Every family has a diva. My aunt Big Mary was ours. No one is really clear on when it happened, but everyone would agree that it did. Big Mary carried her name well. With her big heart, big spirit, big life, she was our beacon. Her big family lived in a big house in a small town, where everyone knew her by name. Just Big Mary. Sure, she was a mother to seven sons and four daughters, and a wife to Big Tom, the radiologist at the local hospital. Yeah, she ministered to the unfortunate at church, and held huge gatherings in her back yard for the countless teams her kids played on, but none of it seemed like any big deal. Though it must have been challenging, keeping all those balls in the air, Big Mary wasn’t the type to make a lot of noise about it. She simply did it, all of it, all the time.
Until last fall, when she just couldn’t do it any more. Somehow she knew she was dying, even months before she did. Late that summer, she gathered her family anyway, as usual inviting whoever could make it to come spend time at her place, to visit, and stay as long as they liked. She cooked like always, and shrugged off her decline as though she were passing on some dessert at the buffet table. Her dying wasn’t part of her living is the thing. She knew she was close to her end, but in her mind, that didn’t have much to do with the visit, when there were kids to see, food to cook, stories to share.
Too few people seem to really live fully. At least as fully as Big Mary always did. Though I’m sure her last months were excruciating, she found the will to walk her young granddaughters through the local Walmart, slowly, for hours, just ‘for fun.’ It wasn’t the big things about Big Mary that made her life huge. It was the countless small things. A lifetime of random but significant impacts she made on countless lives, simply because of who she was, every single day she was here.
At her funeral, I know I felt priviledged to be among her family members. It was a weird kind of A - list, being someone genetically connected to such a giant spirit. She had no interest in any kind of clichéd procession down main street in some dark hearse. Instead, she ended up riding to her own funeral in the back of her beloved van, complete with Big Mary vanity plates, the back seats removed to accommodate her coffin. Her youngest son did the driving, and my mother, her sister, Donna, felt honored to be riding shotgun. I heard later that her coffin was kind of sliding, fishtailing even, as they made their way through town. No surprise there. Big Mary had pre arranged for cremation after her funeral mass. Ever the practical creature, she directed her family to deposit her ashes in jelly jars, which of course they did with predictable amusement and sorrow.
Few days pass when thoughts of her don’t come to mind. The first big extended family gathering after her passing occurred last spring here in Richmond. We had a post wedding BBQ at our house, using a recipe she’d given me. We shared a love of cooking, she’d taught me to make strawberry jam, and blueberry pie. Alone in my kitchen, cleaning up after everyone had gone, I was thinking of how Big Mary would have so enjoyed the get together. As I reached down into my dishwasher, to retreive the clean dishes, in order to reload, I saw something shining at the bottom. I looked closer, not believing it was a penny, but it was. No one could explain how a penny could have gotten there. I knew how, it was my penny from heaven. She’d been there after all.
