living a classic mid-century, middle-class life: home ownership in a residential neighborhood, station wagons, parochial schools for the children, seashore vacations with their Massachusetts relatives. It was a testament to the rapid assimilation of immigrants and the widespread upward mobility for many in post-war America.

The family survived the 1960s with its share of internal drama and all six of Kathleen's children graduated from college. She and husband Jim would retire to the planned retirement community of Sun City Center, Fla., a popular option for members of the "Greatest Generation" many of whom had jobs that also uprooted them from where they grew up. Kathleen would be known as "the life of the party" in this last stop on their life's journey.

But she also endured painful losses at this point in her long life. Jim died in 2000, slumped in Kathleen's lap, after a massive stroke during a Friday night church dinner. Four years later, she married Jack Kirby, a Sun City resident from Wisconsin and converted Catholic, who died in 2014. Her youngest child and namesake, Kathleen Ann, of Orlando, Florida, died in 2017 at 54, throwing her mother into a deep depression. Her oldest son, James Joseph Tarrant III, of Silver Spring, MD., died after a long illness in early 2023 at the age of 73. Kathleen's innate optimism and resiliency helped her through the pain of these tragedies, attributes she carried to her deathbed.

In her later years, she would sometimes wistfully muse about going back to Worcester to live out the remainder of her life. She never followed through, preferring to hold onto it as a dream. But she will be going back to her native Massachusetts; her ashes to be buried next to her beloved husband, Jim, in his hometown of Haverhill.

Kathleen Dorothy Tarrant is survived by her four remaining children – William of Los Angeles, Margaret of Milwaukee, David of Austin, Texas, and Mary Susan of Charlotte, N.C. – 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A Funeral Mass will be conducted 10 am, January 17, 2025, at Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Sun City Center, Florida.