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Bon vivant. Confidant. Neighbour extraordinaire. Naturalist. Born May 16, 1919; in Toronto; died March 16, 2017, in Toronto; of liver cancer; aged 97.

I'm lucky to have had a mother like Mary. I don't know another person who was able to squeeze so much delight from so little. A practical joker, she once served dog food hors d'oeuvre, and notified her guests after dinner. She got all the punch lines of my jokes, and this became a litmus test when I'd phone to confirm she was still sharp and on top of things.

One doesn't live independently for 97 years without fortitude. Mary had helped her own parents live on their own, with unwavering attention and personal sacrifice, into their mid-90s. She was an ace driver until her final years, when she was still fighting her only ever traffic summons.

Mary didn't dwell on the vicissitudes of old age and took a blasé attitude toward her aches and pains.

She met my father, Bud Bunnett, in the early 1940s, when both worked at Toronto's Simpsons department store. He was a rising executive in women's fashion and Mary was hired as a personal shopper. Their romance began with an invite for coffee, and a mutual love of music, art and fun led to a highly compatible marriage and three children: Peter, Sarah and Jane. After 44 years together, Mary was dealt a body blow when he died following a gut-wrenching year of cancer treatment. The closest thing to a boast I ever heard from her was that she had "never once let him see her cry."

After Bud's death, Mary doubled down on all things botanical with her equally feisty sister Fran. They co-ordinated major projects at the Toronto Botanical Garden Club, the Royal Ontario Museum, Casa Loma and the Women's Art Association of Canada. One of her best ideas was to cut and regrow multiples of an original plant from Emily Carr's studio, potting them to raffle off as fundraisers.

Mary was a savvy art investor, but she was no art snob. She liked to tell the story of an inquiring guard at the National Gallery who noticed her perplexed study of some kind of conceptual piece on the wall. Mary told him she found it very interesting. He informed her it was the thermostat.

One of her morning rituals was to sit in her great-great-great-grandmother's rocking chair listening to the jazz radio station she supported, while reading The Globe and Mail with tea and toast. She took daily skinny dips in her garden pool, sheltered by lush vegetation. Sheltered, that is, until I inadvertently exposed the pool by overdoing the trimming of her beloved cherry tree.

When I was still apologizing a week later, she told me it really wasn't all that bad, and it let in more light. "What about the neighbours when you're swimming?" I asked.

"That's their problem."

Mary could be deadly serious about her principles (she once summoned me to retrieve her from a weekend visit out of town where the host insisted on using racist language) and deadly realistic: Minutes before the anesthetic for an operation that might have prolonged her life, she called it off, telling the surgeon she'd had a good 97 years and "didn't want to be greedy."

Peter Bunnett is Mary's son.

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