Obituary
Lori Scappino

Lori Scappino was born on July 20, 1966 and died on July 12, 2025.

Lori and I made fun of ourselves for hanging up a world map because it felt childlike and silly to pin the places to which we traveled together. Silly or not, we had fun and kept it updated with frequent travel. The map is called “The Adventures of Lori & Randall” and it includes one of Lori’s favorite Jimmy Buffet quotes: “I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead.” These are not just words – Lori died while she was living. She did not wait until some undetermined future time to do the work, to love, to travel, to entertain, to cook, to garden, to sail, to create, to help, to learn, and to serve her community. I cannot say she did not fully live her life. I can say that she was in the middle of her life – and not at the end – when she died.
When we fed the dogs in the evening, we would make coffee and program the machine to start in the morning. She had her favorite color of mug for six of seven days; we had different mugs that we used on Sunday mornings. This was a comfortable habit and a small act of service that was one of the many ways that we told each other I love you. We would always make the point that the other person’s handiwork made for better coffee.

Taking care of people was how Lori showed her love – with tasty food often made with fresh produce from her garden, delicious beverages, abundant hospitality, and a warm and comfortable place. That place could be our home, a boat, a restaurant, a shop, a worksite, or faraway lodging. The actual place did not matter – Lori could make it work. Still-hungry guests or an empty glass horrified Lori – that was simply not acceptable. She thought that if four dishes would make a remarkable meal, eight dishes would make it twice as good.

Dr. Lori Scappino was a small-town veterinarian and she wanted to be a small-town vet. By getting to know her clients and patients and to see them, over time, for preventative care and when they were injured or sick, she offered a higher standard of care and a greater level of understanding and insight. The combination of her skills, perspective, experience, and empathy made her an outstanding veterinarian.

Lori was generous to a fault and had a life-long goal of teaching me how to not be cheap. Her word – I prefer frugal. She always wanted us to pick up the check. She was completely unmotivated by money but loved the access to experiences & travel that money could buy and loved the ability to help others with resources that she earned. The only luxury about which she became truly snobby was flying first class and access to sky clubs – which she paid for with miles generated by her business. Because I am frugal (cheap per Lori), I always worried about reverting to steerage when we no longer had miles to support the habit. The first time that we flew overnight in Delta One, from the US to Korea, we were like happy kids on Christmas morning, undoubtedly annoying the nearby seasoned travelers. We each got what we thought was an unusually large and lumpy pillow – and we tried to use it as a pillow. We were about 14 hours into the flight before we realized that it was a bag of pillows, blankets, and slippers for our use. We sheepishly opened the bags and only made that mistake once.

Lori was delightfully irreverent – one of the many things to love about her. She had a solid steel commitment to her responsibilities, principles, and her moral compass but paid little attention to “normal” standards. She was also boundlessly curious about and kind to any living thing, plant or animal. Nothing illustrates this combination better than the conservation program that she devised for us. Anytime that we drove together and we would see a turtle crossing the road, we had to stop, she would risk life and limb to get the turtle safely to the other side, and we would head down the road. To expand her turtle safety reach and impact to when I was driving alone, she set up the save a turtle, get a blow job incentive - the world’s most successful wildlife conservation program.

We both like to write and we planned to use a website to chronicle our work and travel after we sold our businesses. Years ago, we bought the domain beersnobwineslut.com for this purpose. We hoped to share our experiences living and cruising on a sailboat (the Great Loop, Caribbean, and Central America); gardening, cooking, building, and craft at home; craft brewery visits around the world; and living in a developing country for a year or two for international service work. The name of the website directly represents Lori’s perspective - light beer was less than pond water to Lori. Her notable collection of nearly fifty brewery tank tops represented our habit of finding new breweries in new locations. We would visit and Lori’s wonderful and infectious laugh would light up the place, we would sample their wares, and leave with a tank top.

This is an unfinished obituary for an unfinished life. Our partnership and travels together were cut short. No more pins in the map, just holes in the hearts of the people that love Lori and the people she loved.