Mary-Lou Burness

Mary-Lou Burness, 88, of Rindge, NH died peacefully on Monday, January 05, 2015 at the Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough of natural causes.

Mary-Lou was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on August 12, 1926, the only child of Earl Luther Fisher and Margaret Arrato Fisher. Her mother was first cousin to the noted sculptor John Paramino. Mary-Lou graduated from Waltham High School and Lasell College, but she was essentially an autodidact. She worked as a secretary for a lawyer, an ophthalmologist of world renown, a college president, an assistant headmaster, and various heads of businesses.

Mary-Lou was a voracious reader, mostly fiction but also biography, history and detective stories. Her eldest son Philip noted, “It wasn't until l was three or four that I realized a book wasn’t part of a woman's anatomy - she was always reading.” At age eleven she picked up from a bookcase in her house Emile Zola’s Nana and after that the world was not the same! She read the complete Marcel Proust and five biographies of this French novelist. When she first went to France she visited Illiers-Combrai, the home of tante Leonie in Proust’s A La Recherche de Temps Perdu. She consumed volume after volume. Colette, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Dickens, Trollope, Simone de Beauvoir, Eca de Queiroz, lris Murdoch — these were among the writers she admired. She was no less eager a reader of history, particularly the Civil War and World War l.

In 1965 in Strasbourg, France she married her second husband Don Burness. She was previously married for 16 years to Jack Smith. Along with Don Burness she traveled the world living at different times in Mexico, Nigeria, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. People were comfortable around her and appreciated “the flowing wonder of her ways.” She combined lustrous beauty, friendliness, an agile intelligence, a seemingly natural dignity and a refined sense of taste and culture. She possessed a mischievous and playful wit. And there was deep tenderness at her core. Mary-Lou had great self-confidence as a person and as a woman and she was never swayed by the lure of group culture or group identity. She had a good deal in common with Diane de Poitiers! Winds of banality never blew in her direction.

Mary-Lou loved France and appreciated the French; she lived at different times in Alsace, Provence and Perigord. She had a deep affection for Portugal where she spent many winters in her later years — in Vila da Luz in the Algarve. She had pronounced passions. She loved Mozart and Verdi and Beethoven’s Choral. She loved being surrounded by paintings. She loved plays and for over forty years she attended Peterborough Players, where her friend, Bob Alvin, acted. She loved dachshunds. In October 1965 while walking in Strasbourg, she saw a dachshund and proclaimed, “I want a dachshund puppy.” And after she survived her first stroke, in her early 80s, she declared she wanted above all else a miniature, long-haired, red dachshund. Enter Fritz. When Gerhard, her first dachshund, died in 1975, she played Mozart’s Requiem. Gerhard, Trudy, Wolfgang, Roxanne, Paco, Yoshi, Fritz - they all shared her life.

Mary-Lou liked camping, the old fashioned way - in a tent. In 1965-66 she and her husband and Gerhard lived for seven months in a tent, spending the winter in Taormina, Sicily and traveling throughout Western Europe and North Africa.

Mary-Lou was a talented watercolorist, enjoying her classes with Giff Russell at Sharon Arts. Two of her paintings hang in the Ingalls Memorial Library in Rindge. Her drawings have been published in The Poet’s Touchstone, the poetry magazine of The Poetry Society of New Hampshire. She was co-editor with her husband of a book of interviews with African writers, Wanasema, published by Ohio University Press in 1985. Work on that book took her to Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya. Mary-Lou numbered among her friends Chinua Achebe and Niyi Osundare, world literary figures from Nigeria. She was an outstanding ambassador for the United States as people from different lands (she visited more than 40 countries) appreciated her natural willingness to recognize the richness of cultures beyond her own. From Kyoto to Canaima, from Croatia to the coast of Maine, where she spent summers as a girl, Mary-Lou found the world interesting and exciting. She lived with the intoxication of wonder and astonishment. This woman pulsed with life.
Mary-Lou, a happy iconoclast, did not worship money or position or power or image. What she did admire was respect for words. What she did admire was the illumination of violinist, painter, sculptor and storyteller. And she regretted that she lacked the genius of a Monet, a Mozart, a Proust. For her these beacons represent the highest achievement of mankind.

She leaves behind three children: Dr. Philip Smith of Waterville, Maine; Dr. Sue Barrett of Providence, Rhode Island and Ed Smith of Denver, Colorado. She also leaves behind four grandchildren: Carey Smith, Diana Smith, Caitlin Smith and Sandra Barrett. And her husband of 49 years with whom she shared the great adventure. He thought she was magnificent.

A celebration of the life of Mary-Lou will be held on Saturday, January 17, 2015 at 1:30pm in the Rindge Meeting House, 6 Payson Hill Road, Rindge, NH 03461.

Burial will be in the spring at Hillside Cemetery in Rindge.

To share memories or photographs of Mary-Lou, or to send condolences to her family, please visit her permanent memorial at www.cournoyerfh.com