Melissa Catanzaro

Melissa R. Catanzaro (nee Davis), age 52, of Wayne, passed Friday, January 7, 2022.

She was born in Hackensack, having lived in Belleville and Ringwood before moving to Hasbrouck Heights where she graduated from Hasbrouck Heights High School with the Class of 1988.

Melissa’s first job was managing an early morning newspaper route in Hasbrouck Heights. She would go on to work at Burger King and finally settled into a fifteen year career with Bell Atlantic in Clifton.  Bell Atlantic would change names to Verizon and transferred her Customer Service Representative job to Madison where she worked before resigning to raise her family in 2004.

One of Melissa’s co-workers asked her to drop a paycheck off to her house as she lived around the block.  The woman organized her son to be at the house when Melissa dropped off the check and that is how Melissa and her future husband Jay Catanzaro met. Their first date was to the Carvel Ice Cream shop on Route 17 in Hackensack.  They eventually fell in love and Jay proposed marriage only after asking Melissa’s mom for her daughter’s hand. They married on October 14, 1995 at the First Presbyterian Church in Wood-Ridge.  They had a reception at the San Carlo Restaurant in Lydhurst and honeymooned in Aruba.  They have had a loving and devoted marriage of twenty-six years that was blessed with two children Evan and Abigail.

Melissa will be lovingly remembered for her funny, caring way where she always put others needs before her own.  She loved the NY Giants, going down the Jersey Shore anywhere she could get her feet into the sand, and loved to read autobiographies and horror stories authors like Stephen King. She enjoyed her cats and loved going to visit her sister Dawn in Florida where they would relax all day and “party in the pool.”  Most of all she was the proud mom of Evan and Abigail.

Melissa was the loving wife to Jacques “Jay” Catanzaro; devoted mother of Evan Catanzaro of Wayne and Abigail Catanzaro also of Wayne; she was the dearly loved daughter of Ruth Davis, and step-dad Lenny Ortman of Hasbrouck Heights and the late husband Arthur Ebner Davis, III (d. 2002); she was also the cherished sister of Dawn Sanders and her husband James of Lake Mary, FL and Erica Leahy and her husband Chris of South Orange.

In lieu of flowers memorial donations to Eva's Village would be greatly appreciated.