Mary Anne Martel is known in her community for her unwaveringly positive attitude. Almost annoyingly so, her son, Ben Martel, joked.
She was always volunteering. Always donating money.
“When I know how much money she has and she’s donating all of her money and time to other things, I’ve just been frustrated,” he said.
So when Martel was airlifted from Concord to a Massachusetts hospital to treat severe burns all over her body, it wasn’t surprising when a small voice came from the stretcher.
“I can take this one off the bucket list!” she chirped.
The incident that landed her in the emergency helicopter was a series of unlikely events that caused a freak accident you might expect to see in an episode Sherlock Holmes.
Martel went to the house on July 28 with her two children who were moving their father to a long-term care facility that could assist with his worsening case of Alzheimer’s disease. To help pay for the care, they had agreed to sell his house, a small lakefront cottage in Weare. Even though Mary Anne and Cliff had divorced years ago, she didn’t hesitate to volunteer to help clean the place up.
On the morning of the accident, Martel’s son, Ben, and daughter, Kelley Martel, were outside moving the generator they used in the winter if the power went out. To make the generator lighter and easier to move, the gasoline was emptied into a couple of plastic containers and put off to the side.
Martel was in the kitchen emptying out the refrigerator when a gush of amber liquid suddenly came through the screen window and drenched her body. A car right outside the kitchen window had backed up over one of the plastic containers sending a geyser of gasoline toward the house.
As Martel walked to the bathroom to wash herself off, Kelley said a flame from the pilot light leaped from the stove onto her mother, enveloping her entire body in flame.
“It was like a fireball,” Martel said. “All I could think of was to wrap myself in a towel.”
Kelley frantically patted the flames and shoveled water onto her mother. Ben threw his own body on top of his mother, in a desperate attempt to suffocate the fire. Finally, the fire subsided.
They walked her out of the cottage and down to the lake to soak as they waited for the EMTs to arrive.
When Martel arrived at Mass. General, more than 30% of her body was covered in second- and third-degree burns. For the next couple of weeks, she underwent painful procedure after painful procedure – her arm was held together with hundreds of staples, bandages were removed and reapplied on raw skin every morning and she underwent hours of grueling physical therapy.
Even so, she rarely complained unless asked. Martel fought through excruciating pain to ask doctors about their days or life stories.
When she finally recovered enough from her burns to walk, she wasn’t just happy for her own progress. She was excited because it happened under a specific staff member’s supervision.
“This girl tried so hard with her and my mom wanted her to feel some satisfaction,” Kelley said.
She insists her injuries could have been worse – her face could have more burned, the bottoms of her feet could have been touched by the fire.
“There are negatives if you want to look at the negatives but there are also the positives when you look at the positives,” she said.
Martel would rather talk about the sailboats she could see in the Charles River from her hospital bed, the diversity of the staff at the hospital, and her future volunteering plans.
In fact, her whole life has been dedicated to some type of community service. She said once she gets back home to Peterborough and figures out what her new limitations are from the burns, she’ll figure out her next project.
For 21 years, Martel worked as a dorm mom to students at High Mowing School in Wilton. She made them soup if they were sick, offered advice if they were struggling, and left her door open so they felt welcome to talk to her.
High Mowing accepted students from across the globe to stay in Martel’s dorm. Kelley remembered her mother constantly driving back and forth to the airport in Boston to pick up students. It wasn’t in her job description to do this, she said she just wanted them to feel like they had someone waiting for them on the other end of their travels.
Students confided in her. Parents trusted her.
“She didn’t just shut down her place at a certain hour because her job was done,” she said. “No, she was a mom.”
After she retired from the school, she worked as a caregiver and volunteered to teach driving classes to refugees in Manchester at the International Institute of New England in her spare time.
Now, the community that she served for so long is coming back to serve her.
Martel’s long term friend, Andrea Badger, started a Go Fund Me page to help cover the expenses of medical treatments, airlift ambulance, and equipment she will need to recover at home.
About 150 people donated to the page and have raised more than $18,000 to date. Most of the donations have come from people Martel made an impact on, Kelley said. Some people in the comments of the page said Martel was their dorm mom years ago.
“Mary Anne has impacted many lives and its time to help her and her family in their time of need,” one of the comments read.