Mary Lee Griffin

Thank you for taking the time to read this brief essay on the life of my Mom, Mary Lee.

Mary Lee was God’s loyal servant in every aspect of her life.

She attended Catholic schools in Indianapolis, having been blessed with two devout and devoted parents, Leo and Mary. She had two brothers, Jerry and David, to whom she remained very close throughout adulthood in spite of the distance between their homes in Indiana and hers in California. Some of her fondest childhood memories involved being Jerry and David’s big sister. She was amused yet troubled by some of their adventures - especially noteworthy was the time the boys were chased down an alley by a runaway malfunctioning pinwheel firework. (There was a much more relaxed regulatory environment in those days).

My Mom had a gift of being able to describe events quite clearly and with great detail, and so when she regaled me as a child with the pinwheel story, I felt as if I myself had had the experience. By telling and retelling it, she was teaching me an important safety lesson. I offer this as just one example of how she nurtured me as a child. More recently, as an adult, I saw her nurture her grandchildren, Caitlin, Caroline, and Abigail and her great grandchild, Oliver. Nothing gave her greater joy than to teach, play with, and read to them.

As a young woman, Mary Lee enrolled in the Registered Nurse program at St. Vincent’s Catholic hospital in Indianapolis, where she learned nursing practice from the Daughters of Charity. This type of nursing education, together with having been raised in a loving, Christ-centered home no doubt made her a more compassionate and dedicated caregiver. She practiced acute care nursing at Community Hospital of Chula Vista, located on F Street in Chula Vista. In 1975, she was part of the first group of nurses to work at the hospital’s present location in Telegraph Canyon, what we now know as Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. Her nursing career spanned 27 years.

Mary Lee was proud to be a nurse and proud of her profession. I was proud of her too, especially at times I witnessed when she would enthrall younger nurses caring for her with accounts of nursing practice from the mid-twentieth century. Although retired, she never really stopped being a nurse mentor.

In 1955, on a Catholic Youth Organization bus trip from Indianapolis to Churchill Downs, Kentucky, my Mom met Charles “Chuck” Griffin. Being a smart man, he courted her, and they married on October 15, 1955. My Mom and Dad were part of The Greatest Generation, and my Dad was a World War II Navy Veteran. He loved the Navy, and soon after I was born they moved to San Diego, where my Dad had taken a Civil Service job with the Department of the Navy. They raised me, their only child, in San Diego County.

My Mom was utterly selfless in caring for me. Was she sometimes too kind to me? I don’t think so, but I think my Dad would disagree. I feel compelled to disclose a couple embarrassing truths. First, on more than one occasion, after I had procrastinated on writing a paper for school, and had produced a handwritten draft, she stayed up late into the night typing it for me while I slept. Second – and I am sure this was not known by Dad – on Friday afternoons in Lent when she would make tuna fish (which I detested), she would prepare a separate dinner of shredded white meat chicken for me. Although I was below the age for which the church requirement to avoid meat on Fridays was effective, my Dad held me to the adult standard. She told me she could make the chicken look a lot like tuna, and so my Dad would not notice. She was right, and we kept our little dinnertime secret from him.

My Mom loved me unconditionally and never was this more evident than during the past year. While still recuperating from a hip fracture, she agreed to move with us to El Portal, California, a small village next to the Merced River, population less than 500. In the fall of 2015, I had accepted a job offer at Yosemite National Park, and I tried to convince her to come live with us. She was afraid she would be a burden, and initially had misgivings. However, after considering my argument that I would feel a much greater burden if we lived far apart, she acquiesced to moving with us in late January of this year. Perhaps you can imagine the magnitude of this change for an 87-year-old. Yet, never once did she complain to me about the move. By this I do not mean she was truly happy right away in her new home; at the beginning, her attitude was more one of mere acceptance. But I would like you to know that by the first half of February, we had achieved a modus vivendi in which I am convinced she found happiness. On her 88th birthday this past Valentine’s Day, we drove to Mariposa and enjoyed a simple but lovely lunch, a visit to the California State Mining and Mineral Museum, and the gorgeous scenery on the drive through the mountains. That day, I could tell she genuinely enjoyed the outing and had found peace of mind.

Among the leisure pastimes Mary Lee truly enjoyed were, in order, watching Downton Abbey, Jeopardy, and Notre Dame football. In the future, if you ever tune in to PBS and hear sophisticated British accents, or watch Alex Trebek gracefully putting nervous Jeopardy contestants at ease, or see the iconic Golden Dome topped by its 19-foot-tall, 4,000-pound statue of Mary, the Mother of God, I hope that you might think of my Mom, and in any case that you always feel free to ask her to pray for you.