"We had more spectators at our losing game. Nobody could believe we were basketball players."
Haines was tough. In 1998, she got hit by a car at a 10K in West Hartford. She was 84. "I got up and said, 'I got to keep going,'" she told me the day after the medical personnel bandaged her arm. "I only had a mile to go."
Whenever I asked her how she did in a race, she'd say, "I finished."
After she moved to Northampton to live with her daughter, I didn't see her that much. Probably one of the last times I saw her was in 2006 when she ran the Hartford Marathon 5K. She finished the race in 1 hour, 19 minutes, with Verna her guide dog and two daughters by her side.
And she was not last that day, finishing 568th out of 575 runners. She was 92.
She finished.
"She lived a full, full life, a very full life," Hartford Marathon race director Beth Shluger said. "No regrets. Life doesn't get any better than that. It doesn't get any better than a Mary Haines life."
One of Haines' nephews was a doctor. When he was in medical school, he told her that there was a shortage of cadavers. She decided that she wanted to donate her body to a medical school. So she did.
Even in death, Haines was still doing something interesting, pushing the envelope a little, doing something that most people wouldn't think of doing.
"She always wanted to be a cadaver," Pat said. "Finally, she'll get to go to college."
There will be a celebration of Mary Haine's life Nov. 25 at the Scout Hall Youth Center, 28 Abbe Road, East Windsor, from 3-5 p.m.
