Obituary of Jean Tobias Henley

Jean Henley was born September 16, 1932, in Pittsburgh, PA to Louis Tobiasz and Eliza Hanley Tobias, who never could agree on the spelling of their common surname. She graduated Carnegie Tech (later Carnegie-Mellon University), and married William Olin Henley. The marriage produced four children: Jim, Tom, Laura and Bob. After the couple divorced in 1970, Jean undertook the difficult and still-stigmatized task of rearing the children as a single parent. In a quest to provide for her brood, she moved the family from Western Pennsylvania to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC in 1976. She resumed her pre-marriage career as a legal secretary, retiring as personal assistant to the general counsel of IUE. After the death of her father, she became her mother's caregiver for the rest of Eliza's life, and continued to nurture her children and then grandchildren. She spent the last two years of her life at Inova Loudon's nursing home in Leesburg, which she loved and where she was loved in turn. She died late in the evening of February 4, 2013, at the age of 80. On her last day, all four of her children saw or spoke to her.