For Mary Willis, a marker that lasts, April 4, 2007

A soft breeze swirled around Mary Pearl Willis’ resting place Tuesday, enough to make the afternoon pleasant. Her gravesite alone among others seemed almost festive; there, over freshly turned earth, fading roses complemented silk flowers, all in the slim shadow of a 4-foot wooden stake. Somebody cared, these flowers suggested, and all who passed here could tell.

People do pass this gravesite, too, located in the southeastern corner of Monroe City Cemetery. Pleasant women walked nearby, tending to the graves of their family ancestors. Despite the nearby presence of ramshackle, abandoned houses — those appeared dangerous — the graveyard itself does not lack for care and attention. Grammont Street passes to the south, scant yards away.

Mary Pearl Willis, buried at this spot 28 years, did not lack for nearby company, either. Her unmarked grave, made in 1979, rested near the gravestones of older residents: husbands, parents, and veterans of two world wars. One marker bore the words, “Our darling,” and you know that the buried here were loved.

Soon, Mary Pearl Willis’ gravesite will also bear a stone, a permanent marker that will tell the world that she once lived, and that her life mattered to others. Willis’ life surely mattered to her niece, Lela Howard, of Culver City, Calif., who for many months pressed city and state officials to locate her aunt’s unmarked grave. Last week, with the help of city employees and state officials, family members and others, Willis’ casket was finally uncovered, the location was made certain, and the site made ready for the addition of the permanent grave marker.

Willis’ gravesite reminds us that even the poor — in this Easter season, maybe the poor especially — merit their space in eternal memory.  Willis’ short life ended at 37 in tragedy — a Rayville native and medical worker, she died at Guyana.

There, she was trying to adopt a child, but instead was killed in Jim Jones’ massacre/suicide at the People’s Temple in 1978.  Her niece remembers her not through the strange circumstances of her death, but through her childhood memories of an “auntie” to whom she ran for warm embraces, her own mother’s beloved sister whose death shocked the niece she had left behind.