Mary was everyone's nice aunt

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Aunt Mary wasn't my aunt. But that's what I called her. That's what most everyone who met her through her nephew, George, called her.

"This is my Aunt Mary," he'd say. And the name stuck, for it was a perfect fit for a woman who was like a favorite aunt - the one who always likes what you're wearing and praises your food and admires what you've done to your house and tells you you have nice children, even on days when they're not being so nice.

Aunt Mary was like that. Quick to see the silver lining, and always generous with a kind word.

She was small, not even 5 feet tall, and she walked with canes, I thought, because she was old - in her 70s when I met her. I never knew she was born with a disability. It seems remarkable that in all the years we sat together at parties, in dozens of meandering conversations, she never once mentioned that, and certainly never complained about it.

I could see over the last few years the way her body slowed her down. It was harder for her to get out of a chair and it took her longer to make her way across a room. And she had more and more difficulty with her hearing.

And yet she never complained. Sometimes, when she sank into a chair, she'd let out a sigh, but it was more in the line of taking a second to catch her breath. Then she'd turn and smile and say, "Me? I'm doing fine, thank you. Now sit down and tell me about you."

With Aunt Mary it was always, "Tell me about you."

I didn't know that when she was young she was a soloist at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. At every dinner and get-together, she would invariably ask about my daughter who sings. "What is she doing now? Is she still in New York? What kinds of songs is she singing?"

Any of these conversations could have led back to her. "I used to sing, too," she might have said so many times. But she was interested in learning about other people and seldom talked about herself.

I didn't know that she gave up a full scholarship to Regis College, either. Even her nephew doesn't know the whole story about this. Her mother had died, her father was gone, her siblings were young and Regis beckoned. But she went to work instead, supporting her family and attending and graduating from Burdette College in her spare time.

She turned to bookkeeping because she loved numbers the way she loved people, respecting and paying attention to them. Her nephew credits her with the success of his public relations firm. In 1984, when he started his company, she was working as an accountant for the National Check Protection Service in Quincy. He wanted her to quit her job and work for him full time. She kept her job and did his books nights and weekends, working seven days a week, until, in her 70s, she "retired" and cut back to six days.

Aunt Mary never considered herself a workaholic. She simply enjoyed keeping the books and making everything balance. She kept up that pace right into her 80s, balking when George insisted she take Saturdays off. She took pride in her work ethic and the fact that she never took a day off.

She worked until the day before she died. It's what she would have wanted. It's how she lived her life.

She never married or had children. Her obituary says she leaves behind a sister, a niece and a nephew.

But she leaves behind friends, too, and co-workers and so many people who will miss her. She lived a quiet life, doing quiet things: tending to family, keeping the books, listening to other people's stories.

Aunt Mary was a hard-working woman who made the world around her a better place.