September 23, 2002
Spartanburg, South Carolina
The phone rang in the late afternoon, just as a soft gray light pressed against the windows of my apartment. I had been home from college classes for a few hours, the day already winding down. My one-bedroom place was quiet, tidy, familiar. I walked over to the phone, knowing even before I picked it up that the call would bring some kind of weight.
It was my mom. Aunt Mary had passed.
She had been in hospice for a few days, so it wasn’t unexpected. But knowing something doesn’t soften the sting when it finally arrives. I asked how she and my dad were holding up. She said they were okay. Funeral details would come soon. We said “I love you” and hung up.
I spent the rest of the evening in silence, sitting on the couch with my cat curled in my lap. The air felt still. I didn’t cry. But I felt the ache of something closing—a generation, a chapter, a voice I’d never hear again. Aunt Mary was the last living connection to our family’s immigrant roots. Our bloodline ran back to Croatia, a history whispered about more than told. After the First World War, the region our family called home had been battered by violence and poverty. They came to America to rebuild. With Aunt Mary gone, that living bridge to the past was gone too.
She wasn’t technically my aunt—she was my dad’s second cousin—but to us, she was always Aunt Mary. That name carried weight. For as long as I could remember, she was the sweet old woman who lived on the farm with her chickens, ducks, and notoriously aggressive geese.
In my high school years, she started needing a walker to get around. That’s when my dad began making the three-hour drive from Ohio to Four States, West Virginia once or twice a month to check on her. My aunts and uncles pitched in too. Then in early 2002, she developed a stubborn cut on her leg that wouldn’t heal. My Aunt Paula took her to the doctor, and the diagnosis came back—cancer. She was hospitalized that summer, placed in hospice that fall. She died in her own bed on the farm, surrounded by my dad and his siblings.
Aunt Mary was quiet—mousy, even—but she had a way of commanding a room without needing to raise her voice. She didn’t talk much about herself, but when she did, you listened. And she took no nonsense from anyone, especially not her geese. Once, a goose charged at her, honking and flapping, and from her walker she grabbed it by the neck and flicked its beak. The bird retreated, wounded pride and all, squawking back from the safety of the flock. Another time, I got her laughing uncontrollably when I imitated a rooster’s strut and crow. The real rooster didn’t appreciate the competition—he stalked the yard like he was looking for a fight.
There was so much more to her than I realized while she was alive.
After her death, I began to piece together her story from the letters, drawings, and mementos she left behind. She had lived an entire life long before I was ever born. Her mother had married a West Virginian man, and in 1928 they bought the farm. Aunt Mary grew up there, then left home during World War II to work in the Baltimore shipyards building destroyers—one of many women who kept the war effort going on the home front. A real Rosie the Riveter.
But Baltimore wasn’t easy. Aunt Mary was a devout Catholic, and the factory life was loud, gritty, and unfiltered. She struggled to fit in among the rougher, more boisterous women. Still, she found a way forward. A friend back home, Agnes Parish—later known by her pen name, Agnes Smith—encouraged her to find community. Aunt Mary took up baseball. Not the professional kind, but a spirited local women’s league. The two women corresponded for years. Agnes wrote a novel and sent chapters for Aunt Mary to read and comment on. That book, An Edge of the Forest, tells the story of a black lamb adopted by a black panther, a fable soaked in meaning and loss. In the dedication, it reads: “For saints, for philosophers and artists; and for M.” That “M” was Aunt Mary.
She moved back home after the war and took a job at Westinghouse while helping on the farm. Through Agnes, she entered a quiet renaissance of art, history, and literature. I remember packing up her books after the funeral—titles on philosophy, the saints, the ancient world. And then I found her sketchbook. There were birds, flowers, animals. And one self-portrait—detailed, confident. Her progress as an artist was right there in pencil and ink, page by page.
After her stepfather died in the 1950s, she took care of her mother and handicapped brother until both passed in the late ’80s. She lived the rest of her life alone on the farm. But even in solitude, she remained sharp. Aunt Mary always knew who in town had moved or died, and she had stories for nearly every neighbor.
I drove up for the funeral. The priest who had come to her house for years to give her communion led the service. It was a small, simple Mass. Peaceful. Afterward, we ate at her favorite spot—The US Steak Buffet. Sometimes we’d take her there when we visited. She always looked forward to it, like it was the fanciest place in town.
I stayed a few days to help pack up the house. It felt like I was wrapping up someone’s life one box at a time.
A few days after I got back to South Carolina, the phone rang again. It was my mom.
They’d read Aunt Mary’s will.
She left the farm to my dad.
What to do with a 117 acre farm?