Barbara Smith

Forty, in case you didn’t know.

Forty is how many jelly beans that can be crammed into the mouth of a teenaged girl, a discovery mankind still might be seeking today were if not for a blonde and green-eyed wild child named Barb Ryan and her buddies Karen Lloyd and Heather Douthit a half-century ago. And only 40, Barb could verify, because 41 gets lodged in your throat and up comes the whole gooey black-and-bluey mess.

Up with it, of course, came that laugh that would light up a lifetime, the Barb one that would start somewhere between a howl and a cackle and end up in full-body-shaking joy . . . until it fell silent last week. That’s when Barbara Ryan Smith passed away at age 65 due to complications from an eight-year bout with bronchiectasis.

She grew up one of six kids in an Irish Catholic family in Wilmington, DE, effervescent and ever-ready for adventure, fibbing to her parents at age 14 about where she was going for the weekend, hopping on a bus with Karen to Rehoboth Beach with no money and no place to stay because, well, why not? In no time, after graduating from John Dickinson High School, she built a vast client portfolio working for a Johnson Higgins insurance brokerage and created a start-up that designed benefits programs for companies, all while being chauffeur, chef and cheerleader for her three children, Joey, Vanessa and Michael.

Then came a decision that would define the second half of her life. She’d been taunted for being chubby as a child, and knew the psychological weight of that exceeded any numbers on a scale. She wanted to reach all the people carrying that burden, reassure them and lead them laughing through the mountains they might imagine standing between them and a healthy body. She became “Coach Barb” to legions of individual and corporate group clients, inspiring them to just do something, just move, even if it meant turning up the tunes and shaking their booty while doing the dishes or laundry.

Her secret? Meeting people where they were. Listen, I get it! I once sat down and ate an entire cake! And 40 jelly beans — sort of! If an abusive relationship or a topsy-turvy schedule was what stood in their way, Barb was the one convincing them to call the police or showing up at their door at the only time they could work out, for one client even at 3:30 a.m. 

She created Youtube videos, gave buoyant motivational speeches and wrote three wellness books — The Pizza and Ice Cream Diet, Find Your Balance In an Out of Balance World and Drive Thru Kitchen — never missing a beat in the soundtrack staccato of her chopping and dicing knife as she alchemized four random items in the fridge into a family dinner to swoon for. Deal with what you’re dealt was her credo. Make a way. Find a way. Laugh away.

After her marriage ended, a funny thing happened. She told her friend Trish Grant Tomsic that if she ever did find love again, it would be with a soulmate hailing from a big, fun-loving family that she could be a part of, not long before Brent Smith — brother of one of Barb’s old Dickinson High friends, Janine — saw a blonde beauty flash up on Janine’s Facebook page and said, “Whoa, who’s that?”

A month later, and damn the state-of-emergency blizzard that day, they both made it to Janine’s Super Bowl party and stayed up the entire night, literally, after which Brent followed Barb home in the morning, shoveled 2 1/2 feet of snow off her driveway and was rewarded with an omelet from heaven that, truth be told, sealed the deal 17 hours after they’d met.

What kept them up all night? No, not what you think. It was all the sentences they were already finishing for each other, all the touchstones they shared without knowing it due to their seven-year age difference: same big Irish-Catholic families, same church, same high school, same teachers, same sub-division — hell, Brent was even her family’s paper boy, they suddenly figured out, the one her father groused about because the &%#@! weekend News-Journal was always late. 

Barb’s dream box #1: check. As for the other, becoming part of a big, loving family . . . well, Brent was one of nine that could suddenly became 49 when the extended Smith family converged, and they just happened to have a Virginia Houseboat Hoedown coming up on — where else? — Smith Mountain Lake. Barb showed up in a custom-made “Smithworthy?” t-shirt, sparkled in the four houseboats’ deck-top dance-offs, song-offs and skit competitions, and bingo, check dream box #2.

The third and unexpected box was the acre of lawn and gardens awaiting her when she moved into Brent’s house in Huntersville, NC. Now she had a soulmate and a soilmate in Brent, and all that nurturing of hers — when her three kids weren’t visiting or stepchildren Brooke and Sierra or grandchildren T.J., Grace, Chloe and Finnegan weren’t around—always had somewhere to go. She’d be the first and loudest to laugh at what a beautiful mess her life could be, the lady looking for her reading glasses with two of them parked on her head, but in her backyard she’d be laid out on her stomach like a botanist with OCD, blade-by-blade focused and utterly immersed tweezing out imperfections, zany turned Zen.

Then Bronchiectasis showed up on a CT scan, a disease that damages airway walls, breeds bacteria and infections and leaves even wellness gurus short of breath just folding the laundry. It meant spending hours each day bent over a Nebulizer and curled up in exhaustion from coughing, somehow still laughing even when it hurt like hell to.

Some of her ashes will end up in her gardens, some with her children and some at the spot on nearby Lake Norman where she and Brent loved to anchor their boat, sip the latest craft beer hatched by her son Michael at his Huntersville microbrewery, Neoteric, and watch the sunset. The place where 14 years ago Barb found a bobbing blue genie bottle — slyly dropped into the water by Brent — containing the lyrics to “their” song by Rascal Flatts, which she pulled out and read in amazement.

Others who broke my heart, they were like Northern stars

Pointing me on my way into your loving arms

This much I know is true

That God blessed the broken road

That led me straight to you

When she turned around, Brent was on his knee asking her to marry him, and she was shaking with that laugh even when she was crying.

Along with Brent, Barb is survived by children Joseph Mahaney (spouse Lisa), Vanessa Tessari (spouse Jim Cummings), Michael Tessari (spouse Alexandria), stepchildren Brooke and Sierra Smith, grandchildren Thomas (T.J.), Grace, Chloe and Finnegan, sister Susan Clemons and brothers Mark and Mike Ryan (spouse also named Barb Ryan), and numerous nieces and nephews, along with dog Brewski and cats Sneakers and Moogley. She was pre-deceased by brothers Jeffrey and Charles “Chips” Ryan and parents Mary and Charles Ryan. 

A celebration of her life will occur on a date to be determined. In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to the UNC Center for Bronchiectasis Care Excellence Fund via the following link. Click on “Make a Gift,” scroll down and choose “Find More Fund Options” and enter “bronchiectasis” into the search box that opens. https://give.unc.edu/hfdonate?p=main&f=345872

A second donation option is Rotary Club, in which Barb was active: https://www.rotary.org/en/get-involved/ways-to-give