Deanna Maria Pavone was born on April 24, 1938 at the family home in Highland Acres, in western New York. Deanna was the last of six girls born to her Italian immigrant parents, Joseph Pavone and Philomena Manzetti. Deanna was her baptismal name.

Deanna’s father worked at the steel plant in Buffalo, New York. When Deanna was nine years old, he purchased a grocery store to add to the family’s income and resources. She recalled helping her older sisters and mother in the store. She attended public school. In the 1940s students were given early release from school on Mondays to go to religious instruction at the Catholic school. Deanna began to experience an attraction to God.

In the summers her family brought her along to pick berries and beans at a nearby farm. As the youngest, she recalled that “sometimes I would only sit in the field and daydream in the warm sun and prayerful silence.” In those days she thought “it was fun getting up early and getting on a big truck with other people on our way to the farm.” She loved the outdoors and animals.

When she was twelve, Deanna began to learn the art of ceramics, which she continued throughout her high school and working years. In fact one of the reasons she considered entering Clyde was because she read that the sisters, besides praying, made ceramics. However, she later wrote that, when she entered in 1968, the ceramic shop was no longer in operation, which she found disappointing.

In high school, Deanna attended Immaculata Academy in Hamburg, New York where she was taught by the Franciscan Sisters of St. Joseph. Her contact with them and an earlier contact with the Daughters of St. Paul sparked her interest in becoming a nun. She didn’t share this interest with her family since they had told her in ninth grade that she was too young to think about a vocation. In high school she took business courses setting her on a path of employment in New York and later in California, where her family moved just after she completed high school.

“We drove across the country and moved to Santa Monica, California,” though she had to say good-bye to nieces and nephews as well as the only town and parish she had ever known. In the ten years she lived in California before entering the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, she worked at a variety of office jobs. Deanna had her own home and traveled to France and to Italy to visit aunts and cousins. In the early 1960s, Deanna joined the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. For three years she sent $3.00 every month to support a lay mission helper in Africa. She could not be a foreign missionary, yet she wanted to help.

The call of the Lord became clearer when Deanna purchased a book Guide to Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States. She was drawn to the Benedictines in Clyde because of prayer, adoration... and ceramics. Deanna entered in 1968 and made first vows as Sr. Deanna Maria on June 13, 1973, followed by final profession October 7, 1978. She brought with her the love of family. Those family values tied in very well to life in community.

In her almost fifty years as a Benedictine Sister of Perpetual Adoration, Sr. Deanna Maria lived in our communities in Tucson, St. Louis and Clyde, the latter since 1986. She ably performed many and varied tasks in the monasteries: kitchen, driving, correspondence department, altar bread making, sewing, and art.

But more than what she did was who she was. Sr. Deanna radiated warmth, empathy, and a simplicity born of love of God and others. She had a natural sense of humor about herself and others. Once, when a sister shared with Deanna that a doctor had told her to lose some weight, she said with her voice rising: “Sister, Sister, what if that had been me?” She wasn’t afraid to share her perplexities: “Sister, what did Sister so and so mean by that?” She most likely resolved life’s difficulties in the hours she spent in chapel in prayer in the afternoons and evenings. She once described prayer as, “Adoration to the Father through the Son, petition for personal reasons, of other people I know, and of some sad conditions of the world. It is also thanksgiving for all the blessing I have received.”

Sr. Deanna was serving as refectorian at Clyde until a few weeks before her death. When she received a diagnosis of metastasized thyroid cancer, surgery was not an option, and she chose to accept her illness as the final call to the Lord. In her final weeks of life, she was cared for at Our Lady of Rickenbach Health Care Center.

Sister Deanna Maria died peacefully on April 25, one day after her 78th birthday, with Sister Colleen Maura and Mother Marie Therese, OCD praying with her. She is survived by her five older sisters, Katherine, Jennie, Maria, Margherita and Dolores, nieces, nephews, cousins, and her monastic family. Her funeral liturgy and burial at our Mount Calvary Cemetery were on April 28, 2016.