Jody Rae Finnell

Jody Rae Finnell's default setting was joy. Her face lit up when she saw a guest coming up the porch stairs, or when she walked into the home of her son, Gino, or when she encountered her friends.

"I LOVE this!" she would say, with an enormous smile, and study someone’s new shirt or shoes, or something they’d planted in the garden, or fixed for a snack. And she found so much to love. 

She loved her grandsons, Enzo, Luca, and Teo. She loved her son, Gino, whose very birth was a welcome surprise to Jody and her husband, Tiziano Dalla Gasparina, after she'd been told that she would never have a viable pregnancy. She loved her family -- her brother, Ben; her sisters Connie and Clarissa, and her late mother, father and younger sister Bonnie. She loved her friends, and was fiercely loyal. 

"She always looked good," said Connie Finnell Siebert. "She had these long, elegant legs that made her look good in anything."

This was true, whether Jody was wearing her usual outfit -- a flannel shirt, a T-shirt and jeans or soft pants -- or if she decided to dress up, showing off those limber legs. 

She usually dressed down, preferring comfort to high fashion, because then she was ready to play with her grandsons, or do some work in her garden, or working with her mother-in-law, Bruna Dalla Gasparina, to assemble a painstaking lasagna recipe. Bruna Dalla Gasparina was a native Italian whose standards were exacting. If you held one of her handmade lasagna noodles in front of your eyes, you'd have an opaque view of whatever was in front of you.

She grew up  in Humboldt County, California, the oldest child of Ben Finnell and Johanna McCarty Finnell. She and her siblings – twins Bonnie and Connie, sister Clarissa and brother Ben – grew up on a farm, where the three oldest children joined 4H, and sold their beef cattle following the local 4H fair. Jody developed a strong work ethic that served throughout her life. The Finnells were friends with activist Cesar Chavez, and Jody used to babysit his children when there were meetings staged at a vineyard. As an adolescent, she worked in housekeeping, where she learned to flawlessly fold a fitted sheet as if it were flat. 

Shortly before the Finnells moved to Oregon, Jody enrolled at Marylhurst University, where she studied art and business. She met her future husband at a dance sponsored by Marylhurst University and the nearby Mt. Angel Seminary, where Tiz was a young seminarian.

It was love at first sight between Jody, with her ready smile, and Tiz, whose affable eccentricity and quicksilver mind made him a Renaissance man who could rototill his mother's garden near Southeast Hawthorne’s thriving business district, or renovate their Craftsman home in Southeast Portland. and  later, he built a two-story rental unit that stood behind their home on Southeast 43rd street. 

They dated throughout their college days. After they graduated. Tiz left the seminary to start a computer business, and Jody worked as one of Oregon's first female commodity traders at  the Geldermann Commodities, a job that required her to keep East Coast hours, starting her workdays by 6 a.m. After Rissa graduated from high school, she and Jody shared a house in Southeast Portland. 

Jody eventually left the commodities business to start her own company, Industrial Graphics, a printing business that handled mostly commercial jobs, making plates for equipment components. 

She wanted to have children, but doctors had warned that the odds of a viable pregnancy were stacked against her.

Then in November 1986, Tiz and Jody came down with a nasty flu. Tiz recuperated, but not Jody, who remained exhausted and nauseated. She finally went to see a physician, who did some tests.You're not sick, the doctor told her later. You're pregnant. You've got morning sickness.

She and Tiz were stunned and delighted, though Tiz had one worry. He told Jody that he loved her so much, he didn't know if he had enough love for a baby, too.

Turned out that he did. After Gino was born on July 11, 1987, love filled their home, along with hundreds of photographs that Tiz took of his family. Some were framed and hung on their living room wall. Some became part of a family photograph mosaic on a bulletin board near the staircase. The rest went into dozens of photo albums documenting family vacations and everyday life.

