Carolyn Simonds Wagenvoord passed away in Petaluma, California on September 10, 2019 at the age of 86. Her passing was met with great sorrow and shock as she was so full of life before suffering a stroke the week before.

Carolyn was born in Maitland, Florida and was the oldest of three sisters. She grew up on a citrus farm and graduated from Winter Park High School in 1950. She received her BA in music from Florida State University. A few years later, she married and had five children. After raising her children during a series of moves to Louisiana, Florida, California, Hawaii and then back to California, she returned to her music and was a beloved pianist and harpist for churches in southern California before moving to spend her final years in Petaluma, California.

She was a model of how to age with grace and renounced the idea that aging could happen to her. Her spirit of adventure, positive attitude and gratitude for small things were all sources of her fountain of youth. Her interests were wide-ranging and she loved healthy food and staying active. In fact, she took up karate and earned her black belt in her 60s!

Up to the end, she was exercising every day on a stationary bicycle while watching Jeopardy and the news, playing Chopin and Gershwin on her piano and spending time with friends and family. She loved reading all of her life and her room was populated with books on faith, literature, politics and history. She loved pithy sayings like “seven seconds a day on guilt”, “the only constant in life is change” and “this too shall pass.”

Since the age of eight, she displayed a lifelong talent for music and was a very accomplished pianist and played it with deftness and generosity, bringing people joy with the beauty of her music. Later in life, she taught herself harp and became accomplished enough to share her talents on this instrument as well and performed at churches, weddings and memorial services.

As a relatively new but devout Catholic, her faith and spirituality was of quiet importance to her and her patron saint was St. Hildegard, who was an artist, composer and healer who also wrote about natural history and medicine. Hildegard was so well respected that she advised bishops, popes and kings. She once said, “Like billowing clouds, like the incessant gurgle of the brook, the longing of the spirit can never be stilled.” Carolyn shared both Hildegard’s passion and talent for music as well as this longing, as she always wanted to grow, learn and improve.

Carolyn is survived by her two sisters, Patricia Cook and Brenda Edmunds, and her five childen, Alice Toland, Barry Wagenvoord, Michael Wagenvoord, Sam Wagenvoord and Helen Wagenvoord and her six grand-children, Matthew and Nicholas Toland, Jakkob and Claudia Wagenvoord, Isabelle Wagenvoord and Elias Leventhal.

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