(1940-2019)

When as a high school sophomore Nancy Jane Exworthy, the future Sister Margaret Augustine, told her mother that she wanted to enter religious life, her mother dropped the bowl she was drying and ran upstairs to her room, crying.

It was many years before Nancy Jane found out what had prompted her mother’s emotional reaction. After Nancy Jane made final profession, her mother finally told her the tale of her very difficult birth, to the point that the doctor had come out of the delivery room and asked her father which one, mother or baby, he wanted saved if it came down to that.

“My mother said she prayed and prayed for help, and she heard a voice say to her, ‘She’s mine. Will you give her back to me?’ and my mother said yes, and when she said yes, I was born,” Margaret said in her “A Sister’s Story” video in 2017.

“And I was kind of sickly as a child, so she always thought that some time I’d be gone, and she said when I told her I wanted to be a Sister, she heard the same voice. That’s what startled her and she dropped the bowl; it wasn’t my announcement. She said the voice said, ‘Remember, you promised.’”

Read more about Sister Margaret Augustine (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. Funeral arrangements are being handled by Anderson-Marry Funeral Home, Adrian.

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