The life of Rachel Edith Hamlin can't be summed up in a traditional obituary. She was so much more than where she was born, where she grew up, what she did, and who she is survived by. Although all of those events and people shaped her into the person that she became: someone who loved unconditionally, someone to whom family was the most important thing in life, and someone who got great joy from making people laugh with her witty sense of humor.

Rachel was born into an Italian-American family to Primiano and Mary DeMetri Pezzolanella on November 9, 1942 in Utica, New York. She grew up a city girl and an only child for the first 14 years of her life, up until her brother Michael Pezzolanella was born. She may have spent most of her childhood without siblings, but being part of an Italian family, she had plenty of cousins and other extended family to play with, like her cousin Matthew Sica, who she was particularly close to. He loved her so much that he used to let her dunk her buttery toast into his coffee (her not being a coffee drinker), leaving behind an undrinkable crumby, greasy mess. She was also excited to become a young Godmother at 18 to her cousin Angela’s son Carmen. Family was very important to her.

She went to Mount Carmel grade school and graduated from Utica Catholic Academy High School, where she was a National Honor Society student. She worked as a legal secretary and spent two years at Cortland State College. In the early 1960's when she went to school, there weren't a lot of career choices open to women. She was smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything else that she wanted to be. But she left school when she met the love of her life, Theodore (Ted) Hamlin, to pursue what she felt to be the most important career - being a wife and mother.

Family

Rachel and Ted met at a party in 1963. She had recently returned from her second year of college and Ted had just completed a tour of duty in the United States Army stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. Rachel was dancing when Ted first saw her across the room. Overwhelmed by her beauty, he worked up the liquid courage to ask her to dance. Just as he was approaching, however, another guy jumped in first and asked her to dance. Not to be deterred, Ted soon got another chance and they had their dance. They stayed together for the rest of the party, and she told him later how disappointed she was that the other guy asked her first.

After that they were inseparable. He would visit her every night after work at her parent’s home on Jay Street. Even a horrific snow storm couldn’t keep him away. He had a set of chains installed on his tires from the tire center where he worked at Sears just so he could make it to her house that night. The snow was so high he could hardly open the door of his car when he got there, but he was determined to see Rachel.

They dated a short while before Ted asked her to marry him in the driveway of his parent’s home, and he was overjoyed when she said yes. They were married on September 12, 1964 at Mount Carmel Church in Utica. While in their first small apartment, they were devastated by the loss of their first child, Elizabeth, to a miscarriage. But soon they moved to a large three bedroom flat on Lincoln Ave., where they had their first daughter, Mary, followed by their second daughter, Lisa. Ted was becoming more successful at work and soon they bought their first house on East Park Rd., where they had their third daughter, Lauren.

Rachel was a loving and giving mother. She always did everything with their girls, showing up for every school play and important event, from softball and soccer to Girl Scouts and even tap dancing.

After her girls were grown, Rachel channeled her loving energies into becoming the best grandmother to Ryan (Lisa’s son), Greig (Lauren’s son), and Katelynn (Lauren’s daughter). She continued to show up for every school play and important event. She was always there to support her family, like when Ryan was in the hospital when he was little and she was there every day to lend Lisa a hand. And when Katelynn was pregnant, she helped take care of her injured foot.

Some of Ryan’s favorite memories are of spending time with his grandmother and cousins going to lunch, shopping, swimming in grandma and grandpa’s pool and taking ski trips together. She would never ski herself but would be waiting with lunch and hot chocolate for all of the grandchildren when they returned from the slopes.

Rachel loved TV and movies. Some of Katelynn’s favorite memories are of spending time with her grandmother watching classic movies and the game show network.

And Greig has special memories of visiting his grandma and grandpa every Saturday and eating Delco cheesesteak subs and watching Cash Cab together. After grandpa went to bed, he and grandma would stay up together watching horror movies, everything from cheesy B movies like Chopping Mall or some of her favorites like Silver Bullet or Salem’s Lot. Greig credits his grandmother with influencing his love for movies at a very young age and has been binge watching movies since her passing as a way to cope with her loss and also as a way to honor her memory.

