Donna Mae Anne Holmes, a resident of Alexandria since 1987, passed away on May 1st after a 15-month-long battle with brain cancer. She had beaten breast cancer in the 1990s.Born in San Francisco on Nov. 26, 1935 to Olivia Neumann and Norman Smith, a West Point Army officer, she spent her youth at various U.S. military bases with her parents and two brothers. After graduating from the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School in New Jersey she was hired to work at the United Nations, where she served on the U.S. Ambassador’s staff. She continued to serve for many high level diplomats throughout her career with the U.S. Foreign Service. In the course of her diplomatic service, she met a young State Department official and in 1959 was married to James L. Holmes, Jr. in her New Jersey hometown. Donna spent twenty of the next twenty-five years with her husband overseas, where two of her three children were born in Thailand and in Germany. While raising her children full-time, she endured three wars East Pakistan, Cyprus, and Israel, two evacuations, and one coup Libya. She taught English to local children at several of her family’s Embassy postings. She was active in various embassy theatrical troupes, and played the lead role in Annie Get Your Gun. She returned to civil service work in the late 1970s, serving at the Pentagon in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.After the sudden death of her husband in Brussels in 1985, she left the civil service and became a Foreign Service secretary, serving in Austria, Tunisia, and Israel, before retiring in 1997 in a ceremony presided over by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Thereafter she spent many years serving as a volunteer docent at the Smithsonian Institution Postal Museum, until her cancer diagnosis in 2013.She maintained an active and adventurous lifestyle, embarking on many cruise-ship tours and excursions around the world, including a safari in Kenya and a zip-line tour of the Costa Rican rain forest. She also took swimming and tap dancing classes at a local recreation center. She was an avid lover of the performing arts; she was a member of the Friends of the Kennedy Center as well as a patron of Arena Stage.Donna is survived by her three children, James L. Holmes III and Matthew J. Holmes, both of Lake Ridge, Virginia, and Christine M. Holmes of San Jose, California, and by her eight grandchildren: Veronica, Jonathan, Natalie, Molly, Caroline, Claire, Julianna, and James Holmes. A visitation will be held at Cunningham Turch Funeral Home, 811 Cameron St., Alexandria, VA 22314, on Wednesday May 14, 2014 from 7:00-9:00PM. Followed by a funeral Mass on Thursday, May 15, at 10:00AM, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 310 South Royal Street, Alexandria, VA, 22314. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to the INOVA Alexandria Hospital Cancer Center.