Frieda Mae Blissett Goodwin

There were two things Frieda Mae Blissett Goodwin loved without condition or ceiling: the Lord she served and the family she was given. Everything else, every sacrifice, every room she walked into and refused to leave without being counted, flowed from those two commitments like water from a source.

She was born in Chicago on October 16, 1953, and from the beginning she understood something that takes most people a lifetime to learn: that how you do a thing is the thing. She gave everything she had. She expected the same of herself every single day. And the people who loved her are still measuring themselves against that standard.

In 1975, she walked into CNA and took a job in the mail room. She was twenty-one years old, the mother of a newborn daughter, and came with nothing but her own grit and a quiet ferocity that the people around her would spend decades underestimating. Over the next thirty-nine years she climbed, not by luck or proximity to the right people, but rung by rung, decision by decision, until she stood as a senior underwriting technician, teaching multiple Master's degree-holding professionals how to do the job she had built up to.

On July 16, 1983, she married Ron Goodwin, adding another chapter to a life she had already been building with intention and care.

Frieda was honest and direct in the way that people who have genuinely earned their ground tend to be: without apology, without performance, and with a precision that could stop a room. That precision was not new. As a young woman she had honed it at a sewing machine, learning the discipline of a craft that rewards exactness and punishes shortcuts. She was also, when the spirit moved her, deeply funny. She had a chuckle she kept for the small moments and a full, hard laugh for the ones that truly got her, and those who heard that laugh never quite forgot it. Her biggest laughs almost always came when she was having a little too much fun being herself. She was the kind of woman who, upon meeting her daughter's nervous young suitor for the very first time, looked him square in the eye and said: I heard you’re scared of me. You should be. Then turned around and walked away.

Her faith was central to her life. Frieda was an anointed worshipper and psalmist who prepared for praise the way a surgeon prepares for an operation: with total focus and clearing of everything that might compromise the work. Before she led worship, she stilled herself. She protected what she was about to offer. That offering found a home in many places: the Belles of Joy, The Chosen Ones, the J.E. Williams Memorial Choir at True Church House of Prayer, and the Apostolic Faith Church praise team and mass choir. In every ensemble, she brought the same thing she brought to everything else: her whole self, fully given. For decades, without interruption, she rose early and sat with her devotionals, faithful to the practice even in the seasons when the scripture felt opaque and far away. She kept reading anyway. She kept showing up anyway. That was the shape of her belief: not certainty, not ease, but a daily decision to return to the presence of God and remain there. She was, in the truest sense, souled out.

She wanted to be remembered as someone who loved the Lord and loved her family. Those who knew her will carry more than that. They will carry the laugh. They will carry the anointing that filled a room when she opened her mouth to sing. They will carry her unnerving attention to detail, her refusal to do anything halfway, and the particular way she had of making the people around her feel, without ever quite saying so, that they were worth showing up for.

She is survived by her daughter Quiana (Daniel), her sons Ryan (Jasmine), Ronald, and Randall, her grandson Andrew, her granddaughter Riley, sisters Doristein (Harold) and Eneazer, her aunt Hadie, her beloved goddaughter Latrice Jones, and a family and circle of friends still learning what the world is supposed to feel like without her in it.