Tombstone Poem Still Resonates for Family

For more than 40 years, the Boscia children wondered how the child had died. They tried to imagine the life she might have had, what she had looked like, where she had lived.

They would troop to the cemetery every year on holidays and on the anniversary of their father’s death, all nine of them: Monica, Mances, Nick, Celie, Chris, Mike, Clare, Billy and Betty. After planting flowers at their father’s grave, they would walk a few yards to the worn marble headstone beneath the big oak tree.

The stone was old, the inscription faded and sad. It told of the death of an 8-year-old child in 1883. A girl named Annie McGuire.

“Weep not for me, my parents dear

I am not dead, but sleeping here

I was not yours, but God’s alone

He loved me best, and took me home.”

The poem became a prayer for the Boscia children: They could all recite it by heart. But they wanted to know more. Who was little Annie? Why was her grave overgrown with weeds? Was there no one left to care?

“It just seemed so sad that there was never anyone at her grave,” said Betty, the youngest, who was 15 months old when her father died of cancer in 1955. “And it seemed such a mystery.”

One day, three years ago, the mystery deepened. And the story of Annie McGuire began to unfold in a most extraordinary way.

Cemeteries are places of loss, but they are also places of connection--to the past, to the families that came before, to the ripples of life that touch us all.

Among the Boscias, no one felt this connection more than Mike.

More than any other sibling, Mike adopted Annie as his own. He built a 2-inch-high red picket fence around her grave; he planted flowers; he visited it often.

“Mike was tormented, but he was also very spiritual,” said Celie, the third sister, the one so close to Mike that people thought they were twins. “The cemetery seemed to be the one spot where he felt at ease,” she said. “I think it made him feel closer to the father he hardly knew.”

Mike was 5 when his father died, and maybe that explained the course of his life. He was always rescuing some living creature: the homeless man he invited home to dinner when he was a boy, the cat he saved from being kicked to death in a crack house in the Bronx, the dogs he cared for at the Humane Society.

The only one Mike couldn’t rescue was himself.

When his youngest brother, Billy, died in a car accident in 1976, 21 years to the day after his father’s death, Mike nearly came undone. Billy, the brother who had always watched out for Mike, who carried him home from his drugged-out stupors, never judging him, always there. After Billy’s death Mike drew dark, nightmarish oil paintings that made some wonder if he had a death wish. He began to spend more time at the cemetery.

And he made a pledge with Celie. Standing over Annie’s grave, they agreed that whoever died first would try to get a message to the one left behind.

“It was just a childhood promise, but there was a part of me that believed in it,” Celie said. “And Mike had had so many close calls, we always thought he would be the first one to go.”

In 1999, at the age of 48, Mike was killed by a train while wandering the tracks at night. Everyone knew the real cause of death was the heroin he had injected earlier in the day.

He was buried in the family plot, a short walk from Annie’s grave.

A couple of months after Mike’s death, Celie was on her knees tidying Annie’s grave after one of the worst thunderstorms in memory. She was thinking of her brother as she worked, marveling at how the flowers he had planted for Annie still bloomed.

And then she spotted it, buried among the leaves, a tiny package in a plastic bag. Inside was an audiocassette box holding a scribbled note.

The handwriting was crooked and blotchy. The words gave her chills.

Tell me who you are, it asked, you who have so faithfully tended the grave of Annie McGuire all these years.

Was it a sign from Mike? Was it a message from Annie?

The message included a phone number--and a plea. “If you find this, please phone me.”

Still shaking, Celie hopped in the car and raced home. At her kitchen table, she dialed the number.

In Bel Air, Md., Mary Walsh answered the phone, her voice sweet and welcoming.

“I was wondering if anyone would ever call,” she said.

Mary, now 79, grew up in Pelham, near Tuckahoe. Her husband’s grandfather had been married to Maggie McGuire, Annie’s sister.

For years, after moving away, Mary and her husband would occasionally return and visit Annie’s grave. They would always marvel at how nice it looked.

“We were mystified,” Mary said. “All these years we wondered, who was taking care of little Annie’s grave?”

According to family lore, Annie died when she fell into a wood stove and her nightgown caught fire. But Mary had never been able to confirm the tale. And Maggie, Mary remembered, never talked about how her sister had died.

Why now? Celie asked her. What had possessed her to leave the note now?

Mary had no real explanation. She had traveled up from Maryland for her own sister’s funeral, and she was thinking of her late husband and the passage of time.

“It was like something just came over me,” Mary said. “After all these years, I just felt I had to write that note and see what happened.”

There was no doubt in Celie’s mind what had happened.

“It was as if Mike had kept his promise and sent me a sign,” she said. “And the sign was Mary Walsh.”

The women talked for over an hour. Mary told Celie how her husband’s family had once owned a grocery store in Tuckahoe, but lost it in the Depression and moved away. Mary remembered her father-in-law, Thomas Walsh, a railroad man--Annie’s nephew--standing at the grave telling her the story of the little girl who had died in a fire.

