THE Baltimore housewife Mary E. Frye was acknowledged towards the end of her long life to be the undisputed author of Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, the well-known bereavement verse which has brought comfort to mourners throughout the world for the past 70 years. There were many other claimants to its authorship, including attributions to traditional and native American origins.

Frye’s assertion that she wrote the piece was confirmed in 1998 after research by Abigail Van Buren, the newspaper columnist responsible for the popular column “Dear Abby”.

Frye had never written any poetry before 1932, when she and her husband had a young German Jewish girl, Margaret Schwarzkopf, staying with them. According to Frye, their guest had been concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but she had been warned not to return home because of increasing anti-Semitic unrest. When her mother died, the heartbroken young woman told Frye that she never had the chance to “stand by my mother’s grave and shed a tear”.

Frye found herself composing a piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag. Later she said that the words “just came to her” and expressed what she felt about life and death. Because people liked the free, open-air nature of her 12-line, untitled verse, she made many copies and circulated them privately. The verse demonstrated a remarkable power to soothe loss. It became popular, crossing national boundaries for use on bereavement cards and at funerals regardless of race, religion or social status.

Today, it is often a feature at memorial services for disasters where there has been a large loss of life, for example the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, or the 9/11 terror attack in New York in 2001. In Britain, a reading on the BBC television programme Bookworm in 1995 attracted more than 30,000 requests for copies. A year later, a Bookworm poll named it “the Nation’s Favourite Poem”.

Born Mary Elizabeth Clark in Dayton, Ohio, Frye was orphaned at the age of 3 and moved to Baltimore when she was 12. Although she had had no formal education, she was an avid reader with a remarkable memory. She married Claud Frye in 1927; he ran a clothing business while she grew and sold flowers.

Frye continued to write, often to support animal charities, but none of her subsequent work matched the impact of her first piece. She never published or copyrighted the poem, which over the years became subject to small changes. The modern definitive version is:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

Widowed in 1964, Frye is survived by her daughter.

Mary Frye, housewife and poet, was born on November 13, 1905. She died on September 15, 2004, aged 98.