Missing Mary

When you are an unknown blogger like me, the loss of a faithful follower is devastating. I’m mourning the passing of Mary DeYoung, a friend for at least 25 years, who died last Monday following a brief battle with cancer. Mary followed the blog I did when we lived overseas and was overjoyed when I started this new blog. She was a frequent commenter who would also unabashedly correct my grammar via personal notes. I’m not sure if she ever fully believed my explanations that they were “just typos.” She sent me about three paragraphs in May on the difference between “its” and “it’s,” which I kept pleading I already knew. Our last correspondence was on June 21st. Unbeknownst to me, she also had a biopsy that day.

Her funeral last Saturday was the epitome of the oxymoron “good funeral.” It was attended by hundreds of people, which gave an indication of how beloved Mary was. The messages and remembrances were touching, the music was great, and I felt honored to be there.

Here’s one of my favorite stories about Mary. I’d known her for years and Gretchen and I had even spent a week in Minnesota together with Mary and her husband Steve when this happened. I used to teach a class in the religion department at Hope College. It was usually in the same room in the same building – which I always thought of as the “humanities” building since it housed the religion, English and history departments. Then one year I was given a new classroom in a building that housed the math department. On the first day of class I was wandering through the building trying to find the right room when I saw Mary sitting in an office.

“What are you doing here, Mary?” I asked.

“This is my office,” she said. And indeed, it did look like her office. Not only was she in it, but there were pictures of her husband and kids on the wall.

But I was puzzled. “Why is this your office?” I asked stupidly. Now I knew in the back of my head that Mary did something with math but I wasn’t sure what it was.

“This is where the math department has their offices,” she said.

Oh. At that point I’d known her for six or seven years. She’d been a professor of math at Hope College all that time. (All told she spent 29 years on the Hope math faculty.) Apparently, that had never come up between us.

Now if I were a math professor everyone I met would be informed of that fact within the first three minutes of knowing me. I like to establish my intellectual superiority. Not so Mary. Teaching was one of the things she did, but not the only one. It was possible to know her and experience the richness of her life without having that fact straight. We went to church together, had a lot of the same friends, went to parties together, served on boards together, and many, many other things. She had a great spirit and zest for life. And she knew more math than I ever, ever imagined.

Mary DeYoung was 58 years old when she died. I, and countless others, miss her.