As the grandkids grew up, Katelynn married Tanner and they moved to Tennessee, and Rachel was so excited to welcome her first great grandchild, Brantley, followed in short order by her second, Blayne. Because they live far away, Rachel wasn’t able to see them as much as she would have liked, but Katelynn bought her grandma a digital picture frame and would frequently upload new pictures of the boys, and Rachel would sit in her recliner and get very excited to see the latest pictures pop up of her great grandchildren as they grew older.

Food

In an Italian household, food represents the soul of the family and cooking is the way of expressing love. Rachel loved to cook… and also to eat!

She had a weakness for chocolate and ice cream (especially butter pecan) and one time confessed to eating an entire gallon of ice cream in a single setting, one spoonful at a time. She would go to the refrigerator, eat a spoon, sit back down, get up, and go eat another spoon until the whole gallon was gone. She rationalized it by saying that the exercise of walking back and forth to the refrigerator counteracted the calories of the ice cream.

We all loved her Italian cooking, which she learned from her mother. Every holiday, she would make so many delicious things: pizza fritta, tomato pie, ravioli, lasagna. Her meatballs were legendary!

She always made dinner for her family when her daughters were growing up, even the one time that dinner was late because she got distracted playing space invaders (which she was really good at and used to kick everyone’s butts).

And being the queen of rationalization, when Katelynn was little she used to tell her that since we’re Italian, we have second stomachs that are separate from our normal ones that are just to make room for dessert. Katelynn remembers telling someone at school that she had two stomachs before she realized her grandma was just kidding, which she still thinks about every time she wants dessert after dinner.

Humor

And if it’s not clear by now, Rachel was a very funny person who used humor as a way to express her love for people and of life. She had a very mischievous and irreverent sense of humor and loved to ham it up and make us all laugh.

She was even happy to be the butt of jokes. Being very accident prone, she would often injure herself and laugh about it with us, like once when she fell over a big ice ball at the ski resort and another time when her kids were little, she lost control of Mary’s mini bike and flew down a hill into a corn field.

She also very much appreciated potty humor. She made jokes about her hemorrhoids. She made jokes about poop. And farts. And she was unapologetic about it. She didn’t give a crap! (Pun intended.) One time, when Lisa was in college, she was to be presented with an award. Rachel, Ted, and Ryan were in the audience. Before the ceremony, they had gone to dinner at Arigato's restaurant, which Rachel always said gave her intestinal distress. Needless to say, that night was no different and Lisa recalls looking out from the stage only to see her mother running down the aisle back to her seat just in time to see her accept the award.

She was also very silly. She liked writing notes to Katelynn with silly drawings. And making silly faces at Brantley and Blayne, copying every face they made. And she wore Sponge Bob Square Pants pajama bottoms.

One of Lauren’s favorite memories of her mother was when she gave her a family mom police badge. She would call Lauren every week, thanking her for not getting a speeding ticket. Lauren would always remind her, “Mom, I gave you that badge as a keepsake—it’s not a license to speed!” She always found a way to make her laugh, and those weekly calls became a cherished memory that she will carry with her forever.

A few of Mary’s favorite memories of her mother are from her wedding day. When she said “You know, I thought when you told us that we were supposed to fly kites that it would be stupid. But then I tried it and it was actually fun!” And then when Mary was feeding a cupcake to her wife Kim for one of their wedding photos, Rachel said, “What about me?!” So Mary proceeded to feed a cupcake to her own mother on her wedding day. (And wishes there were pictures of that now because it was classic Mom.)

Reflections

As they got older, Rachel and Ted enjoyed sitting side by side in their recliners in the living room of their home enjoying the simple pleasure of watching TV and movies together. And they’d both joke about how much longer it took for them to get out of their chairs, as their knees and joints got more painful with age. And every once in a while, Rachel would lean over and spontaneously tell Ted that she loved him.

Rachel’s recliner sits empty now, and Ted has to learn to carry on in this life without her. And there’s a bigger-than-Rachel-sized hole in all of our lives. But we also know that one day we’ll see her again in Heaven, where she’ll welcome us all with a big Italian feast and we’ll all sit down together and eat and joke and get to hug her again and tell her how much we missed her.

This obituary was written by her family.

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