“Mary died,” my mom tells me over the phone while I try vainly to be warm. Mom was just telling me about what was going on at home when she said it. At her words, there was a pause on my end. “When did she die?” I think I asked.
I was more surprised she had lasted so long. Ever since Christmas time, cars had surrounded her house, and visitors went back and forth. She’d been told she had about two weeks left, and it was mid-January by the time she passed.
Mary has been our neighbor as long as I have lived where I call home. Having moved there at 7, and now rapidly approaching 21, I have spent two-thirds of my life knowing she was just down the driveway, running a babysitting business. I remember getting off the bus after school and watching the kids pass the willow tree in the front of her house and trudge up her stairs. I remember knocking on her door to sell cookies for school. I even remember my grandma getting in a handful of arguments with her over her fence being over our property line.
As a child, my impression of Mary was one of fear. She seemed intense. I’d seen her snap at the kids she was babysitting, and subconsciously decided to not cross her. As I grew older, I grew less and less afraid of her, but I didn’t see her much. My family didn’t help with that. Sadly, because of a few incidents involving my family, bb guns, and pets, our family wasn’t very connected to Mary. It’d been many years since I’d seen her face — in fact, I couldn’t picture it with one hundred percent accuracy until I decided to Google her obituary.
I found it after a minute or so of searching, recognizing her blonde hair and smile beside a couple paragraphs about her loved ones. I click on a video, and the picture show starts. After fourteen years of living just down the street, I saw more of her in about five minutes of photos than my entire lifetime. I see her and her husband, her radiant in a white button-up dress, and him dark-haired and gangly, looking like he’s about to tell a joke; I see her holding a tiny newborn as she herself is in a blue, patterned hospital gown; I see her at a football game at my high school with her grandsons, an arm around each of them as they grin in their red and white uniforms. I recognize all of the sudden my Gram in her as she stands, more often than not, in the center of the photos, a wide smile on her face, her hair nice and trim. Her family is a mirror image to mine: they love her.
I feel my chest tighten as I watch Mary in front of a giant Christmas tree, holding a baby wrapped in a white blanket with a burgundy hat, peering at the camera through thick black glasses. The grief is striking home now. This was a woman I could’ve known — I should’ve known — my neighbor.
I had so many opportunities to knock on her door. But I didn’t. For all the times I cracked open my Bible, I never saw Mary. I go to Church, I try to keep daily Bible reading, I like to volunteer locally. I’ve even taken multiple classes on missionary and relational work.
And yet, I don’t think Mary ever knew my name.