Barbara was a warm, funny, deeply creative person, and she made the sun shine a bit brighter for the people who knew and loved her.

She danced for almost her entire life. She began with ballet and tap as a child, continued ballet throughout adulthood, and remained on pointe into her late sixties. When that became too hard on her feet, she found other ways to keep dancing, including hula and clogging. Movement, music, grace and expression were her life's blood, and she showed her commitment by dancing for nearly as many years as she was able to walk.

She was always making something. Quilling, pop-up work, block printing, sculpture - there was nearly always a project underway. Her basement was full of art supplies, plaster gauze, paper, ribbon, googly eyes of all sizes, pipe cleaners and ideas in a state of half completion. Every Christmas, she made elaborate handmade cards for family and friends, often spending far more time on them than anyone could reasonably expect, simply because she cared about making them lovely.

That instinct reached beyond art. Barbara cared about beauty in a very real way. She loved beautiful places, beautiful churches, beautiful objects, and the experience of seeing something extraordinary with her own eyes. She could be stubborn about it, and wonderfully so. If there was something worth seeing, she wanted to be there in person.

She also loved to travel, though she never mastered the art of travelling light. She was curious, adventurous and endlessly interested in the world. She loved churches, art and history, and always spoke of Florence as her favourite destination, but she is also remembered for washing elephants in Malaysia, hot air ballooning in the Blue Mountains and dancing in her rose-green to the Mangueira bateria.

Her Catholic faith was one of the deepest constants of her life. She rarely missed Sunday Mass and would attend even while travelling, whether or not she understood the language. In Damascus, when someone kindly handed her a hymnal, she laughed and admitted it wouldn't help much. She took daily walks and prayed the rosary as she went. Later in life, rather than making the American Thanksgiving dinner at home, she spent the day serving meals to people in need through her church.

She was also wonderfully sociable and always tried to make others feel at ease through her openness and kindness. She talked easily to strangers and could turn the smallest encounter into a conversation. When she first came to Britain while sheltering from Hurricane Irma, she cheerfully introduced herself at church as a refugee from the hurricane, to the polite bewilderment of the Hertfordshire parishioners. She had a gift for endearing herself, in spite of the occasional culture gap, wherever she was.

Holidays with Barbara were magic. Christmas meant weeks of preparation, including decorations, a mountain of presents, homemade cookies, lights, animatronics and the terrible electronic bells that somehow returned every year. She gave enormous energy to creating a sense of wonder. But on Christmas Day itself, lunch was make-your-own sandwich. She had no interest in spending the day in the kitchen when she could be with her family. She created the magic in advance so she could make memories with us.

She was goofy, quick to laugh and slow to anger. Some of our happiest memories are of her laughing so hard she could barely speak, usually after one of us (Kelly) had managed to get her unexpectedly soaked or stuck in an awkward social situation. At Iguazu Falls, after certain details about how wet she was about to become while partaking in the 'baptism' had not been fully disclosed, she laughed through the whole thing and declared, “I’m going to kill you,” to her slightly chagrined offspring. The threat was never especially convincing.

Above all, Barbara believed in the people she loved. She believed that her children were capable of almost anything, often before they believed it themselves. Her faith in them had a way of becoming part of their own confidence. Many ambitions that might otherwise have felt impossible became possible because Barbara had already decided that of course they could do them.

She was not a solemn person, and it would not feel right to remember her solemnly. She was someone who danced for as long as she could, made beautiful art, travelled with too much luggage, talked to strangers, prayed faithfully, made Christmas feel magical and laughed often.

Survived by her brother Richard and his wife Kathy, her daughter Kelly and her husband Imad, her son Kevin and his wife Mia and her grandson William, Barbara was absolutely, enormously loved.

And she always will be.