Find A Grave
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/183671076
Sometimes a person knows many things and tries not to know them holds many things and tries not to feel them. What do you do with such a big consciousness? Pass it on. And that’s what she did.
Virginia fed the hungry. She donated to the poor. She was devoted to service activities in so many ways, for most of her life. She was an amazing story teller.
She was amazingly strong and surprisingly healthy, considering that she went for a 20 year stretch from 45-65 barely ever going to a doctor, while avoiding most common health recommendations. But, she never smoked or drank and that must have given her a lot of leeway. She seemed to live on pure Irish willpower. And yes, at times she had an Irish/Italian temper (take your pick), like the fire that fueled her.
She loved her sister Claire and her husband Jim, her sister in-law Nan and her husband Jim and her brother Len and his wife Marilyn, loved them all dearly and always spoke of them with glowing affection. She placed a high priority on family and loved spending time with her nieces and nephews, often getting us all together at the shore, in Vermont for skiing, on holidays, and other times. She got to see her grandchildren Stuart, Cara Beth, Eddie and Ryan frequently and enjoyed their presence at the Jersey shore and elsewhere. Virginia even got to meet her newest granddaughter Shany at 6 months when Debbie made it happen.
She hosted so many great Thanksgivings and other family gatherings with Cullens, Motronis, and Giordanos and taught us the value of family this way.
Virginia was a walking dictionary, but she still taught me to look up every word I did not know in the massive Dictionary Brittanica that we kept at the top of the stairs next to the Encyclopedias. I remember Virginia having tremendous energy and will whenever she got focused on a task.
Mom was a writer. She wrote lots of poems, articles for local papers, newsletters for her charities, countless letters to friends and family, and even a book about Grandma Cullen’s life. She won a poetry prize in high school and her wonderful poem was featured in the yearbook.
She was the chairwoman of the Social Service Committee for charity at the Leonia Catholic Church. And I was recruited to help her.
Together, we carried bags of clothes and all sorts of donations like canned goods and toys. She ran that committee for several years in the mid 1980’s. We made special trips to a large homeless shelter in New York city on a regular basis.
Sometime around the year 1980, she organized an anti-nuclear rally in the large main park in Leonia. The rally featured impressive educational speakers, who spoke over a large P.A. system about nuclear proliferation and it drew a very large crowd of a few hundred people on a bright sunny day. That day, while my mother was on stage speaking, one of my friends from school complained that the organizer of the rally must be a Russian Communist. At that particular moment, at the age of 10, I decided not to tell him that the organizer was my mom.
For many years she was chairwoman of a charity group called Community Chest, collecting donations for many different local town groups like the Volunteer Fire Department, by going door to door to neighbors’ houses. For at least a decade, she also ran a charity called FISH which drove elderly and disabled people to doctors’ appointments and helped them to grocery shop for essentials.
Throughout her life, there were always several families that she would help individually with clothing, money for food, etc. She was an incredibly generous person and we saw that constantly in countless ways. One time she went out of her way to mail a workman an extra $10 because she thought he undercharged.
In her own special way, she let me know God exists. And her mother, Grandma Rose Cullen, was 100% clear about this, especially in her later years. Virginia honestly grappled with the teachings of Christianity and sought to put them into action in her own life.
Unexpectedly, that has been the greatest gift in my life. To doubt, then search, and finally touch the edge of this often overwhelming concept of what God is such a personal and amazing experience.
What Virginia Cullen Lombardi showed me was that God is worth looking for.
She lived at a depth and experienced an inner intensity that few people dare to touch. She wrestled with the great questions of Life and human existence.
In her career she was trained as a registered nurse and worked many years in that profession in many challenging hospital settings, as well as helping her husband Angelo to start and run his dental practice when they were first married. She nursed him through almost a year of traction when he severely injured his back in the while serving on a military base in Morocco during the Korean war.
At another point in her early 20's Virginia was called upon to nurse her sister Claire back from a near fatal illness. Staying up through several sleepness nights to nurse her sister back to health brought Virginia to collapse from exhaustion herself after the ordeal.
She devoted herself to her 4 children, and to so many others. Being a nurse in her generation was like the non religious version of being a nun–it required tremendous service and selflessness.
LINKS
Memories
Gallery
Guestbook (1)