WRITTEN BY EMILY MORRISON
When I moved back to Maine in 2004, I never expected to find a real-life guardian angel living two houses down. Kathie Conary looked, sounded, and acted like the spitting image of my late grandmother. She took me under her wing and pulled me through one of the hardest periods of my life: being a young mother with postpartum depression.
Little did I know, Kathie also suffered from depression and, much like myself, found daily exercise to be part of the cure.
Born in a one-room camp on the Surry Road in 1937, Kathie has been on the move ever since. She credits her mother, “a saint,” for raising her and her siblings.
“Mom washed dishes at the Sun Diner and cleaned offices at night,” Kathie said. “Neighbors would pound on the door and say, ‘So-and-so is in labor; they need your help.’ Mom would go and help deliver babies, thinking nothing of it.”
Though her mother had her teaching certification, she was let go when the parents of her students learned the color of her partner’s skin. “They didn’t want anyone like her teaching their children,” Kathie said.
Kathie met her husband on a blind date when she was 15. They married by the time she turned 16 and had 5 children. Sometimes they couldn’t afford food.
“There was one Thanksgiving, all we had was a loaf of homemade bread that his mother sent down. I had a box of frosting I mixed up, and the kids had that on their bread.”
Kathie recalls hard times in “the deep, dark hollow” (the land where they lived). The only heat was the woodstove. No water. The roof leaked. As the kids got older and her husband was injured on the job, she waited tables and became a bus driver to make ends meet.
When someone told her she couldn’t do it, Kathie’s response was, “Watch me.”
Eventually, she began working in the mill. “I shoveled snow, did janitor work, cut cores.”
Kathie found that walking helped her cope with the stress of work, raising children, and the bipolar disorder that ran in the family. She started walking a mile to the corner and back; the mile turned into 11. She walked morning, noon, and night.
“If it rained, the kids would say, ‘We hope the sun comes out so Mumma can get outdoors.’ Exercise is peace of mind. You come back and feel so much better,” Kathie said.
After her husband died, the depression she had been too busy to feel reared its ugly head.
“I’d be vacuuming at midnight and walking the camp roads at daybreak. I couldn’t stay still.”
Kathie continues to take medicine for anxiety and depression. Living with an aortic aneurysm, her philosophy is, “Life’s too short. Live for today.”
Kathie has outlived her mother, husband, two brothers, and son. The thing that bothers her most is eating her meals alone, without anyone on the other side of the table.
Still, her daughter calls every night, and her other children live close by.
“I enjoy taking care of people,” Kathie said. “Do unto others as they would do unto you. My mom used to say that.”
As I reflect on the “deep, dark hollow” of my own life, I marvel at the miracle of having a woman like Kathie Conary watching over me. She isn’t just the woman walking alongside the road picking up trash to make the neighborhood nicer.
She’s the woman who taught me to keep moving through darkness toward the light, toward life.
