Catharine Phanavong was born on Oct. 18, 1980, in Seattle. Her mother, Sounthala (Inthirat) Phanavong, is a personal assistant to a doctor, and her father, Bo Phanavong, is a retired security guard. Both were Laotian refugees.
Ms. Phanavong and her family moved often. From Seattle they moved to Quincy, Wash., a small town in the central part of the state, and then to Stockton, Calif., in the Central Valley.
Ms. Phanavong dropped out of high school in Stockton and moved on her own to Minneapolis, where she later received her diploma through G.E.D. tests. She earned an associate degree in business marketing from a community college in Minnesota and attended San Francisco State University for a semester.

She met Mr. Marcum on Match.com while living in Minneapolis. Soon after they began dating, she told him that she wanted to return to California to live a little closer to her parents, her brother and a younger sister, Melinda, all of whom had by then settled in the Bay Area. Though he had known her for only six weeks, Mr. Marcum packed up and moved with her to Los Angeles.
“It was just one of those things where you know,” Mr. Marcum said. “I didn’t want to not be with her.”
The couple soon acquired an Apple Head chihuahua named Chula and built their life on the West Coast.
“She was so good at keeping in touch with family members,” her brother said. “She reaches out to them all the time on a monthly, if not weekly, basis, sending them a message. She even has a pen pal from third grade who she still keeps in touch with.”
In 2017, Ms. Phanavong took a job as an assistant to the chief executive of Kimo Sabe Mezcal, a spirits company in Pasadena, Calif.
Along with Mr. Marcum, her parents, her brother and her sister Melinda, Ms. Phanavong is survived by two other sisters, Julie and Jennie.
“The thing about Cathy is she could make any place home, but she loved being around her family,” Kal Phanavong said. “For her, home is wherever your family is.”
As posted in New York Times – Those We’ve Lost