My aunt, in her eighties when I joined Madonna House, still lived in that building. Until she died, I went every year on my vacation to visit her, to see how she was doing, to help out where I could.

My mother, who had also lived in that building, and Maria’s roommate and servant had all died, leaving both my aunt and Maria living alone. They gradually became good friends.

Maria found it very hard to live alone. She started talking to me about her loneliness.

I sent her a copy of Poustinia, Catherine Doherty’s book about prayer and solitude. When she wrote to thank me for it, she said, "Now I know why I am living alone."

Maria’s love for God, which had probably been growing all her life, naturally overflowed into love for others. I don’t think she looked for ways to help people, but when she saw a need, she responded.

She was, for example, a Eucharistic minister, bringing communion to the sick, but it didn’t stop there. She befriended the people to whom she brought communion.

Also, since more and more Spanish-speaking people, mostly from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, were moving into the neighborhood, Spanish had become a necessity for anyone working in the parish. When the pastor asked Maria to help the deacon with his Spanish, she took it on, giving him weekly lessons.

Sometimes Maria responded to a need to an unusual, even extraordinary degree. She attended the daily 12:10 Mass at the parish, and at that hour, not surprisingly, most of the congregation was elderly.

One day, during Mass, a man, the only man among the regulars, collapsed. Maria went with him in the ambulance to the hospital. Then, though she had only known him by sight, she visited him regularly.

One day, his doctor asked to speak with her. The man was ready to be discharged, he told her, but he would still need some care. There was no one to do it; would she take it on? She hesitated, but said yes.

Though she was concerned that people might talk, Maria took him home to her apartment and took care of him until he was ready to return to his own place.

This man was not the first person she had taken care of. The other one, also, would have been unusual, I suspect, for someone from Maria’s social class, though she was certainly not rich when I knew her.

When they left Colombia, her family had brought a servant with them, and after the parents died, the servant stayed with Maria. When the servant grew old and needed care, Maria refused to send her to a nursing home. "Mena has taken care of me all my life," she said, "Now I will take care of her." And she did, for several years.

It was with my aunt that I saw the constancy of Maria’s loving service. My aunt was older than Maria, and, as time went on, she was less and less able to manage on her own. Gradually, Maria did more and more for her.

It was only because of Maria that my aunt was able to stay alone in her apartment until age 92.

Then when my aunt broke her hip and had to get a fulltime housekeeper, it was Maria who took care of all her business and who ironed out all the big and little difficulties that arose. No relative could have done more.

One day, Maria told me, a visiting friend had asked her, "Why do you do so much for that woman?" Her answer was, "When the Lord allows us to serve someone, it is a gift and a privilege.

Maria, of course, had worries and sufferings of her own. Every so often, she would say to me, "My family is all so far away. Who will take care of me when I can’t take care of myself?"

I would answer," You’ve taken care of so many people. The Lord will certainly not leave you alone."

I myself wondered how he would do it.

More than once, I talked with her about how Catherine Doherty used to tell us that, in old Russia, some people would spend their last years in a monastery.

Maria’s eyes would light up. "Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful!" she would say. I thought so, too, but how impossible in this modern age and in New York City!

Nothing, however, is impossible to God.

Maria had a younger sister, a nun in Peru. Her convent there closed, and she was transferred to a retreat house in the suburbs of New York.

Shortly after that, Maria had a stroke. When she returned home from the hospital, her sister was able to come and take care of her.

Though Maria recovered to some degree, she would never again be able to live alone. Her sister invited her to come and live in her convent.

So Maria spent the last two years of her life in a convent. I visited her there. She was doing what little things she could to help in the kitchen and praying before the Blessed Sacrament for an hour every day.

Her sister told me that they had tried having relatives, usually the mother of one of the Sisters, come to stay in their convent in their old age before, but it hadn’t worked out.

With Maria, it did. She stayed in that convent, that retreat house, until the God whom she had loved and served so faithfully called her to spend all eternity with him.