Willie Mae Phillips Owens Ross, the mother of a longtime Harlem funeral home director, died Saturday at age 104 in South Carolina, her son said.
She was a lifelong resident of Branchville, S.C., a tiny town where she was born in 1916, said Harlem funeral director Isaiah Owens.
Ross had 11 children of her own, and became mother to many of her dozens of nieces and nephews when their own mothers died, her son said.
“They would come to my mother, once they buried their own mothers, and ask my mother, ‘Miss Willie Mae, can you please be my mother?'” he said.
“She wound up being the mother of the community, the town, the county, the whole area. She was everybody’s mother,” he said. “She just knew how to be a mother, to mother the motherless children.”
And all those children helped care for Ross through the years, he said.
“All of these people always came to visit her all the time,” he said. “You never had a day when somebody wasn’t sitting on the porch with her. They just came to visit Mama.”
Ross herself was one of 13 children and attended church-sponsored schools. She retired as supervisor of housekeeping at an area nursing home. She also helped Owens run a second funeral home he operates in Branchville, along with his Harlem business.
The popular Harlem businessman marked 50 years running his Manhattan funeral home in 2019.
Ross had 11 sons and daughters with husband Clifton Owens, a brick mason who died in 1984, and became mother to the five children of her second husband, Rev. Blease Ross, as well.
She is survived by six of her children, 44 grandchildren, 76 great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren, her son said.
While she lived her whole life in Branchville, Ross moved to a nursing facility in nearby Orangeburg, S.C. about two years ago, he said.
