Elizabeth O’Connor Foglino, known as Libby, passed away on Oct. 10 after suffering a stroke during a weekend visit with childhood friends in Colorado. She was 60 years old and a 1984 graduate of Moorestown High School.
Libby leaves behind her husband, Paul, two daughters, Francesca and Lucia, and an extended network of family and friends.
Born in Willingboro, N.J., on Jan. 4, 1966, Libby was the daughter of Mortimer and Elizabeth “Betsy” Wright O’Connor. She grew up in a military family, the youngest of six kids, and lived in Kansas and Arizona before the family moved to Moorestown following the combat death
of her father, a lieutenant colonel and 1st Division battalion commander, in Vietnam in 1968.
Growing up on Valley View Terrace, Libby benefited from observing the life mistakes of her older siblings and emerged the wisest of the O’Connor sextet.
She was also inspired by the example of her mother, a small-town gal from the cow-pastures of rural New Jersey who became the first in her family to attend college. Betsy raised the family alone while going back to school to receive graduate degrees in library science, running the library at Mount Holly Hospital, playing tennis at the Moorestown Field Club and becoming active in the League of Women Voters.
Libby’s father, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, loomed mythically in her life but also spurred her deep interest in history and literature, impressing teachers who had endured the passage of siblings Sean, Brian, Michael, Siobhan and Brendan through their Moorestown classrooms.
Libby’s extraordinary gifts of compassion, inclusion and service drew lifelong friends and were apparent from a young age. She threw a house party on prom night for high school classmates without dates and spontaneously invited class loners out for movie nights.
Libby attended Barnard College in Manhattan where she met her future husband Paul, a Queens native and Columbia grad with a brilliant mathematical mind and a guitar case full of ironic ballads. They lived in pre-gentrified Brooklyn while she worked at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the early years of AIDS and Paul charted a path as a musician, a much-sought tutor, and later as a faculty member at the Brearley School in the Upper East Side.
Except for working for a year in a London bank and spending several semesters at Harvard Divinity School, Libby spent the rest of her life in New York City, the metropolis where her parents met on a blind date in Betsy’s adopted Greenwich Village.
Libby earned a graduate social work degree from NYU, where she later taught, and eventually opened a private therapy practice, developing a loyal caseload of clients drawn to her clinical expertise and earthy wisdom. After their marriage in 1998, Paul and Libby lived and raised their daughters near the Lower East Side clubs where Paul and his musical trickster friends often performed.
A voracious reader and sharer of books, Libby engaged friends and family members in detailed conversations about her latest obsessions, whether military history, anthropology, medieval French court thrillers or Harry Potter. She also developed a passion for the Arsenal Football Club and rooted last season for the Gunners’ first Premier League title in decades at the Fancy Free Pub near the family’s Fort Greene apartment in Brooklyn.
As those who loved her can attest, rarely a day went by without a question or comment from Libby appearing in text or email form about some item of mutual interest or a friendly follow- up from a trail that, with Libby, never grew cold.
“Among her multitudes,” wrote her husband Paul, “she was an adoring mother, an unrelenting friend, a devoted little sister, a gifted therapist, an unrepentant smoker, and an organ donor. I am bereft. Libby is the beginning and end of all of my suffering, my one and only love.”