Celie told Mary how the Boscias had moved to Tuckahoe in the early ‘50s, around the time the Walshes moved out. She told of how her widowed mother rearednine children in the small, white house on Oakland Avenue, how her brother, Mike, had felt a special connection to Annie’s grave, how he had died just a few months earlier. She began to recite the poem--the one all the Boscia siblings know by heart. Mary joined in.

“Weep not for me, my parents dear. . . . “

Over the phone that day, the two women resolved to find the truth about the child who had brought their families together.

Tuckahoe is a village within the township of Eastchester, 22 miles north of New York City. It was built around marble quarries that provided jobs for thousands of Irish and Italian immigrants in the late 1800s. Family ties run deep: Everyone knows a Boscia, or a Walsh, or a McGuire. Many old-timers know the cemetery and can recite the child’s poem.

It didn’t take long for word to spread about the women’s search. In the library, in the village hall, in Roma’s restaurant, people began talking about Annie McGuire.

Harold Dunn, an 89-year-old retired teacher, remembered a Jack McGuire, son of John McGuire, the stone cutter, who worked in the Dunn grocery store.

Jack Rosenstein, 83, nodding off over his cane and old photos in his liquor store on Depot Square, remembered playing baseball with a Jack McGuire, “a big, husky young fellow,” whose father was one of the first policemen in town. He thought that Jack’s grandfather was the father of Annie McGuire.

“Black Mike” Pinto, who at 93, attends every wake in town, remembered two families of McGuires that had passed.

But no one had heard of a little girl who died in a fire in 1883.

The Boscia sisters began scouring the records. Mances Boscia, who works for Immaculate Conception Church, which owns the cemetery, found the deed to the grave. It suggested that Annie and Maggie and their father, John, are all buried in the plot. In the McGrath Funeral Home in Bronxville, Betty tracked down a yellowed copy of Maggie’s obituary. It listed her children, but mentioned nothing of a sister named Annie.

In Eastchester Town Hall, Betty found a ledger of deaths in 1883. In flowing script, it recorded the passing of Annie, daughter of John McGuire from Ireland, and Ellen Dunn. Annie was 8 years, 7 months and 7 days. The cause of death was “aortic regurgitation.”

Over pizza at Roma’s the sisters pondered the words, which suggested heart disease. Had Annie been a sickly child? Perhaps she had suffered from the “consumption” that afflicted so many children at the time. What about the story of the fire?

“I wonder,” Celie said. “is there anyone who knows the truth about Annie McGuire?”

The sisters fell silent, all thinking the same thing. Betty was the one who voiced it.

“Mike probably knows,” she said. “He’s met Annie by now.”

As word of the Boscia search spread, scraps of information were stitched together all over town. In time the trail led to a white stucco house on Hall Avenue, to an 87-year-old lady with white hair and manicured nails--with a head full of memories and an attic full of photographs. Mildred Cahill had lived all her life in Tuckahoe, and 68 years at this house.

Sitting on her porch, she told her story.

“My father,” Mildred began, “was the second person to be sworn in as a village police officer. His name was Jack McGuire, but everyone called him “Spot” because of the freckles on his face.”

The old lady paused, remembering.

“He had a sister who died at the age of 8,” Mildred said. “Her name was Annie McGuire.”

Mildred believes that her grandfather--Annie’s father--was a quarryman who fled Ireland after the potato famine. Her proof is pressed between the pages of an old photo album--an elaborate invitation to a quarryman’s picnic in 1893.

Until recently, Mildred had never heard of the Boscias. But like Mary Walsh, she had wondered who was leaving flowers on Annie’s grave.

According to Mildred, Annie’s father married twice--to Ellen Dunn, mother of Annie, Maggie and John, and later to Celia Dunn. Mildred remembers Celia, her grandmother, carrying great baskets of flowers to the cemetery, taking Mildred with her. There, at the age of 7, Mildred stood before Annie’s grave and read the poem aloud for the first time.

She didn’t pay much attention to the words, nor did she ask how Annie died.

“Back then, every family had children who didn’t survive,” Mildred said. “It was just the way things were.”

Generations of the McGuires, she said, had suffered from a congenital heart disease that struck suddenly: Mildred’s only daughter, Dorothy, had died of it in December.

Mildred’s visiting grandson had never heard of Annie before. And so Mildred told him the tale--of her aunt, the little girl who died mysteriously in 1883, and of the Boscia boy who adopted her grave, of his tragic death, and the note, and the search it inspired.

When she finished her story, Mildred recited the poem.

“Weep not for me, my parents dear

I am not dead, but sleeping here

I was not yours, but God’s alone

He loved me best, and took me home.”

Soon, Mildred plans to meet the Boscia sisters. She would like to share her photos and memories. She would like to learn more about their brother, the one with the tormented soul, the one who cared so much about a little girl who died half a century before he was born.