Mary P. Green

Mary P. "Rae" Green Of Ypsilanti, age 86, April 4, 2022. When she was born into the working-class tenements of Govan, in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 21, 1936, her parents, Margaret and Andrew (Meg and Andy), named her Mary Paul Irvine, but they called her Rae, or Mary Rae when Meg was annoyed. And those are the names most people used throughout her life. She was known only as Rae so often, in so many places, that there were people who knew her for years before they learned she was also Mary. A few stories she often told about her early years in Scotland: She fell in love with movies when her dad took her to the theater and she saw “The Wizard of Oz” (released in 1939—she was three, nearly four) and she also first came to adore Mickey Mouse and all things Disney. (These were, it bears mention, her first notions of a place called America). During the war, when Norway fell and it became clear that the Germans could extend the air war to the shipyards of Clydeside, the children were evacuated to the coastal countryside near Ayr, where, perhaps, her firm belief that fairies were real originated—it’s hard to imagine fairies in the tenements. She remembered seeing German POWs behind fences in Glasgow, and the sound of the air raid sirens—this was 1941. She was five. Her father didn’t go to war—he was rejected by the army for a weak stomach, and continued to work as a milk delivery man, a vital service to the community. The family lost one of Andy’s brothers, Mary’s uncle Bobby, at El-Alamein in 1942. Mary Rae’s brother, born that year, was named Robert. He predeceased her last year, while his wife, her sister-in-law Sandy, remained Rae’s best friend through her final days. In 1948, when she was 12, the family emigrated to America, coming to live with Margaret’s sister and her husband (Mary and Archie) in Detroit, where Andrew found work in factories at Chrysler. After some acclimation, Mary Rae thrived in Detroit public schools and graduated from the High School of Commerce, where she studied book-keeping/accounting. Shortly before she graduated, though, she’d married Neal Wilson, a fellow east-side Detroiter she’d met in social activities such as the swim team and theater productions. She’d just turned 18 and he, a year and half older, had enlisted in the U.S. Army. Her connections with their close circle of friends, including the Rutkowskis and Corbetts, endured for a lifetime. Scots are known as a clannish people, but Mary Rae’s “clan” of loved ones had a wide and ever-expanding embrace. Those friends, for instance, or all of Neal’s family, the Wilsons and Commers, or anyone she met through work, or Neal’s work, or at a series of Presbyterian churches. Or people her children or her nieces and nephews met and brought home. Family was central to her, including her sons Kevin (Toni), born in 1955 and Scott (Donna), in 1958. Here we should note that she’d been born with a congenital heart defect, a hole between the left and right chambers roughly the size of a quarter coin. If she’d listened to the doctors, neither son would be here today—twice the medical experts told her she was too tiny (barely five feet tall and less than 90 pounds) and frail to carry a baby to term, that it would probably kill her. Not just once, but twice, she defied those orders and the odds. In 1959, she became one of the earliest patients to benefit from open-heart surgery using the then-new heart-lung machine to allow surgeons to repair her heart. She’d also been born hearing impaired, a condition she shared with her mother, which was eventually determined, in Mary Rae’s case, to be due to her not having fully developed the middle of those three little bones in your inner ear that transmit sound. Hearing aids helped, and the technology improved over her lifetime, mostly offsetting the continued deterioration. She also became an adept lip-reader. She also loved books, was known to turn her hearing aid off to avoid being disturbed in reading and passed her appreciation for a story well-told and an educated mind to all her descendants. After Neal completed his military service, the couple moved several times, following his job opportunities, to Keego Harbor and back to Detroit, then to Dearborn where he was managing a bowling alley, and then to Livonia in 1963 where they’d built a new home on a cul-de-sac. Mary soon knew all her neighbors on Summerside Court and treated them all as members of her clan—their concerns were hers, their triumphs and joys, their struggles. She might be mostly deaf, but hers was a welcoming ear and however weak her physical heart, her spiritual heart beat strong. In Livonia, once the boys were old enough for full-day schooling, she took work doing home sales with Avon cosmetics, then in a Sears store, and then as the book-keeper with a local business. The work was a necessary contribution to family finances, but also an