My Aunt Mary

The first time I watched The Sound of Music was at my Aunt Mary's home in Florida. We ate popcorn and freely talked any time we wanted to during the movie, which she said came on TV every Thanksgiving. We sang along with the songs. We loved Julie Andrews.


It was Thanksgiving weekend my first year away at University. I had been feeling kind of low and wondering what I was going to do for Thanksgiving and Christmas that year, when I got a call: "Karyn? It's your Aunt Mary. I want you to come here for Thanksgiving."


I tried to explain about the rules that prohibited me from leaving campus without express permission from my parents unless it was my parents who were taking me off campus; somehow she managed to get permission even though my parents were in India. She sent me a plane ticket and said she would be at the airport in Jacksonville, Florida, to meet me.


I had met her maybe twice or three times before in my life.


When she saw me she gave me a big hug and we whirled off together in her car - she wanted to show me one of her favourite places. It turned out to be a beach, and in the waning light we walked together and she asked me questions about my life. She didn't treat me as some odd curiosity who had recently stepped off the boat; she didn't patronize me; she didn't compare me to anyone else. I was just 18 but she made me feel like I was her equal and that my opinions and observations mattered to her. She listened intently and with a complete absence of judgmentalism that left its mark on me all these years later.


I remember shivering suddenly as a breeze hit me while we walked. She immediately took off her jacket and placed it around my shoulders. "It's getting colder," she mused. "Time to think about getting my fur coat out of storage."


I remember that I burst out laughing at the thought of needing a fur coat in Florida; and I remember that she looked at me very soberly and said words to this effect: "Honey, sometimes you feel a cold that has nothing to do with the temperature. At times like that it's nice to have something to wrap around yourself and make you feel warm all the way through."


It wasn't until several years later, when my Dad told me some more of the story of Mary, that those windswept words took on added significance to me. My brave, gallant aunt had done everything she could to raise her three children and to give them a good life through some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable. She worked hard and industriously at everything she set her mind to. And she was cheerful and thoughtful throughout.


My first US Thanksgiving weekend was wonderful - I was Cinderella to her fairy godmother. She sent me off with her daughter, my cousin, Penny to get me more practical dress shoes for winter than the high-heeled sandals I had worn because they were my only dress shoes at university. I still remember them: 3-1/2" black stiletto pumps with a strap over the arch part of my foot. Very sophisticated. I treasured them all through college.


But it was more than playing Cinderella. She was the first of my Canadian relatives to make an effort to know me and to open parts of herself up to me, showing how it was done.


She took me to her church on Sunday. It was an Episcopalian church and I remember feeling both relieved that I was in church on Sunday and terrified that someone from college would find out what kind of church I had attended and write me up for discipline! 


It was a beautiful, joyous service.


It was a wonderful weekend.


She also came to my wedding a few years later, along with her eldest daughter, Patty. They were the only relatives outside my immediate family who, along with my mother's Cousin Elizabeth, could make it - it turned out that my cousin was getting married that same day! My Aunt Mary chose me. She gave me a tiny porcelain hand-painted Villeroy and Bosch wedding box. How did she know what I would love? I often asked myself as I looked at it.


My beautiful Aunt Mary passed away this morning. She is my Dad's elder sister, the filling between my Uncle Gordon and my Dad. She is now with Gordon and with her parents in heaven, because she trusted the Lord Jesus Christ to take away her sin and take over her life. She trusted Him to protect her, care for her, wrap Himself around her in a way that no fur coat could come close.


She had been in poor health; but her passing seems so sudden. Dad was told that her son, Howard, told her a day or so before she drew her last breath, "You've done everything for us that you ever possibly could ... Now it's time to rest. It's time to go Home." 


Dad remarked, between reminiscences of this beloved elder sister, "Knowing that she is with God takes away some of the sting of her death ..." And for the rest of the afternoon he hummed or sang Going Home, that hymn of comfort set to the timeless melody of the Largo movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony.  


How I wish I had known her better! How thankful I am that some day I'll be given that chance.


And I wish I had told her that now I understand what she meant about the comfort of her fur coat ...

Mary Ironside Jordan

February 13, 1931 - February 26, 2012