Esther Martine Day

November 8, 1935 - August 31, 2023

Esther Day lived a long life marked by grit, gumption, strength and resilience, from a childhood cut short to an adulthood filled with family, career and home, and on to decades of retirement enjoying her grandchildren, travel and many hobbies. She had a 63-year marriage to the love of her life, (Reginald) John Day, as well as three daughters, one son, four granddaughters and one grandson.

Her perseverance led her out of circumstances that were, to say the least, tragic. She was orphaned by 9, separated from her two sisters (one of whom was sent to England, the other elsewhere in Ireland) and ensconced in a country village with distant relatives in County Meath, Ireland. She soon realized that her mother’s emphasis on education and self-improvement was not valued in her new household. So she read and reread the only books available to her as she charted a plan to escape. At 18, armed with a forged high school diploma, she fled to London to attend nursing school at Guys Hospital. It was not her calling, but her salvation.

In London, her world expanded beyond the Irish country village. She made many friends as a young nurse, a large proportion of them also Irish immigrants. She enjoyed her life in the city, appreciating access to culture deprived from her for years. Although she sometimes felt out of place in a country not always welcoming to Irish people, she rekindled a relationship with her younger sister, who was living with relatives in Chelsea, London.

By chance, at the age of 22 in 1957, she attended a friend’s engagement party. It was not in her character to approach the handsome young photographer, but she was emboldened by a beautiful new dress she wore that night, so she walked over to him and feigned interest in his camera. He was equally shy, but mustered the courage to ask for her phone number. They never looked back. Together they went on picnics in the countryside, Epping Forest and Devon, touring in John’s battered convertible. When she was assigned to a midwifery detail in Dover (riding a bicycle through the countryside to deliver babies as depicted so accurately in “Call the Midwife”), he would make the long drive to visit her every weekend.

After their wedding in May 1959, she dove into her new life with complete enthusiasm and determination, teaching herself to cook, run a household, take care of babies and children, and continue her work as a nurse at the same time. Starting as a newlywed (and for decades forward) she bought books and cut out newspaper articles about how to cook, how to be a parent, how to do anything, carefully underlining passages that she thought to be important. Her fearlessness served her well when -- at age 33, with three daughters ages 8, 6 and not even 1 year -- she and her husband took a gamble, sold their house, packed up all their possessions and moved across the Atlantic to the United States (on the SS United States, no less).

Fast-forward through their years in Rochester, New York; Esther was a devoted mother (welcoming their fourth child, a son, in 1970), nurse, wife, and friend to many. In the frugal ‘70s, she ran her household armed with extensive lists, weekly menus on the fridge, a budget, and huge pots of meals she often invented based on what ingredients were on sale. She encouraged her kids to participate in everything and anything that she thought would benefit them, be it various lessons – piano, horseback riding, sewing, canoeing, soccer, football, baseball in addition to Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts and Scrabble tournaments -- and any other opportunities for them to improve and learn. She took them on weekly library trips and adventures of all kinds. She tried to give to them what was taken so abruptly from her. What she could remember of her own parents’ values, she set as a guide for hers.

Esther built and decorated multiple houses with her husband, beautifully furnishing them with finds from her constant “travels” (i.e., garage sales, estate sales, barn sales, auctions and any other kind of sale), and learned how to cane chairs and refinish furniture. She was an incredibly prolific, speedy and skilled knitter, producing countless socks, mittens, scarves and sweaters distributed every Christmas. And amidst all of that, Esther spent decades as a registered nurse, working her way up to nurse manager/supervisor. In the 1980s, she earned a bachelor's degree in the evenings after work. And while she could never pursue the career she would have chosen -- a writer, literature professor or literary critic -- she was instead a lifelong reader of poetry, short stories (her favorite: Somerset Maugham) and novels.

When Esther retired, she and John moved from New York to Olney, Maryland, an approximate midway point among her children’s homes. They also began traveling the world in earnest -- one of their shared passions. She’d planned and led her family on many station wagon road trips in the ‘70s and ‘80s -- from Maine to Florida and points in between. But from the ‘90s onward, they went to Costa Rica, Thailand, Croatia, Ecuador, Ireland (multiple times), England (multiple times), Paris, Brittany, Italy, the French countryside, Scotland, a Caribbean cruise, Mexico and Quebec, among others.

Esther was known as a highly skilled self-taught cook (researching and planning meals days in advance, mapping out menus and ingredients across many lists and notebooks) and a warm, gracious host, welcoming strangers and friends alike around her table. No matter who she was feeding, she believed in (and usually insisted on) second helpings and sizable portions. As she eased into her years as a grandmother, she fed another generation with her hearty Irish and English recipes: Cornish pasties, shepherd’s pie, toad in the hole, potato cakes, sausage rolls, puddings and cakes. And over those meals, around her table, she sought to inspire her grandchildren with the same strength, resilience and perseverance that had defined her life.

In her final years, Esther continued to demonstrate that strength as she suffered a debilitating disease and the loss of John in December 2022. Our mother is much beloved, absolutely unforgettable, and sorely missed.

Send to someone

Share this obituary with others

https://everloved.com/life-of/esther-day/obituary/

Copy