The Bend Bulletin, 1997, by Penny Starr There's a lot of mystery in 107 years. Edith Ward touched people with her smiling eyes, impish grin and the habit she had of dispensing hugs to just about anyone who crossed her path.

Everyone called her Grandma and indulged her collection of costume jewelry.

So when she died on October 30, 1997, her friends grieved. They buried Edith in a pretty blue dress that was a birthday gift. At Edith's funeral, they helped carry her coffin and signed a remembrance book.

But the handful of mourners admitted they really didn't know Edith, a white-haired wisp of a woman who lived almost 107 years.

I hadn't expected that confession when I went to Edith's funeral, although the two-paragraph obituary The Bulletin ran seemed remarkable.

In Edith's lifetime, the Wright brothers made their famous flight and men walked on the moon. Nineteen U.S. presidents held office. Inventions ranged from the circuit breaker to cyberspace.

And what about her own history? Was her childhood happy? Was she once a blushing bride? Did she have children of her own.

And how did she come to spend the last 25 years of her life at Bachelor Butte Nursing Home in Bend? No one knew the answers.

"All we had was her name and Social Security number," says Estelle McCafferty, funeral directory with Deschutes Memorial Gardens.

No surviving relatives were at the funeral to share Edith's past. In the quarter century she lived at Bachelor Butte, she had no visitors. Those who stood at her graveside were her caregivers who had grown to love Edith over the years despite her usual silence and occasional demands for shoes and socks or a wheelchair.

A few days earlier, the same caregivers had gathered at Edith's bedside to sing "Happy Birthday." They believed she was born on October 30, 1890, and died on the same day 107 years later.

A birthdate and name wasn't much to go on, but as I watched workers lower Edith into the ground, I was determined to put a face on this centenarian.

My search proved both fruitful and frightening-a puzzle that once put together revealed a portrait of a woman who life wasn't nearly as innocuous as her death.

Edith was born in Marshland, near Clatskanie, the daughter of Walter and Mary Colvin and the fifth child of 13 [15] the couple would eventual conceive. She was born, however, in August 1891, the year after her older brother, Elmer, who was born in 1890.

Above Edith's bed hung a poem someone wrote for her a few years ago. It mentioned her husband, Edward. But records show Edith married a man named William, who apparently lived in Washington. Life may have been good for Edith in those days and she bore William's child, although its gender remains a mystery. But then something went awry and Edith left her husband and 11-year-old child never to return again.

The only clue of her fate are notations in her medical records describing Edith's "restlessness and domestic infelicity."

In 1923, by court order issued in Columbia County, she was committed to the Oregon State Hospital, where she would live for the next 46 years.

In 1969, Edith was released to a commercial nursing home in Washington and then in 1972 she was transported to Bend.

Edith's admittance papers at Bachelor Butte don't give much information, reflecting a long life in institutions.

But if the quiet, sweet Edith her friends miss may have had a troubled past, she still leaves a legacy worth remembering.

Her life reminds us that society has come a long way in the way it diagnoses and treats the mentally ill. And, more important, Edith showed us that each of us, without prejudice, is capable of love.

The Colvins, Oregon Pioneers" 1982 Stout. Edith Colvin was born in August 1891. About 1910, she married Carl Johnson and they had one son, Clifford Henry Johnson. They were divorced, and in 1921, Edith married William B. Ward. About 1925, Edith had a nervous breakdown and was committed to the hospital in Salem where she spent the next 44 years. She was released from the hospital in 1969, and the family knows nothing more about her. Clifford spent a few years with his grandparents, Walter and Mary, but when he was 13 or so, he left and went to the coast where he worked in the logging camps. He was married but had no children. His first wife, Audress Charlene, died in 1955; his second wife's name was Caroline. Clifford died in Siletz, Oregon, in 1972.