Claudia V. Williams

Remembering Mom

July 20, 1937 - September 15, 2026

Claudia Williams

Some people leave behind an obituary, Mom left behind a lifetime of stories, laughter, lessons, and memories that will live in all of us who knew and loved her.

Claudia Williams, known as “Baby Parker” when she was young, was the daughter of Ira and Mary Parker. She grew up alongside her siblings, Jessica, Pansy, Rudy (Buddy), and Glory in Alexandria Bay, NY.

In 1959, she married the love of her life, James Williams, in Watertown, New York. Together they built a family and a home filled with love, hard work, Christmas decorations, good Italian food, laughter, and plenty of Mom’s opinions about how things should be done.

Mom’s greatest joy was her family. She was Mom to Lisa (Jack), Gaetano (Julie), Vincent (Lenny), and Geno; grandmother to Alicia, Tyler, Ian, Samantha, McKenna, Maria, Halla, Steven, Precious, Matthew, Zander, and Forrest; and great-grandmother to Willa, Ellis, Freya, and Emin.

She also had special friends who became family, including Lou and Olivia, who held a very special place in her heart.

Mom loved children and had a special gift with them. She was affectionately known as the “baby whisperer.” Somehow, she just understood babies.

She took great pride in the home her husband built and worked hard to care for it. Her yard was always beautifully manicured, and during the cold Watertown winters, you could count on Mom tending to the wood stove.

She loved to read, do word searches, keep her daily journals, and play board games - and she was very competitive. Losing was not necessarily part of her plan.

She had a wonderful sense of humor and could laugh until she cried.

And then there were Mom’s little quirks - the things that made her uniquely Mom. She had a particular dislike for people who lacked “common sense.” She was fiercely independent and definitely liked things done her way. If someone washed the dishes and she wasn’t convinced they were clean enough, she might quietly wash them again. And nobody could pile and stack dishes to air-dry quite like Mom.

She made delicious homemade sauce and meatballs, and food was always made with love.

Mom was also a kid at heart. One of my favorite stories is that she met an Amish man on an Amtrak train and somehow ended up paying him to make her a pair of wooden stilts, just like the ones she played on as a child. That was Mom. She never completely lost the little girl inside her.

And Christmas… Every room inside Mom’s house - and even outside - was beautifully decorated for Christmas. She didn’t simply decorate for Christmas. She transformed her home into Christmas. It was one of the things that brought her so much joy.

Mom was funny, stubborn, generous, strong-willed, independent, and deeply loving. She could be a force of nature, but underneath that strong personality was a tremendous heart.

She was also deeply proud of her country and grateful for the freedom, opportunities, and community that shaped her life. Her love of America was part of the strong, independent spirit she carried with her every day.

For the last five years of her life, Mom lived with Lewy Body Dementia. That illness gradually took away so many of the things that made her independent and changed the person we knew in heartbreaking ways. But dementia does not get to tell Mom’s story.

We do:

We remember the young girl called Baby Parker. We remember the wife. The mother. The grandmother. The great-grandmother. The baby whisperer. The Christmas decorator. The journal keeper. The sauce and meatball maker. The fiercely independent woman who wanted things done just right. The proud American. The woman who could make us laugh until we cried.

And most of all, we remember Mom.

Her life was so much more than the final years of illness. She was here. She loved. She laughed. She raised a family. She made a home. She created memories. She lived with courage, pride, and an enduring love for her country. And she will always be part of ours.

We love you, Mom.

Your story doesn’t end here. It lives on in all of us.