UXBRIDGE, ON – Maureen Gibson, passed away at the age of 87 this Monday surrounded by loved ones and a freezer full of bananas she had been meaning to make into banana bread.
“I’ve lived a beautiful life of love and adventure,” Gibson wrote in a final letter, “If only I had more time to spend with my family, I could have finally made that banana bread I kept promising. Not doing so might be my biggest regret.”
Gibson was an esteemed elementary teacher and active member of her community. She loved friendly tennis matches, embroidered pillows, and bookmarking banana bread recipes she would never come to use.
Gibson had devised an ingenious system wherein she’d buy a bunch of bananas and eat only one or two. A few days later she’d notice that all her bananas had gone black. Instead of panicking at the sight of her rotting produce, Gibson would instead chuck the remaining bunch into her freezer.
She repeated this cycle once a month for the past 63 years.
“It saves you money!” Gibson would often repeat when anyone questioned her about her refusal to simply throw away her bananas, “Why do that when I can and eventually will just make it into banana bread? The sturdiest of the loaves!”
Over her 87 years, Gibson had reportedly devoted most of her savings to the utilities company responsible for powering the electricity to her 24 chest deep freezers.
“This is a burden, I mean gift that I hope to bestow on all my grandchildren. They will become the rightful heirs to my 3,402 over-ripe bananas,” she dedicated in her will. “There might be a few bags of walnuts in the freezer too, now that I think of it.”
