Mary Burdick

We mourn the loss of Mary Proctor Burdick, 94 -- loving spouse and mother, generous and steadfast spirit -- who died on June 15, 2024, in Syracuse, N.Y., her home since age 17.

Mary was an intrepid, independent-minded woman before her time. She was born on May 1, 1930, in Seneca Falls, N.Y., to Amy Jewell Proctor of Jordan, N.Y., and Harold Proctor of Lincolnshire, England, and raised in Malaya from the age of a few months. From 1939 to 1947 she attended the Woodstock School in Mussoorie, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. At the start of each school year, she traveled from Penang with a small group of students by boat to Calcutta and then by train to Mussoorie, returning home eight months later.

In December 1941 the family fled before the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and moved to Mussoorie year-round as refugees. Mary liked to tell her children that she walked a mile uphill to school each way (amid rain, mud, and leeches). In 1947, on graduating, Mary moved with her family to the U.S., and entered Syracuse University that fall, completing a B.Sc. in chemistry four years later.

In 1951 she married Robert E. Burdick (b. 1924-), whom she had met in the campus dining hall. For the next several years she worked as a research assistant, including in the organic chemistry department refining a technique to "plasticize" wood, making it pliable by immersing it in liquid ammonia. She bent trees to her will. Together Bob and Mary had three children – Jan Ellen (1957- ), Stephen David (1960- ), and Robert Alan (1965- ) – and, indirectly, three grand-children: Erika Burdick King (1990), Josh Walter Burdick (2006) and Robert Leo Burdick (2006). She enjoyed camping and wilderness canoeing and instilled in her children an appreciation for hiking in inclement weather.

Mary was devoted to her community. As a young mother she volunteered as a library aide and reading tutor at local schools; helped write the Syracuse City Charter Commission in the early 1970s, and for several years served on the board of directors of the Syracuse League of Women Voters, including two years, from 1971 to 1973, as president. No P.T.A. meeting went unattended. Gardening was an enduring passion; with her friend Lida Hart Black she planted the outdoor herb garden at Thornden Park, and many years later was a master gardener with the Cornell Cooperative Extension, providing expertise over the phone to gardeners in need. In 1975 Mary resumed work full-time, and for the next two decades, she was director and coordinator of the Onondaga County Health Department’s lead poison control program, often going door-to-door to test children and families for unsafe lead levels.

Her crafts were innumerable. She studied calligraphy, decorated Easter eggs in the Ukrainian style, arranged flowers, embroidered elaborate quilts, and made clothing for her children, which involved inventive uses of rickrack and, once, produced a pair of purple bell bottoms bearing the signs of the zodiac. She belonged to book clubs, loved anything on P.B.S., and did The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle every week in pen.

She was reserved but ran deep. If she had a motto it was implied: that there is always something to create or to cultivate, and that giving goes unsaid. She believed in doing more than talking (this also went unsaid) and modeled the idea that sometimes the most important thing you can do for someone is simply show up.?She knew her own mind but was practiced at biting her tongue. Friends knew her as someone who did not suffer fools; the fools she suffered rarely knew it.

Mary was an explorer inside and out, and for 73 years she and Bob shared an inseparable journey. Their travels took them to England, France, and back to India, to Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, to little-traveled lakes in Ontario and Minnesota. Since 1951 they have been members of the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society, where they sang choir, joined committees and subcommittees, made lifelong friends, and found a spiritual home. “I belong to a religious community where, as in the natural world, the balance of nature requires respect and stewardship,” Mary wrote in 1985. ”In this community, I have the fellowship of people who will respond with their support in times of uncertainty and with whom I can share horizons.” Her ashes rest in the MMUUS memorial garden, which she and Bob helped create. We miss her dearly.

A memorial service will be held in the autumn.

In lieu of flowers, please consider making a contribution in Mary’s memory to Planned Parenthood or the Syracuse League of Women Voters.

To share a memory of Mary or leave a special message for her family, please visit the guestbook below.