Go in the back door at St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy in Buffalo, climb the narrow wooden stairs to the little office that is always a fast-moving, in-and-out meeting place for an entire community, and right now, no matter how much you prepare yourself:
The grief and disbelief are immediate when you see the empty chair behind the central desk, alongside the life-size cutout of Josh Allen, beneath the familiar painting that shows the mission’s founders, Amy Betros and Norm Paolini, side-by-side.
The desk is where Betros settled in each day, for years, to oversee the operation – a massive, nonstop effort of solace and assistance for a neighborhood in need – and why so many who loved her are feeling such loss on Mother’s Day.
“Amy never cried for you. She cried with you,” said Mike Taheri, the Buffalo lawyer who serves as director of education at the mission and who spoke with reverence of his longtime friend’s “maternal practices.”
Officially, I suppose, Betros had no sons or daughters — if you limit your definition of motherhood to the strict constraints of giving birth. But then you think about St. Luke’s, and the countless meals the missionaries serve to the hungry, and the clothing and shoes they provide to those in need, and the we’re-right-here-with-you assistance for those wounded by addiction, and the new men’s shelter rising up across the street, and the pupils from the home school who always sang “You Are My Sunshine” to Betros on moving-up-day, because her own mom sang it to her, in childhood …
Taheri summed it up: Betros has “thousands of children,” of all ages, over many generations.
On Mother’s Day, while her friends at St. Luke’s mourn Betros’ death in her sleep on April 30 — seven years to the day after Paolini, the co-founder, also died at 71 — they remain intensely conscious of what they know Betros would want them to do.
“She was a very spiritual person who trusted in God and was straight-forward in her requests,” said the Rev. Paul Seil, a Catholic priest who has lived on campus since he retired from regular ministry. “It was very hard to say no to Amy Betros.”
That sense of inspiration hardly ends with her death.
In the early 1990s, she chose to leave Amy’s Place — a tremendously successful restaurant in Buffalo — to team up with Paolini, a guitar-carrying cancer researcher from Roswell Park. They founded the mission at St. Luke’s, a Catholic church that had been closed by the Diocese of Buffalo, within a neighborhood where many families were in pain.
Dennis and Sue Gilhooley are “missionaries” at St. Luke’s, meaning they set aside their old routines to live and volunteer on the mission campus. They say a huge part of why Betros and Paolini chose St. Luke’s was a mosaic they noticed on the wall, an image of the Divine Mercy, or Jesus as described from a vision by St. Faustina.
To Betros and Paolini, the core meaning was simple: Everyone, no matter the struggle, is entitled to God’s mercy. Joanah Perkins — in hearing that — would totally agree, though she uses another word to capture what Betros personified:
Love, not as cliche but as an overwhelming, 24-hour force.
Joanah is an assistant district attorney, in Massachusetts. She and her siblings, Sydnie and Josh, grew up on St. Luke’s campus, where their mom was part of the operation from the beginning. Sydnie, Joanah said, was the first baby ever born at the mission.
All three attended St. Luke’s home school, which consists primarily of neighborhood children — the great majority of whom have gone on from St. Luke’s to attend college. The kids in Joanah’s family — like countless others from the mission – typically referred to Betros as “grandma,” a bond of presence and spirit that ran as close as blood.
Joanah, as she travels through her sorrow, considers herself lucky because of what at first seemed like a hard break. Her mother’s home at St. Luke’s caught fire a few months ago. The family temporarily moved in with Betros, in the mission’s “mother house.”
When Joanah went home for Easter, she stayed there and saw Betros constantly. They shared breakfast. They watched movies. Joanah felt the same deep comfort and safety she recalled from childhood, at the mission.
“I think it was just God,” said Joanah, of how those last days together came to be. She has a tattered picture of herself as an infant, with Betros, that she’s carried until it’s close to falling apart. She remembers Betros taught her — when Joanah was an intensely competitive little girl — how to lose a game of “Trouble” with grace, or how Betros and a whole contingent from St. Luke’s went to Boston on the jubilant day when Joanah walked the law school stage, in cap and gown.
“All I can say is she was my grandmother, but I can’t lay claim to her,” said Joanah, who saw how Betros brought that same love to everyone who passed through St. Luke’s – whether it was a friend of many decades or someone brought to the mission for the first time, after a crisis on the street.
When Joanah left St. Luke’s at Easter, she told Betros: “This isn’t goodbye, it’s see you later.” Not even two weeks later, her sister contacted Joanah in the middle of the night to tell her that Betros had died.
It remains unbelievable. From New England, Joanah spoke to Betros almost every morning. She finds herself again and again weeping out of nowhere, but what sustains her is the feeling shared by anyone you talk with at St. Luke’s, the idea that Betros lived out love in its purest form — and for those who knew her, such love was a door to the divine.
Meaning, how can there be death if someone loves in such a way?
