Claire Dorman was taken by cancer on January 29, 2012. Our beloved Mom, Sister, Aunt, Grand and Great-grand Mother and Friend filled her last months and moments with relaxed comfort and cheerful delight in her family and cherished friends.

Claire lived in the Riverside area for 66 years, after moving first to Banning with her family in 1946. She was born in 1927, in Nashua, New Hampshire, the oldest daughter of Albert and Rose Morissette.

Her varied work life began as a telephone operator in Nashua and continued on the front lines of banking until a prominent Riverside law firm recruited her to be its office manager. Her last career position was CEO of the CRC Federal Credit Union at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco for seventeen years.

Claire retired in 1990 to focus on her greatest love, collecting close friends, typically in the course of helping people and supporting causes and activities she valued, from volunteering as a literacy tutor, to serving on the Board of the Riverside Mental Health Association for seven years, to helping run a garden club, to collecting glass, and to organizing and running popular book clubs. The Cover Street Book Club is in its sixteenth year.

Claire was deeply fulfilled by helping women prosper and nurturing her life-long love of books. She had a true friend’s heart, as welcome as a warm hearth and profoundly empathic.

Claire’s life fulfilled her favorite saying — from the Spanish proverb, “Living Well is the Best Revenge,” which she took to mean that a life full of beauty, friendship, good conversation, music, flowers, reading, traveling, and spiritual reflection, is the greatest compensation for the fact that life is short.

In her later years Claire loved discovering the French culture of her ancestors. Her life was living joyfully. She embodied the essence of, “joie de vivre,” — in English, “the joy of living.”

We know that Claire’s loving presence will remain with us. When we look into the eyes of someone she loved, we will see it.Claire has joined her dear husband, Ernest, who passed away in 2003. She left three adoring children, David Hallock, of Bellevue, Washington; Suzanne Garton Calcagni, of Temecula; and Margaret Field Fischer, of Riverside. She also had nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Claire is also survived by two sisters, Sybil Wilkins, of La Jolla, and Marjorie Dugan, of Redding.

Visitation will be held from six to eight p.m., on Thursday, February 2, 2012, at Acheson & Graham Mortuary, 7944 Magnolia Avenue, Riverside, with a memorial service at ten a.m., Friday, February 3, 2012 at Acheson & Graham. Internment will immediately follow at Riverside National Cemetery, followed by a reception at Orange Terrace Community Center, 20010 Orange Terrace Parkway, Riverside.