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SISTER MARY EDWIN DECOURSEY
The only girl, living on a farm with four brothers, motherless from an early age, it seemed the only thing to do was to send little Mary DeCoursey to live with the Sisters at Saint Mary's Academy at age ten or eleven.
And Saint Mary's became her home for most of the remaining years of her short life. Graduating from the Academy in 1915 and from St. Mary's Junior College in 1917, she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity in 1918 and received the name, Sister Mary Edwin after her mother, Mary McCormick, and her father, Edwin DeCoursey, who doted on her.
Although she spent a few years after making vows teaching at Sacred Heart School in Leavenworth, she spent most of her religious life as the "disciplinarian" at St. Mary's Academy. Despite its ominous name, her job was similar to a Dean of Girls in a modern high school.
By 1930, having been a sister only 12 years, she died of cancer at Providence Hospital, Kansas City, Kansas on Jan. 20, 1930.
Sisters who knew her remember her as someone "very special", delicate, a "charming little person", tiny, quick in her movements, with flashing brown eyes.
That her father and brothers adored their little sister goes with out saying. Every Sunday afternoon, Will drove her father up the highway to Saint Mary's where Edwin brought portions from his Sunday dinner, hoping that she would find the appetite to eat some of it. (He must have felt that the sisters did not feed her enough.) Sister Regina, then eight years old, remembers walking with her father in the cold to Providence Hospital every evening to visit her during her long illness, and recalling his tears walking home, "the only time I ever saw my father cry." Later that year, her father, Edwin, inquired about having a memorial in memory "of his little girl", erected on the grounds of the Academy. The final result was the "Shower of Roses" group, depicting St. Mary and St. Therese, the Little Flower, which was executed in marble in Italy, and shipped to Leavenworth. It was dedicated (with all nieces and nephews participating) on May 17, 1931. It is the group on the western side of the campus behind Maria Hall.
