Irene Virginia Nebel D’Angelo

Irene Virginia Nebel D’Angelo, formerly of Woodbridge, New Jersey and Annandale, Virginia, died at home with her family on December 27, 2017. She was 98.

Irene was born in Woodbridge in 1919, at the tail end of the influenza epidemic, which had swept through the household months before. She was the third child of Erwin and Katherine Brown Nebel. She spent a happy childhood on Grenville Street, a member of the “hill gang” through high school and a devout parishioner of St. James Catholic Church. Irene could tap dance with the best and often performed with travelling stage shows. Her life’s dream was to become a Radio City Rockette, but her Irish mother and aunts had other ideas. They encouraged her to become a nurse and so, in 1938, she graduated from St. Peter’s School of Nursing, after training in New Jersey and New York.

Following a stint as a private duty RN, Irene joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation as staff nurse. She worked for the FBI until 1948 when she married the man of her dreams, Louis C. D’Angelo, who charmed her heart one afternoon while playing “Claire de Lune” on her mother’s piano. Irene and Lou, a former CIA agent, traveled around the world, had three children and a long life together. She crossed the International Dateline in 1956 on her way to Japan in one of the first Pan Am clipper ships and braved the heat and a military coup in Laos in the early 1960’s, sowing kindness, goodwill and friendship wherever she made a home for her family.

From the mid-1960’s, for more than three decades, Irene lived in Annandale, Virginia, where she especially loved driving her old Mercedes Benz around the suburbs of D.C., before retiring with Lou to her house by the shore in Sunshine Harbor, New Jersey. She continued to be an accomplished knitter well into her 80’s and when her eyesight failed, an avid consumer of audio book mysteries. For the last decade of her life, and after Lou died in 2008, she lived with her daughter and son-in-law in Wilmington, Delaware. She is survived by her three children, Lois Torgerson (Bob), Sally Stroberg (Eric) and Francis D’Angelo; two grandchildren, Kevin Stroberg and Jenny Torgerson, her brother-in-law, Henry D’Angelo (Betty) and her sister-in-law, Anne Leavitt, and many nieces, nephews and grand relations who live from coast to coast. All will miss her cheerful laugh and sharp sense of humor. Hers was a life well lived.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Delaware Hospice, whose nurses, caregivers and volunteers ministered tender mercies when needed most.