Obituaries

Miriam E. Poeta

February 16, 1932 - July 31, 2026

As part of their instructions, we were to hold Dad’s ashes until Mom passed. They will be laid to rest together at Finn’s Point National Cemetery in Pennsville, New Jersey on August 19, 2026, at 11 a.m., which would have been their 78th wedding anniversary. All are welcome. A few graveside words will be spoken, and then we will do exactly as they asked. Go on.

Miriam E. Poeta

February 16, 1932 – July 31, 2026

Our parents had a strict “no services or ceremonies” rule. When Dad died, I wrote a eulogy and presented it to Mom as an obituary. She agreed that, technically, an obituary was not a service, and she let it stand. So, given that precedent, here is who my Mom was to me.

Mom turned 94 in February. She was a 4’11” spitfire who lived on her own for the past 8 years, worked out every day, walking and swimming, and volunteered at the church, the thrift shop, and for hospice. She presided over the ten-cents-a-block bingo with the authority of a woman who knew exactly where every dime was, and she baked for her community until she couldn’t, which was only a few days ago.

She met Dad in 1948 at the roller rink in our hometown. He knocked her down, he claimed by accident, but we know now it was on purpose. After a brief courtship, she left high school, married him, and was raising two boys while he was in Korea.

When Dad came home, she took a job as controller at the Anchor Hocking glass plant in Salem. One night he found her at her desk near tears, kept late over a month-end that was a penny off. Accounts vary as to what was said in her boss’s office but the result was they walked out together, and she never went back.

After that, they went looking for something Mom could do where Mom was in charge. They landed on cosmetology. Dad built her a one-room studio off the back of the house, she got her licenses, and thirty-some years later she sold the largest salon serving southern New Jersey and northern Delaware. Seven stations running full time. Six 15-hour days a week in the winter, five in the summer.

And still, every dinner was homemade. Wednesday night, every Wednesday night, was pasta with meatballs and sausage, and the meatballs were always homemade. I had to beg her for my grandmother’s recipe. I have since learned she recently gave it to her neighbors. You ate what was served or you went to bed, so there is almost nothing I won’t eat. The one exception was her oyster stew, the white kind, milk and butter and whole oysters. I would take the broth, crush a boatload of oyster crackers into it, and call it a day. Mom let nothing go to waste. Leftover pasta became pasta fagioli, a whole chicken became soup, a ham became ham, cabbage, and navy bean soup.

I was raised in that salon. Miriam’s Beauty Salon. As a baby I was passed from lap to lap and read to all day long. Later my sister and I filled shampoo bottles, washed towels, swept floors, and hid the dog when the inspector came. All five of us lived above the shop. The day my pet snake got loose was particularly memorable for the customer at the wash sink who looked up and watched it cross the light panel above her head.

Mom polled her clients on what magazines they wanted. What they wanted, it turned out, was Cosmopolitan and Playboy. So that is what she stocked, in a closed cabinet in the room with the hair dryers. Her view was that a woman sitting under a hot dryer was entitled to read whatever she pleased. Meanwhile she ran a strict no-gossip policy and would fire a client on the spot for breaking it. That was Mom. Completely unshockable about what people read, and utterly unbending about what they said.

Summers were camping or out on the Chesapeake, on the 22-foot houseboat my father, my uncle, and my mother built in the backyard. Grilling on the beach. Lying on the roof of that boat at night listening to my family play cards below me. Mom could dock that boat with the best of them, and anyone who has fought the current on the Salem River knows what that means.

Mom’s rules were self-sufficiency and independence, and she came by them honestly. Her own mother died slowly of cancer, and Mom was her teenage nurse. When an uncle I was very close to died, Mom sat me on the couch, got down on both knees, and told me the truth as she saw it: your father and I could walk out that door today and not come back, and you must be able to take care of yourself, and you will go on.

I never once heard “poor baby” in that house. It was always, “let’s get you patched up, you’ll be fine,” usually right after she blew on the cut to take the sting out of whatever was within reach, Sea Breeze or the peroxide from the salon. When it was actually bad, it was “ok, let’s get you to the emergency room,” without a single ounce of panic. Pain, injury, and loss were facts to be handled, never to be dwelt upon.

Before you get the wrong impression, there was another side to that tough coin, and it was work hard and live all the way. She could do things on roller skates that you see ice skaters do today. She and Dad moved five times and downsized more than once. I just found her skates in her garage. After all those moves, she kept the skates (over 80 years a least).

They travelled the amateur bowling tour when that was a thing. They hosted house parties that ran into the early hours, and she loved a whiskey sour and a grasshopper. They went dancing every chance they got and played cards late into the night, though never on the same team, because legend holds that a misplayed card nearly ended the marriage early on. When I was 15 or 16, she said, “your father and I, Aunt Al and Uncle Bill are going to Europe for a couple of weeks. There’s cash in the freezer. Call your sister if you need anything.” My sister was 21.

She collected every silver dollar and half dollar that came through the salon. One summer she cashed them in and took me, my sister, Darlene Wanamaker Davis, Roxanne Livingston, and their boyfriends on a tour of every amusement park in the tri-state area. We were sitting in the parking lot at Great Adventure when the news came that Elvis had died.

On Tuesday morning, July 28th, the hospice nurse called and said she was having a bad day and I should come. The days before, she had been as active as ever, spending what she called a great day with her great-grandchildren, building a model with Brooks. When I walked in, I saw the baking sheets and the mixing bowls and the mixer sitting out on the counter, untouched. That is when I knew. Not having the strength to bake for her friends was the thing that told me.

She faced death with nobility and without fear. She knew what she was choosing when she refused heart surgery. They could fix the blockage and buy her a little time, but they could not fix the valve, and the valve was what would have given her back her strength. No strength meant no activity, no community, no usefulness. That was never going to be acceptable to her. She told us she was ready to be with our father. She outlived all of her oldest and dearest friends, and then, being who she was, she went out and made new ones. Patty, Betsy, Marcia, and Jane, among many others, her buddies at Ware, who helped our family this week. Godsends, all of them.

She is survived by her sons Raymond, Rockey III, and J.R. and his wife Dawn, along with 14 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by her loving husband, Rockey, her daughter, Cindy, and her daughters-in-law, Diana and Susan.