Joanah returned to Buffalo to do a reading at the crowded and emotional funeral. All the regulars in the St. Luke’s office — the women and men who surrounded Betros each day — say she planned out every detail of her own service a couple of years ago, not from some sense of grim foreboding but because they all had a casual conversation about how that planning is something everyone should do.
Dennis Giloohey has become interim director. He said the first time he and Sue met Amy was absolutely mystical: They were helping with music for a teen music presentation at Holy Spirit Church that included young people from St. Luke’s, and the door swung open and a figure — outdoor light turning into her into a silhouette — swept in, arms up, saying:
“You’re the one!”
It was Betros. “God told me He was going to send me a keyboard player,” she said to Dennis.
Not all that long afterward, with their lives changed, he and Sue moved to St. Luke’s.
Right now, any mention of Amy Betros at the mission quickly leads to tears, because her friends say: This was a life defined by divine mercy. Pam Krzanowicz, for instance, principal of the 24-student Our Lady of Hope home school, remembers arriving at St. Luke’s almost 20 years ago, when that school was still just an idea.
The concept awaiting her: What would happen if you give around-the-clock warmth, attention and support to children coming from lives of relentless struggle, most of them living on campus? Krzanowicz thought about the notion, and bought in.
From minute one, she said, Betros embraced the school – but never acted like a boss. In her honor, as a sign that what matters will not change, the children will again sing “You Are My Sunshine,” just before they leave for summer.
“She was my friend, a second mother,” Krzanowicz said of Betros.
There was a time when Krzanowicz, a single mom, was in that no-cushion stage of being working broke — that place where you figure out which bills you can pay and which ones you can put off a little bit. At the worst possible moment, one of her kids called to say the freezer in their old refrigerator had stopped working.
It seemed like a quiet disaster. To buy a new fridge meant missing payments on some bills that would lead to larger trouble. Krzanowicz did whatever juggling she could, and in the middle of it school ended for the summer.
Betros, as she always did, gave every teacher an end-of-school card. Except this time Krzanowicz’s envelope held a check, covering the amount needed for a fridge.
You hear that story, Krzanowicz said, and you understand this: On the first day back to classes after Betros died, the home school staff brought all the kids together in a circle and said, “It’s OK to cry for grandma, because look: We’re crying, too.”
Amanda Ogwu, an eighth grader, grew up at St. Luke’s. In her earliest memories, Betros is a presence. Amanda’s family is from Nigeria, “and when we first came to America we were living in a shelter, and (Betros) brought us in,” Amanda said.
She always called Betros “gram.” She remembers how they would eat apple pie, side-by-side. “She helped us start a life in America,” said Amanda, recalling how Betros told her to never be afraid because God was always with her. Amanda believed it “because she had this kindness and warmth, radiating from her.”
Of more Earthly pursuits, Betros allowed herself one big one.
On each autumn Sunday, many St. Luke’s regulars would gather around her television for a few raucous hours, because Betros loved the Buffalo Bills with knowledgeable, always-keep-the-faith ferocity.
In particular, she brought all those protective instincts to “my Josh,” as she called Josh Allen.
She met Allen last year, when Scott Bieler — an old friend who operates the West Herr Auto Group —brought them together in a showroom, before Allen did a commercial. It’s hard to describe how thrilled Betros was. She had faith that she would meet Allen again, that he would someday become another pilgrim within the nonstop, dizzying stream of Western New York humanity that came and went every day from her office.
“I had no idea who half of them were,” Taheri said of that everyday parade of visitors, “but Amy knew.”
As Sue and Dennis Gilhooley note — at a time when they say “we’re already seeing Amy’s intercessions,” from above — everyone at St. Luke’s has this absolute belief about Betros, and the Bills:
“If we win it this year,” Sue said, “there’s no doubt about why.”
The other day I called Jayseana Jackson, a home school graduate who is now in law school in Atlanta. Her voice cracked when I asked her about Amy. As a child, Jackson felt the desolation of seeing her family splintered by foster care. She was eventually reunited with her mom and siblings, but a moment arrived when it looked like she was going into foster care again.
Betros, knowing Jackson’s mother simply needed a little time, stepped in and served as foster mother to the kids, until the entire family came together for good, at St. Luke’s.
Jackson never forgot how her college graduation photo was on Betros’ desk. She recalls how Betros often talked to her about forgiveness, about love, about being “Jesus-like.” Betros used to take “all the girls from St. Luke’s” out to Sunday breakfast, Jackson said, and she told them not to dwell on grudges or past hurts, how life is about making your next decision a good one — especially within “the movement and flow” of hard times.
That resolve propelled Jackson to Canisius College, and then law school. “I’d never be in the place I am right now without her,” Jackson said, which on Mother’s Day sums up the gift Amy Betros gave to thousands whom she raised.
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