DELRAY BEACH — Mary Bush, a descendant of a Trail of Tears survivor, died Aug. 10 after six years with dementia. She was 77.
This tender and thoughtful woman with Irish, Welsh, and Cherokee roots spent her formative years in Chicago, where her husband-to-be’s family named her an honorary Hungarian.
She started her career as a nurse there and felt honored to run summer camps for children from the city’s housing projects. Mrs. Bush found the most joy providing outreach and advocacy as an elementary school parent liaison/guidance counselor in Boynton Beach, where she taught parenting classes and ran emotional-support groups.
Her beloved “Glasses Club” inspired children to see the world in all its many layers. She also found comfort by helping migrant worker families and single mothers in the community.
A devotee of chocolate and angel pins, Mrs. Bush appreciated movies and concerts with her daughter Jennifer Bush, and often fell asleep with her glasses on and an open book over her heart.
In addition to her love for family, dear friends, and all Chicago teams, the guiding promise of nature provided a much-needed salve for this golden-hearted, Delray Beach resident. Throughout the years, she enjoyed floating over the waves and loved seeing turtle hatchling releases along beaches.
The cheerful, blue-eyed Mrs. Bush saved every card from family members, friends, colleagues, and students, and her own handwritten letters sounded more like free-verse poems, her words embracing recipients as warmly as her hugs.
She insisted people call her when they arrived home safely and specialized in mixing sports terminology and creating celebrity name hybrids — to the amusement of her family.
Mrs. Bush had a way of delivering comforting talks, chock- full of truisms. Her daughter Elizabeth Bush affectionately recalled a discussion they had about the boxes stacked in closets. As her daughter studied the teetering archives of sentimentality, Mrs. Bush assuaged her fears about the fate of these treasures.
“Most people don’t catalog their remembrances so extensively,” her mother said, “but you can’t borrow into the future and worry about what will happen to the photographs or letters, morphing into tissue-thin pieces of antiquity. People will either toss all the boxes one day or end up alone in a house full of sentiment. I’d like to think we’ll all be together eventually in the afterlife and it will not matter if anyone is here to preserve the memories. Those are coming with us and we’ll be with all the people we’re holding onto in this life again.”
The family feels immense gratitude for the loving companions who helped her daughters care for their mother at home, in addition to the exceptional memory care professionals who sang to her during the later stages of her life, as well as the warmth of the nurses and doctors during her final days.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Dr. Theodore Bush, and son, Teddy, and survived by her two daughters and granddaughter, Theodora.
— Obituary submitted by the family
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