Mary Helena Englert

Mary was born in Passaic New Jersey on December 24, 1929. It was a momentous year. The first rocket-powered aircraft flew, the first Academy Awards was hosted, the stock market soared and then spectacularly crashed marking the start of the Great Depression.

Mary Jani, as she was known then, would grow up to share her wonder at how much had happened in the nearly 100 years she was alive.

Born at the first public demonstration of TV, she evolved through many digital devices and insisting on keeping her iPhone close until just before the end, having mastered a rich repertoire of emojis and WhatsApp. Mary had a deep fondness for Washington DC and her large extended family there where she was sent with her sister Honey to school when she was only four. She loved her cousins, her summers on Lake Webster, trips to her grandparents farm in Wayne New Jersey, cruises to Cuba and the Caribbean as a child in the 1930s. Later at Sacred Heart in Greenwich Connecticut she played halfback on the field hockey team with her sister and Ethel Skakel who she delighted in saying did all the running while she hung back. Running was not Mary’s style. She liked the opportunity to reflect, to be present, to absorb things at her own pace and to the beat of her own drum —in an increasingly noisy world, she gravitated to meditative silence. She did not do fads or trends. She had a way of imbuing ordinary, seemingly commonplace things with a sense of wonder and joy, and letting even the little things of this world know that they had a special place and purpose.

Mary had three careers, two were professional. She earned a Masters degree in parasitology from Columbia and later another Masters in Clinical Social Work from Fordham. Unlike most women of her generation, she also married “late” having rejected one suitor, turned fiancé, after telling him that upon reflection she would have doubtlessly made his life miserable. There was a hint of Katherine Hepburn just at the edges.

But when she did marry, J. Carlin Englert, she threw herself into becoming the full-time mother of three boys: Juan, Greg and Jonathan.

How do you capture in a few words a spirit like Mary? She built generous bridges of empathy and kindness to complete strangers. She remembered birthdays and small details with a consistency and genuine interest that eludes most of us. She had an enormous capacity to understand and forgive —sometimes it seemed almost too much of a capacity. She loved the St. Francis Prayer. She loved that St. Augustine had once observed if you want to know if someone is good, don’t ask what they believe, ask what they love. She loved many things. One thing that she particularly loved was animals. Especially birds, and especially the piliated woodpecker, the male cardinal, the tufted titmouse, the piping plover. She turned her terrace into a major migratory hub for birds of all sorts —she called it Bird TV. She permissively let nature invade her home like the carpenter bee hive burrowed into the lintel that returned to life each spring above her front door. She was curious about so many things, constantly citing new studies, fresh research, a recent discovery of something formerly thought unlikely. She loved Beethoven and carried with her the contagious conviction that culture and the arts mattered. She espoused the value of whole foods and probiotics when Don Draper was still drinking martinis and smoking Camel unfiltereds in the fifties. She cooked and baked with love. Her brownies were sent all over the world from homesick soldiers in Iraq to her offspring in Australia.

She loved her sister Honey, She loved and was like a second mother to her sister Fran. She wasn’t perfect, but she came dangerously close.

Instead of flowers, please consider donating a little something in Mary’s memory to the birds through The Audubon Society

https://act.audubon.org/a/donate