expression of her need to be out in the world, accomplishing things herself and meeting still more people. She also made a point of getting to know and befriend the families of her sons’ friends. When they got to their teens, it was not uncommon for one of them to come home and find that a former girlfriend had come by just to visit his mom. Warm and welcoming as her presence made it, her house was, it should be acknowledged, often a cluttered mess. Home-making was not her thing. A sink full of dirty dishes or a table piled with unsorted papers never seemed to her like a higher priority for attention than the next chapter of a good book or a long phone conversation with one of the clan. And always a cup of tea. More likely a pot. And cooking? It was a necessary thing when raising children, moreso when hosting a gathering, but she never embraced the culinary arts. Dinner was often another chore to be fit in between work and some kind of meeting. Mary Rae never took U.S. citizenship—she went decades saying that she would, soon, but eventually she’d say she just couldn’t renounce her loyalty to Queen and country. Yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more civic-minded person committed to building America. She was a PTA president, a Sunday school teacher at Livonia’s First Presbyterian Church, a supporter of Boy Scouts when her husband, an Eagle Scout himself, took on leadership of the church-based troop. It wasn’t always about us, either—she remained active in her Scottish lodge, the Daughters of Scotia, where she eventually followed her mother and her Aunt Mary into the leadership role of Chief Daughter, and attended national conventions around America. The little girl who’d lived in a single room with her entire family now had a big suburban Colonial-style four-bedroom house with a yard and even a swimming pool, a large circle of friends, and steady, engaging work. Margaret had come to live with the Wilsons in Livonia after alcoholism made life with Andy impossible, and that was fine, until it wasn’t and her mother passed away in 1971, only 59 years old. Mary Rae took on responsibility for her father’s care, an unenviable task that she accepted out of that seemingly bottomless well of love, until his death in 1987. Soon after Kevin graduated from high school in 1973, Neal took work in Ypsilanti and the family home moved to that township. Making the best of an unwelcomed turn of events, Mary moved her father to a Belleville trailer park and found work at a company making partitions for office settings and then in Ann Arbor Public Schools in the accounting department. True to form, she was soon a union steward, a listening ear for her co-workers and an advocate, especially, for equal treatment of women workers. Neal left Mary Rae in 1980 and their divorce was finalized the following year. Both her sons had just married, too, and Mary Rae struggled with these life transitions for a while. But she soon met Frederick Green, who became her second husband, a U.S. Navy veteran of 30 years and an aircraft ground crew chief with (then) Northwest airlines. Fred predeceased her in 2006 after a series of strokes. But not before they enjoyed more than 20 years together, dancing, traveling the world—including three visits to Scotland—and enjoying life to the fullest. Fred Green came from a large family of brothers and sisters and had a passel of children from his first marriage—they all soon came to know Mary Rae’s love, encouragement, and warm embrace in her ever-expanding clan of loved ones. Despite the irony, she noted, of their German heritage. And Fred, in turn, treated Kevin, Scott, and Mary Rae’s grandchildren—Donald (Tess), Ash, Heather (Don), Sean (Lisa Bane), Greg (Soren Soto), and Colin (Caitlin Zachow)—as his own. Now there are three great-grandchildren, Angus, Ozzy, and Duncan, whose early lives have been touched with Mary Rae’s spirit. In the end, Mary Rae expressed surprise that it was renal failure, rather than her heart, that would prove terminal soon after her 86th birthday. She died April 4 under the care of Arbor Hospice in the Ypsilanti family room where she had hosted so many gatherings. Her mind was sharp and she spent her final weeks under continual care by her family, saying goodbye and, as she was able, expressing her love, encouragement, gratitude, and, yes, dispensing life-advice. She also found it “miraculous” that she was surrounded by so many who loved her. When she expressed mild concern that she’d led a good-enough life to “go to the good place,” daughter-in-law Toni told her “I’m pretty sure they’re going to make you a hostess.” A Funeral Service will be held at the R.G. &G.R. Harris Funeral Home, 15451 Farmington Rd., Livonia, Friday, April 8, 2022 at 11:00 AM. A visitation will be held on Thursday from2 –8:00 PM. Please share a memory of Mary on her tribute wall. https://www.tributeslides.com/tributes/show/D8S22GBC3X4MN28F