Besties for 78 years die of coronavirus 6 days apart, now 'They're together up there'

For 78 years — through adolescence, marriage, children, jobs, widowhood and dementia — Mary and Jessie remained devoted friends.

They bickered the way best girlfriends sometimes do. They teased each other about boys they'd grown up with in their old neighborhood on Detroit's east side. And they teased each other about getting older. Mary never failed to take joy in the fact that she was a little more than three months younger than Jessie. But they always found their way back to each other.

Even at the very end. 

Like so many elderly people during this pandemic, Mary Hackett and Jessie "Toots" Ancona, both 91, were living in metro Detroit nursing homes when they became sick with COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

They were transferred to Beaumont Hospital in Troy within days of each other and, unbeknownst to them, ended up in rooms just two floors apart. 

They died within six days of each other — Mary on April 5, Jessie on April 11 — without their families at their bedsides because that is the way people die these days.

But neither of them were alone.

Mary and Jessie met in the fall of 1942. Mary's family moved to a building near what is now the Heidelberg Project and into an apartment across the hall from the one occupied by Jessie's family. They grew close, though they sometimes disagreed with each other and Mary would end up stomping up the stairs in anger. Otherwise, Mary helped Jessie with homework. And they went to movies and rode streetcars and grew into young women together.

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They were so much alike, these daughters born into Italian-American families with strong Sicilian roots. Mary was her parents' only child. Jessie was the eldest of two; she had a younger brother. They were brought up to appreciate family, faith and food. "They had a shared history," said Mary's daughter Mary Jo Miles of Madison Heights.  

And yet in appearance, talent and temperament, the women were quite different. Mary let her hair go gray while Jessie kept hers dyed. Mary almost always wore dresses and thought Jessie — who almost always wore slacks — should do the same. Mary excelled at making cannoli and Jessie knew it. Jessie excelled at making cookies and Mary knew it. Mary never swore; Jessie swore frequently, though she never took the Lord's name in vain.

She was the more outgoing of the two, Jessie was. "Just like a teddy bear, you wanted to hug her," said Miles, 56. "My mom's not quite into that physical contact thing."

So at church, Mary would roll her eyes when parishioners stopped to hug or kiss Jessie as they walked back to their seats after communion.

"Stop that," Jessie would tell Mary.

"If my mother saw that, she would be mad at me if I was kissing people at communion," Mary would counter.

In 1973, Mary was living in a new development in Sterling Heights with her husband and daughter and son when she talked Jessie into moving her family — husband, daughter and three sons — onto a block one street over. 

With proximity, the women grew even closer.

They shopped together — they loved Hudson's, the former department store chain that was synonymous with Detroit. They lunched together. Sometimes their families ate dinner together. Mary and her daughter and Jessie and her daughter — the girls are the same age — went on outings to Toronto and Niagara Falls. 

Mary introduced Jessie to her church, St. Renee Goupil in Sterling Heights; she was a founding member there. "They (would be together) at this women's club for four hours and then they would come home and sit in the driveway and talk for another hour," said Josephine Kuhlman, who is 55, lives in Sterling Heights and is Jessie's daughter.

When it came time for Miles to choose a dress for her wedding, Jessie weighed in. “I picked out a really plain wedding dress," Miles said. "I wanted to do all the lace and bead work myself. My mom was like, 'You're not getting that dress, that's cheap!' Aunt Jessie just stepped in and told her off. 'Mary, that's the one she wants! You leave her alone.' I got the dress I wanted."

Mary always drove — Jessie had been too afraid to learn — and continued driving even after she and her family moved to Troy and elsewhere on the east side. And when Jessie's husband died in 2004, Mary drove even more. She took Jessie to doctor appointments, to church — until late last year, the two friends sat together in the front row for 10:30 Sunday Mass — and anywhere else she wanted to go until she broke a hip five years ago and stopped driving.

By then, dementia had begun its creep.

It was difficult for Jessie to see Mary change, difficult to talk to her every night on the phone. "She would cry," Kuhlman said. "She would say, 'If you'd seen us as teenagers. ... She always used to help me with my homework.' "

Mary and Jessie last saw each other at church in early December. They talked about something, maybe going to brunch, maybe going on some sort of adventure. Whatever it was, this is what Mary said: "Toots, I'd take you if I could drive."

On Dec. 26, Mary fell. It was her third fall in a month. Her family realized she needed to be someplace where she could get around-the-clock care.

Jessie cried.

At the end of February, Jessie, suffering from congestive heart failure and cellulitis, returned to the hospital for the third time since December. After she was released, doctors sent her to a rehab  facility until she was well enough to go home.

By April 11, both were dead, these friends who grew up together and grew old together. And while they may have died without their families at their sides, they did not die alone. Best friends never leave each other, at least not in spirit.

“If I could be lucky enough to have one friend for that many years, oh my gosh," Kuhlman said. "Time, space, nothing could separate them."

Not even death.

"They're together up there, I know that," Kuhlman said.

Contact Georgea Kovanis: gkovanis@freepress.com