Obituary of Patricia Rathbun

Patricia Rathbun of Cambridge died Sunday night, October 13, 2013, exactly two months after her 70th birthday. Born in Minneapolis on August 13th, 1943, she was the second child of Jean and George Rathbun. Her mother had always wanted her to be called Patsy, but unfortunately when it was time to start school there were three Patricias in her class, and she got "stuck" with the nickname "Pat", much to her mother's dismay. After graduating from West High School in 1961, she went to the University of Minnesota, where she double-majored in German and Russian languages. She married Roger Messenger in 1966 and moved to Boca Raton, FL where she spent the next 37 years raising two children and working as a caterer, wedding cake artist, and administrator of Life Long Learning Society at Florida Atlantic University. In 1998 Pat and Roger divorced and by 2003, after retiring, she decided to move back to Minnesota to be near four out of six of her grandchildren and her siblings, John (Angela) Rathbun and Georgia Nesteby and her sister's children, Richard, Robert, and Randal Nesteby and extended family. She was preceded in death by Georgia and her parents and is survived by her brother and sister-in-law, son, Todd (Maria) Messenger of Centennial, Colorado and his children, Zoe and Niko, and daughter, Natasha (David) Lee of Harris, MN and her children Serena, Danny, Nellie, and Celeste. An adventurer at heart, she loved to travel the world, from Ireland and England, to the USSR, Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, and our beautiful US. She loved to go to plays and try ethnic foods of any sort. She may have read almost every book at the library. She was a gourmet cook, which in the last years of her life, mostly was used in special tea parties for her grandchildren and holidays with her family. And of course, she was known for making the best chocolate cake in the entire world.