One page obituary of my mother

Margaret Mary Donohue (Mom) died in her sleep two nights ago at the age of 93.  She had outlived two husbands, Walter Werbos and Gordon (Buddy) Smith, and asked more and more what the purpose was in her still living on after her three children were well-established and even the grandchildren all finished college (except the youngest).

            Mom started life in Bucks County, but became an orphan in the Great Depression. Her Aunt, Mary McFadden, leader of the Pennsylvania Economy League (and a key supporter of the anti-prohibition movement and the FDR campaign) took her and her sisters in, and funded her to go to a Catholic girl’s boarding school in the Poconos, where she won the mathematics prize and made life-long friends. She even boarded with one of them in the rural part of northern Virginia, as she commuted to the Treasury department in World War II, where she handled classified documents which were a great eye-opener to her at the time.

            She left Treasury to study nursing, to help wounded war veterans,  but caught TB herself from soldiers she was treating. In the hospital, she met her first husband, Walter Werbos, then a naval officer on ROTC, assigned to go to the Pacific. When the war ended as he was halfway across to Japan, he married her, and moved into the advertising/marketing business, gradually taking over and running the Harry P. Bridge Company of Philadelphia.

            Mom was a deeply devout Catholic, not the formal rules-based kind, but the kind who revered the sacred heart and brought her children up with a degree of intense, real, and palpable love which we wish more children could experience. She talked to her plants, and listened to their needs, creating huge green gardens inside the house.  She laughed at times at how strict Aunt Mary was, but she also talked a lot about Aunt Mary’s many accomplishments, and we were not surprised years later to learn that DNA analysis showed they shared a maternal haplotype straight from Scythia, the land of the original Amazon women. Soft and sociable but as intense as a laser in her way. Aunt Mary did genealogy work, confirmed by Walter, showing that Mom’s father’s was a direct descendant of Mortimer Donohue, who provided the first ships to the US Navy, for his in-law Commodore John Barry, and traced back to the “flight of the nobles” from Ireland. Why fight the British king in Ireland, when a whole new land was available?

     During her first marriage, Mom was a Democrat, wildly enthusiastic about John Kennedy and Teilhard de Chardin, unlike her husband, who became more completely absorbed in his business, his German heritage and support for Ronald Reagan. Circa 1971, she divorced and remarried to Gordon Smith, a very tough former Marine Sergeant who had actually fought in the “trench warfare” of the Pacific, of a more conservative upstate Pennsylvania family prominent in Freemasons and receivers of a land grant from William Penn, but Buddy mostly stayed away from such fancy stuff. Mom traveled with Buddy around the world at times, as Boeing called him in to fix helicopters, until they retired to the waterfront house they built in Avalon, New Jersey. There they led a pleasant sporty life, becoming a bit stricter themselves (but not teetotalers) as they hobnobbed with local political leaders and watched Fox News. But as she approached 90, Buddy died of disease due in part to malaria he caught in the Pacific reasserting itself, and she chose to sell the house and move in with her younger son, John, after comparing his house in New Jersey with the two others which were offered to her. She enjoyed living with him, with John’s three kids and their many dogs, until they also started moving on and her health became so bad she had to move into Brandywine/Haddonfield.  John’s son Rob was with her at the end, before that night, so that she experienced the full level of warmth, understanding support and intelligent professionalism which she deserved.

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That's long for an obituary. I wish we had found a nice way to check and edit and insert just a few more details while she was alive. 

There are LOTS more details we remember, of course. Zillions of pictures of her 90th birthday party, when John and Suzie rented a huge boat in Avalon to accommodate so many family members we wished we could stay more in touch with somehow. She joked that this was like an Irish wake, except that she got to attend her own funeral.

We have pictures of the little house in Oreland, Pennsylvania (Montgomery County) where we lived from about 1948 (when I turned one) until 1955 or 1956 (when I turned eight, when Suzie was two years old, and John was born, and we moved to Haws Lane in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, Chestnut Hill ZIp code). I actually have some memory of the time before I was one, when we lived with my father's parents in a rented row house -- and of the great excitement of moving to Oreland, and exploring the forest and creek across the street. For about a year (the 1959-1960 school year?), my mother and father were separated, and we kids lived with her in a row house on Gravers Lane in Chestnut Hill proper, from which I could walk to school to Chestnut Hill Academy and to the train station to University of Pennsylvania. I remember her inviting over a local Catholic priest, who showed me Teilhard de Chardin's book The Phenomenon of Man, and discussed it with her in the house. And I remember a very large Halloween party there which made me somewhat uncomfortable, with the whole big family, and my Aunt Loretta's husband wearing a scary skeleton suit and actually making me feel a bit scared. 

Of course, I also remember Mom's two sisters, Aunt Loretta (still alive) and Aunt Eleanor (who virtually died in front of my mother when they had a brief experiment living in the same retirement building in WestChester, Pa). And her brothers, John and Frankie... and.. a story of a brother older yet who died of shock when young, diving into the cold river north of Manhattan. John compiled his own book of family history; not a small family, on the Irish side.

John actually lived for a time with Buddy's mother Margaret, who had a big old house in Bucks County and rented out rooms, some said to be haunted. She also had a small beach house by the inland water off a small island in the Avalon complex, and that's why Buddy decided to build a big beach house next door to her; he did not do the plumbing himself, but he acted like a typical construction boss, supervising the groups who did the various pieces, relying mainly on money from my mother's divorce settlement.  Lots and lots of boating, clamming, fishing, kayaking and so on, and sometimes the twenty minute walk to the beach, and some cycling. Mom handled the books. 

When my mother felt she had to separate form my father, she first moved into a nice small house in the Gwynned suburbs of Philadelphia, near the Catholic girls day school , Gwynned Mercy, which Suzie went to at the time. By then, I was mostly away at Harvard, so Suzie and John were the ones who lived through the brunt of the difficult year. After that, after final divorce and remarriage, they went to live in Buddy's house in Marple-Newton (SW suburb of Philadelphia). For about a year I commuted 50-50 between Marple-Newton and Flourtown as I worked on my PhD thesis project. 

At Marple Newton, especially, there was also a long succession of dogs and cats I won't say much about, though it's hard to resist.

In fact, many many stories...

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Yes, there were times when our visits to the island of Avalon reminded me a lot of the Arthurian legends...

and I had a feeling that my father associated her at an early time with Little Orphan Annie.

My mother