Patricia Mattina

March 4, 2024 - July 24, 2009

Pat was born March 4 in Buffalo, New York, in a year she wished forever to keep secret. After her father’s death, her mother raised Pat and her three siblings and Pat was very devoted to her mother and family. After graduating from college, Pat moved to southern California with her mother and brother Frank. Pat taught school in Pasadena to special needs children. From there she went into DoDDS where she taught two years in Germany, two in Italy, and twenty nine years in Yokosuka, Japan, much of the time as a reading teacher. After retirement she moved back to Kelseyville, California to be near her brother’s family, making many trips back east to Buffalo to visit her sister and other relatives.

Pat was an accomplished harpist, a dedicated teacher, and a loving, devoted friend. She spent long hours preparing and working with her students and never gave up on any one of them. She was the first one there to help anyone in a crisis and was always a sympathetic friend. Once you were her friend you were always her friend. She kept in contact with all her friends and is the godmother to many of their children. She had a great curiosity and interest in the world and enjoyed traveling and adapting foreign customs into her life. She never carried a camera but liked to blink her eyes and click a scene into her memory.

In retirement, her church and her family were an important part of her life along with her DoDDS friends. In the past few years she was plagued by more and more serious health problems. She passed away July 25, 2009, in St. Helena Hospital. How fortunate we were to have had such a dear friend in our lives.