Three years have passed since Anna left us. I’ve already written about the signal graces of that day; how she waited until Bud’s homecoming was secure, and until all of the arrangements were finalized. We all thought she had been aiming to reach one hundred. She had simply been waiting for her brother.

Along with all of the personal effects of Bud’s that I collected from the house on Thornridge, I also found item after item from Anna’s career and travels that I had never seen. As with the artifacts I found of Bud’s these items once again bring me back to the “big-ness” that is Anna. Here are a few…

Anna was in nursing school at Norwalk Hospital the day that word came home about Bud. He was proud of her decision to go into nursing and in his letters, encouraged her to go as far as she could. This photo of her was used in a brochure:

In late 1944, she joined the Navy Nurse Corp. and Ensign Anna Byrnes was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas. We have a few boxes of letters between Anna and Rita (who was also studying nursing at Adelphi on Long Island). Those letters continue to show the family bond that existed in the Byrnes family. Mama and Papa must have really missed their lively girls after suffering Bud’s loss a year before.

The war ended, and so did Anna’s time in the Navy. After separating from the military, she returned to Stamford and attended New York University to earn a degree in Nursing. She was about to begin a position at United Hospital in Port Chester, NY when the Navy lured her back.

She was sent to Great Lakes, Illinois, and given the rank of Lieutenant.

The thing that makes me laugh about the pictures from this time period is that she was always surrounded by men! Her assignment at Great Lakes was to teach corpsmen to be medics. Later in life, she’d muse about those “boys” and think about how many of them had gone off to Korea or Vietnam. She’d get a bit weepy, probably thinking about what some of their families had dealt with. Most of the time, she’d end up chuckling about some wild thing one of them had done, though.

Anna’s later assignments in the Navy included a tour as the ship nurse on the USS Butner, transferring military and their dependents from the US to Southampton, England and then on to Bremerhaven, Germany. I think this is what ultimately gave her the travel bug. It never left her! She was stationed in Grosse Isle, Michigan, Reykjavik, Iceland, and Bethesda, Maryland where she and her ward nursed President Johnson back to health from a gallstone attack.

Anna loved being a nurse, and this was evident when she was made head of recruiting for the Naval Nurse Corp. It was in this role that she was elevated to the rank of Captain. She was awarded this honor by her boss at the time, friend and first female admiral of the Navy, Alene Duerk. Anna was interviewed by the New York Times on the occasion of Admiral Duerk’s honor.

Upon Anna’s promotion she received many letters of congratulations. A few are here…

Anna traveled extensively as a recruiter, sharing her own experiences and passion for the Navy and nursing. Her role also had her stand in as Inspector General in Navy hospitals around the world – Tokyo and Morocco are just a few I remember off the top of my head. In Morocco she met the Personal Secretary of the King of Morocco and she was gifted these funny slippers.

Everywhere she went, she tried a new cuisine – but couldn’t wait to get back to a good cup of tea and a baked potato!

Another fun thing that I found was her invitation to the National Prayer Breakfast, attended by President and Mrs. Nixon. I have a feeling Anna was not impressed, but liked the invite!

Anna was fortunate to meet so many wonderful friends in the Navy. She stayed close with many, and loved going to annual reunions. Here she is in Newport at one such event.

She traveled as often as she could. Here she is in Ireland with her dear friend Irene Sullivan.

I had the good fortune of traveling to California with her when I was in high school and then later to Italy in 1998 when she turned 80. You couldn’t stop her!

I think about Anna more than I think I should. An imperfect person, like all of us, I still feel like it’s so easy to fall short in her shadow sometimes. I was lucky enough to have her in my life and in my children’s, but how I wish that we all had more time to be inspired by her. And maybe I found a bit of that inspiration in prepping this post.

She typed her closing remarks for the graduation corpsmen at Great Lakes in the back of one of the programs. The remarks are brief, but urge the graduates to honor each other by doing “today’s job well”. I am sure as I head into this unknown school year and fret over how to take care of so many, she would probably have the same advice: “we must face each day with its new problems and do the best that we are capable of doing”.

How is it that she always knew the right thing to say?