Carol Ann Wakefield died peacefully on the evening of August 31, 2026, at Intermountain Health St. George Regional Hospital, with her husband and five of her seven children at her side. She was 83.

She was born on Valentine's Day, 1943, in Mobile, Alabama, the second of Fred and Marion Davis's four daughters. She grew up mostly in Mobile, with several years in Chateauroux, France, where her father worked as a civilian employee at the Air Force base. After high school, while working as an X-ray technician and taking classes through the University of Alabama, she met a Naval aviation cadet in flight training across the bay in Pensacola named Anthony L. Wakefield. They fell in love quickly and completely and married on December 19, 1964.

They began their family at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, where sons Glenn and Todd were born. Daughter Sherry arrived a few years later, after Tony left the Navy and the family settled in Southern California. There they built a home, a career in the airline industry, and an orchard of 800 avocado trees. In 1979 they more than doubled their family, adopting three siblings - Paul, Matt, and Amy - and also taking in their adult older brother, Mark, as their own. In 1984 they moved the family to Summit County, Utah, where Carol spent the next thirty years before she and Tony moved to St. George in retirement.

Carol carried the grace of the Southern belle she was raised to be and the grit of the Western mountain woman she became. She never met a stranger. She would welcome anyone into her home as family, sometimes to the surprise and even the chagrin of her actual family – though every one of us has since come to wish we could be more like her in that regard. She was a mama bear in defense of her children, and if the moment called for it, she could tell someone exactly where to go - but so sweetly that they would look forward to the trip.

She and Tony were inseparable for nearly 62 years, as husband and wife and as best friends. Their travels took them to very nearly every continent ocean, much of it by ship. Through five years with COPD, the illness that ultimately took her home to her Maker, she was slow to complain and quick to name what she was grateful for.

If Carol lived by a single principle, it was that love conquers all. She met eight decades ·of whatever life sent her by throwing love at it - at the problem, and at everyone in the room while she worked on it. Her life is the argument for that principle.

She is survived by her husband, Tony; her sisters, Edna and Judy; her children, Mark (Elva), Glenn (Trista), Paul (Elizabeth), Todd (Paige), Matt, Sherry (Fred), and Amy; 17 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her parents, her sister Patty, and two grandchildren.