Died peacefully on January 27 th after a long and fulfilling life, grandmother of Hillary and Taylor Gillmore and Ivan Jr., Katherine, and Anton.

Born on February 12, 1937, as “Valentina” in Cherkassy Ukraine, the second daughter of Tamara and Oleksander Zabazhan, Valerie’s official Canadian documentation stated she was born on February 18 th , 1938.

Soon after war came with its violence and cruelty; the family barely survived and after the war Valerie found herself in a Ukrainian DPW camp just outside Ingolstadt Germany. There “Walentyna” attended a German Catholic school with her sister Nina and their mother Tamara worked as a nurse and teacher.

After almost six years in Bavaria, sailing on the USNS “General Taylor”, the three immigrants landed in New York harbour on the 23 rd of August 1950. They had been sponsored by a family in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Tamara begun work at the local chicken-processing plant and “Walentina” soon became “Wally” after enrolling at Roosevelt Junior High School. She would graduate however, from Port Credit High School (from which three of her five grandchildren would also graduate) after further emigrating to Canada and becoming a citizen on February 16, 1956.

In Canada “Wally” blossomed into Valerie, becoming a semi-professional singer performing with the Ukrainian diaspora across southern Ontario. She worked as a legal secretary and began courting a debonair Russian Greek émigré Antony (Anton) Titishov. After the first wedding date was postponed by a year, due to the tragic death of her sister, the couple would be married on July 21, 1962, at the St. Demetrius Greek Orthodox Church in Long Branch. Their honeymoon to Cape Cod would soon become a family summer-vacation pilgrimage after daughter Nina was born in 1965 and son Ivan in 1968.

After raising Nina and Ivan, Valerie returned to the workforce moving from sales to human resources, and roughly at the same time her children were graduating from university, she also graduated, earning a degree in English Literature from York University. At this time, she returned to singing and started to travel extensively with her best friend forever Lydia, and after the death of Antony in 2012, she would visit Ingolstadt returning to the very room in which they had lived with several other displaced families, and from which the long journey to Canada had begun.