Maria Popescu

2 May 1943 — 17 January 2025

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

She planted trees she would never sit under.

Photos: 5 photos
Stories: 3 stories

Their life

Maria was born in a small village outside Cluj, the eldest of five, in a house with one stove and a great many opinions. She trained as a biology teacher and spent thirty-one years in the same school, teaching three generations of the same families.

She kept a garden that fed half the street and a notebook where she wrote down every plant she ever grew, in blue ink, in handwriting that got smaller as the years went on. When she could no longer kneel in the beds, she sat on a chair at the edge of them and directed.

After retirement she learned to swim at sixty-four, took up the accordion again at seventy, and became the person her grandchildren called when something in life needed to be made sense of.

She was diagnosed in the autumn of 2024 and died at home, in her own bed, with the window open, on the 17th of January. She asked that there be no speeches — and then gave us all a page of notes about what to say.

“We are only ever looking after things for a while.”

— Something she said often

Photographs

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Memories people shared

The list she left in the cutlery drawer

Ana Popescu· Granddaughter· January 2025

She left a piece of paper folded twice in the cutlery drawer, where she knew somebody would eventually look for a knife. It said: water the two on the windowsill, not the one by the door, it is already gone. Give the good shears to Radu. Tell the school I want them to keep the microscope with my name on it and let a child use it, not put it in a cupboard. And then, halfway down the page, in the same blue ink: stop reading this and go and eat something.

Added 25 January 2026

Nobody could ever have too many tomatoes

Radu Mureșan· Neighbour, for 40 years· Always

In August her hallway was full of tomatoes. Crates of them, along both walls, so you had to turn sideways to get to the kitchen door. She gave them away to anyone who came past and she never once accepted money. The rule was: you may refuse a tomato, but you may not refuse twice. My daughter was seven the first time she came home with a bag of them and asked me who the tomato lady was. Last summer, twenty-two years later, she took her own daughter to that hallway. Maria was too tired by then to stand for long, but she had put two crates out anyway.

Added 21 January 2026

The accordion years

Ana Popescu· Granddaughter· Summer 2019

She started playing again the year my grandfather died, which I only understood much later. Every Thursday she would come down with the accordion in its brown case and say "only one song, I am very rusty" and then play for forty minutes. The one she always finished with was about a man going home. She never told us what it was called. When I finally found the sheet music in her notebook it had no title on it either — just the notes, and in the margin, in her small blue handwriting, the words: "for later".

Added 19 January 2026

In their name

Maria Popescu supported these causes. Donations go directly to them — LibreMemorial takes no cut and processes no payments.

Hospice Casa Speranțeihospice.ro

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Maria Popescu

Their life

Photographs

Memories people shared

The list she left in the cutlery drawer

Nobody could ever have too many tomatoes

The accordion years

In their name

The QR code and a card to print

Maria Popescu

Keep this page growing