Meanwhile, their businesses thrived. Jody and Tiz bought an office building about a half-mile from their Southeast Portland home. They took the southern unit to share between Tiz's computer business and Jody's printing business, and rented the other spaces to Beads at Dusty Creek, TypeSpace, and Vibe By California, a marijuana dispensary. They invested in property at Rockaway, a beach town about 90 minutes west of Portland, and spent a lot of their spare time working on renovations, or sitting on the beach and dreaming about their future.

Jody loved working in the generous garden next to their home, and sometimes helped Tiz’s mother, Bruna, with the tomatoes Bruna raised in her garden a few miles away. Jody treated trips to Portland Nursery as if they were visits to Disneyland, exclaiming over flowers and vegetables, eyes lighting up when she found a new plant to love. 

But her thrifty sensibility meant she found most of her plants in the garden section at Fred Meyer’s. She would buy plants that were discounted by half, and nurse them with better soil, more water, and lots of attention.

“She had a knack of bringing them back to life in the most surprising places in her garden,” said her longtime friend and neighbor, Katie Bronson, whose daughter Jilli grew up alongside Gino.

“She loved to pick seed heads off flowers on our daily walks, and managed to have a lovely and peaceful garden, complete with the giant hammock that Tizzy made her as a surprise.”

The hammock had a wonderful bentwood stand in the shape of a half-moon, and Jody enjoyed reading or napping in the hammock. She and Tiz and their friends spent many afternoons and summer evenings in the garden, sharing drinks or a meal or a card game. Some of those meals were whimsical, like the time Jody and her friends bought six pints of ice cream from Cloud City, and had ice cream for dinner.

With Gino, the Dalla Gasparina family expanded beyond the Craftsman home, the businesses nearby, and their project at Rockaway. Tiz fixed the computers at the parochial school Gino attended. Jody printed T-shirts for school fundraisers. 

They were proud, if not surprised, when he decided to follow their lead and become the owner of a small business. At age 24, Gino founded Meridian Cacao Company, importing roasted cacao beans from throughout the world. As his parents grew older and downsized their businesses, Meridian Cacao took over the facility, and the sweet scent of chocolate filled the rooms where Tiz used to handle his computer business and Jody printed machine components.

Jody could be mercurial. She loved the wooden table that her father-in-law made for her, an expansive, long table that filled their dining room. When Tiz decided it would be a good idea to make an extension for the table, and cut it in half, she was furious. But she was forgiving, too, mostly; she never quite let Tiz know that she was still mad about that table. Her spats with friends and relatives resolved with hugs and kisses, and tender “I love you”s whispered into the former offender’s ear.

One of the rare times Jody dressed up was for the 2019 wedding of her son to Carly Corrado, a tall woman with a brilliant smile and an easy-going personality. Jody wore a gauzy gown and a broad smile, and spent most of the reception on her feet, dancing. By that point, Tiz was quite ill with cancer that had returned after a long period of remission. He lived to see his son married, but passed away a few months before Gino and Carly announced that they were expecting a baby in 2021.

It was the height of the COVID pandemic. When Carly went to the hospital to deliver their son, Enzo, only Gino was allowed in her room. Jody and some friends collected snacks for the new parents, and cheered from the parking lot outside the delivery ward.

Time went on, and the pandemic eased. Jody got used to babysitting Enzo and, two years later, his brother Luca. Her third grandchild, Teo, was born on May 29, and for Jody, holding him was magical.

But a few days later, she fell ill. Jody struggled with health issues. She had been diagnosed with giant cell arteritis, an inflammation of her arteries and veins that sharply curtailed her activities. On top of that, and congestive heart failure, she was hospitalized with pneumonia. She died in her sleep early on the morning of June 18.

Survivors include her son Gino and his wife, Carly; sisters Clarissa “Rissa” Finnell and Connie Siebert; brother Ben Finnell; grandsons Enzo, Luca and Teo. Her husband Tiziano, mother, father and sister Bonnie preceded her in death.

Services for Jody will take place on August 29th at 2pm at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.

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