Mary Therese Griffin

Views: 787
Added: Thu. Mar 11, 2010 9:56pm
Posted in: Living

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Sometimes it takes a funeral to find out the scope and reach and impact of what a person did when they were living!   

My Aunt Mary died last month, at the age of 82.  She was a history teacher, and after she had retired from teaching history she threw herself into volunteering for all sorts of historical things.   We had traveled together, and kept each other abreast of our shopping adventures and other personal highlights.  But it wasn't until after she died that I had the faintest IDEA of how her love of travel and her passion for teaching and her outspoken pursuit of knowledge had influenced so many of the students she'd taught.  Many went on to become teachers.  Many went on to travel widely.  I was just a kid and then a teenager when a lot of this was going on, and wasn't paying attention at all.  All I knew was that she was my aunt, and she was a teacher, and we took some great trips.    

But at her passing, I finally saw the true measure of a life bravely lived, and challenges undertaken, and the legacy of a woman who defied convention and truly "grew bolder" every year.  The Chicago Tribune gave her a nice writeup...but I decided she deserved a longer obit, which I put up on my website.  Then, for all the folks who couldn't make to the wake, I posted a collection of photos as well.  There's Aunt Mary as a slender young woman in high heels, cradling a small monkey, who-knows-where.  There's Aunt Mary sitting on a camel in Egypt with the Sphinx in the background.  There's Aunt Mary feeding a banana to an elephant; teaching a high school class; in front of a stone statue in Thailand.

It's a view I wish I'd had and appreciated years ago, when I could have told her so. 

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