If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. ~Rupert Brooke

Kathleen Vera Barker Ficklin was born on Sept. 12, 1927 in Lincolnshire, England and died peacefully at home on March 21, 2026 in Gonzales, Louisiana. In her 98 years on earth, she was eyewitness to events that her descendants will read about in history class for generations to come. She came of age in England during World War 2, with its bombings, rations, and ever-present threat of invasion. As a young adult, she watched the coronation procession of her contemporary, Queen Elizabeth II, and served Queen and country as a district nurse. As a new wife to a United States Airman, she immigrated to his home and created a new life with him in a foreign land. As a young mother of three, she lost everything she owned and narrowly escaped with her and her family’s lives in one of the most powerful storms to ever make landfall in the United States, Hurricane Camille. She rebuilt her life once again, raising her children, working full-time, and with her busy hands always sewing or knitting something.

Historic events aside, Kathleen was, first and foremost, a nurse. Mother and baby health was her career and her calling; the cause she dedicated her entire life to. Having left home at 16 to help care for evacuated children during World War 2, she’d earned a diploma from the National Society of Children’s Nurseries by the time she was 18 years old. By 21 she was a State Registered Nurse, by 23 she’d been trained at the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing, and by 25 she’d passed the Central Midwives Board Exam and was working as a District Nurse-Midwife in Lincolnshire county. She remained in this role, riding the lanes of rural England on her motorcycle, delivering babies and caring for mothers and newborns until she married at age 29. After immigrating to Louisiana, Kathleen immediately began the process of passing the necessary equivalency exams to work as a nurse in the United States. She worked at various hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi and was most often found in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Labor and Delivery, or doing pre- and post-natal home health visits until she retired from the Women’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana at age 68.

In her later years and into retirement, Kathleen enjoyed period dancing and clogging, sewing gowns, dresses, and scrub shirts galore, knitting baby hats, booties, and sweaters, and traveling to England and Guernsey at least once a year to visit her sisters and escape the Louisiana summers. She was never happier than when someone placed an infant in her arms…especially if that baby was wearing a dress she smocked and booties she knitted. She never stopped drinking her English tea with milk and sugar, loved a fried shrimp po-boy, and had a sweet tooth for as much cake as you’d put in front of her. She could recite poems and songs she learned as a young girl and never failed to send a thank you note or a birthday card with messages written in her unique shorthand for the recipient to decipher. She loved to spend time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, taking them on beach vacations, filling her yard with reasons for them to “go play outside,” and generously providing them opportunities to attend camps, classes, school trips, and other extracurricular activities.

Kathleen was preceded in death by her parents, James William Barker and Gladys Vera (Holmes) Barker, her beloved sisters Margaret Fallaize and Jean O’Grady, and her husband Truvy Alvin Ficklin. She is survived by her youngest sister Brenda Mumby, her children Mary (late Robert) Guidry, Margaret (Mitch) McNabb, and Robert (Lori) Ficklin, her grandchildren Adam Guidry, Paige Silcox, Hannah Guidry (Spencer Johnson), Winston (Nicole) Guidry, Tracy (Buster) Bueche, Ben Dubroc (Emmeline Deville), Andrew (Dominique) Ficklin, Anthony Ficklin, and Truvie Ficklin, as well as twelve great-grandchildren and a host of grand-nieces and -nephews.

Kathleen Ficklin’s legacy will live on in her friends’ and family’s memories as well as in the countless knitted caps donated to Women’s Hospital for newborn babies, the smocked dresses, sweaters, bonnets and booties passed on from baby to baby in the family, the tote bags, kitchen towels, and scrub shirts made from fabric scraps that she simply couldn’t let go to waste, and all the other little gifts and tidbits she shared with the people she’s loved over the years. Once she’s served her final shift training doctors at Tulane/LSU medical school, she will be laid to rest with her husband and her father at Ficklin Cemetery in Galvez, Louisiana. A memorial will be held at Grace Life Fellowship in Baton Rouge on June 27, 2026.

Farewell to an icon of an era. May we never forget.

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