Adeline J. Delaney

Adeline Jenny (Barbera) Delaney, devoted wife of Tom for over 50 years and beloved mother to James has departed and been set free from earthly life on May 16, 2025. Adeline was born on December 22, 1933 in New York, NY and grew up in Knickerbocker Village in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to an Italian Catholic family. Her mother Giovanna worked in a candy factory and was also a seamstress and doll painter. Adeline’s father Salvatore Barbera lived to be 100 and had several jobs, from working for the ‘Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad’ to cleaning fish at the Fulton Fish Market and delivering blocks of ice up tenement stairs. Adeline was extremely intelligent, getting straight A’s and scoring very high on the NY Regents exams. While obtaining her high school diploma from Bedford Park Academy, she also earned her Secretarial Course Certificate from the Drake Business School. Adeline had great organizational skills, and had a gift for and love of words and reading. She looked forward to quickly solving the difficult Saturday & Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles in ink. Adeline ran NY offices in the 1950s and 1960s as a secretary typing 120 words per minute, capturing meetings verbatim using Pitman shorthand dictation, and enjoyed taking lunch at the Automat. As a small child crawling on the floor, I would often be fascinated by the machine gun hammer of the keys striking the platen as mom would use her Royal typewriter on the kitchen table, with seldom a correction needed. Adeline was fluent in reading, speaking, and writing in Sicilian and liked communicating with and helping people with English, from her Sicilian parents in NY when she was little to our Chinese friends and neighbors at the house in NJ when she was older. Adeline took pride in keeping things neat, and although we had lived in an apartment complex, she would be meticulous in cleaning up the courtyard and planting tulips that bloomed each year. She would love to sit out on the porch on summer evenings to play Scrabble with neighbors, and although she could easily beat her opponents by a few hundred points, Adeline was polite and deliberately won by a small margin (but secretly kept score of what she could have made). Serenaded by summertime crickets, we kids would encourage our moms to play another game so we could stay out late and run around the apartment courtyard under our parents’ watchful eyes, catching lightning bugs and grasshoppers, playing with sparklers, and burning punks picked and dried from New Market Pond to help keep mosquitoes away. When I was little and stayed home sick from school, mom would always find time to play Monopoly with me while doing housework and not buy Boardwalk when given the chance, through which she taught me math, financial concepts, and simply how to make change. Adeline enjoyed being a loving mom and wife, keeping a clean and safe dwelling for her son and Tom. With easy listening music of the 1970s or the TV playing in the background, Adeline would make great meals, especially the Italian dishes like lasagna, but also made great stew, applesauce cake, and banana bread.

Adeline and Tom were long time members of Our Lady of Fatima Roman Catholic Church in Piscataway and liked to go on walks to the local library and senior center. Adeline enjoyed quiz shows, such as Jeopardy, ever since it aired in the 1960s, but she also was a fan of sitcoms like I Love Lucy, The Carol Burnett Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, All in the Family, and Cheers. When she couldn’t sleep, Adeline would be up at all hours and would voraciously read each classic novel and book I had brought home from high school in one sitting with retention of all details (which came in handy for me). Mom liked jigsaw puzzles and activities that used her ‘Mens et Manus’, i.e., her mind and hands. Adeline enjoyed making five beautiful wall-sized Shillcraft latch hook rugs that took several months each to complete, carefully adding one color coded yarn strand at a time, that adorn the house to this day. Mom was humble but proud of her son’s academic achievements and her ‘Lux et Veritas’, i.e., light and truth, were responsible for this, shining on those she met. Family was very important to Adeline and she and Tom took care of Grandma Jenny and Grandpa Sal when they lived with us in the apartment, then at the house we bought after grandma died. After Adeline became unable to express herself much later in life, she was happy inside until the end, smiling during activities, pointing and giggling when looking at baby pictures, and feeding herself. Adeline never had a mean word to say about anyone, and when caretakers would sometimes playfully ‘argue’ in jest, she would out of nowhere say ‘be nice’, surprising everyone. When two years earlier I broke down telling her Tom died, she instinctively comforted me by patting me on the head saying ‘yeah, that’s OK, that’s all right’. As Adeline’s vocabulary became limited later in life, she would say ‘I love you’ to everyone she encountered, since she probably knew inside that the language was leaving her. I know the last words mom heard were ‘I’m little Jimmy your son, I thank you for all you have done for me, and I love you'.

Adeline is survived by her son James, and Tom’s nieces Nancy Bueschen and Beverly DeSeno.

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