Josefina “Josie/Iming” Ibeas King

Josefina Ibeas King — Josie/Iming, to everyone who loved her — was born on August 29, 1948, in Talisay, Camarines Norte, Philippines, to Lorenzo and Josefina Ibeas. She grew up alongside two brothers and three sisters in a devout Catholic household, in a home where faith was not something you talked about but something you did, every single day. It was the gift her parents gave her, and she carried it with her for the rest of her life — across an ocean, into a new country, and all the way home.

Hers was a love story that began early and by her own choosing. Josie and Francisco King met at Camarines Norte High School. In 1964, when she was crowned Miss Camarines Norte High School, the honor came with the right to choose her own escort — and she chose Francisco. She never stopped choosing him. They married in 1973, and together they built a life that would one day hold six children, seventeen grandchildren, and more love than any one house could reasonably contain.

Josie found her calling in nursing. She graduated from the Philippine Women’s University in 1970, ranking in the top ten of her class — a quiet point of pride she carried always. At the Provincial Hospital she served in surgical, emergency, maternity, and pediatric units, moving wherever she was needed. It was the beginning of a lifetime of caring for people at their most frightened and most fragile, and she was extraordinarily good at it.

In May 1983, Josie immigrated to the United States and stayed with her sister in Houston, Texas — arriving with courage, a nurse’s hands, and a willingness to begin again. She passed the postal exam and started what would become a long career with the United States Postal Service, working as a postal clerk while she waited for a nursing position to open. In the meantime she refused to set her calling down, nursing at Tomball Regional Hospital and Greater Heights Hospital. When the opportunity finally came, she took it, and she finished her career as an occupational health nurse for the USPS.

Over the years she built a life centered on family, faith, work, service, and community. Josie was known for her strong will and her devotion: praying the daily adoration, worshiping in church, and finding her deepest joy in the company of the people she loved. She delighted in filling her home with extended family, driving them out to NASA and Galveston and San Antonio, wanting them to see everything, wanting them to feel welcome. She loved watching her grandchildren play. She spoiled them shamelessly and on purpose — a gift for good grades, a gift for a song played well on an instrument, a gift for simply making a good choice — because she wanted every one of them to know that being good was noticed and being loved was never in question. She was proud, always and out loud, of her seventeen grandchildren.

She was a woman of enormous will and enormous tenderness, and those who knew her knew there was no separating the two.

Josie/Iming is survived by her beloved husband of 53 years, Francisco King; their children Kristin and her husband Michael, Harold and his wife Karen, Carolyn and her husband Francis, Agnes and her husband Sebastian, Cheryll, Kathryn and her husband Vincent; and their grandchildren Francis, Megan, Kevin, Joshua, Danielle, Angelo, Colin, Kaitlyn, Grace, Evangeline, Joseph, Victor, Benjamin, Fredrick, Abigail, Robert, and Nathan.

She leaves behind a family shaped in her image — faithful, hardworking, and fiercely devoted to one another. That was her life’s work, and it will outlast all of us. May she rest now in the peace of the God she knelt before every day of her life, and may her family be comforted by the love she spent a lifetime giving away.