Anna S. Mair

Anna Scott Mair, a gifted artist, devoted mother and grandmother, voracious reader, natural storyteller and lifelong maker of beautiful things, died on September 29, 2026 at the age of 61.

Born September 10, 1965, in Canterbury, England, Anna lived a life that resists easy summary, largely because she was interested in almost everything and good at an unreasonable number of things.

Anna spent her earliest years in the English countryside. As a teenager, she moved to the United States with her mother and sisters, but England never entirely surrendered its claim on her. She carried with her the birdsong, the gardens, the particular green of the countryside, and memories of her father’s garden. Half her heart, it sometimes seemed, remained planted there.

The other half she scattered generously.

Anna was one of those irritatingly gifted people who could simply decide to make something and then, somehow, make it beautiful. Creativity seemed to come to her without much ceremony. Painting became an especially important part of her life, and her work earned her a place in Cincinnati’s art community. But creativity was never something Anna reserved for a canvas. It appeared in her sewing, her woodworking, her garden, her home and in the way she saw the world. She could also sit down at a piano and play by ear, an ability that seems unfair to those of us who require sheet music, lessons and considerably more effort.

Her creativity was matched by an equally restless mind.

Anna was a natural storyteller with a formidable intellect and a wicked sense of humor. She was brilliant, quick and very funny, sometimes all within the same sentence. She also loved to read. Many Januarys found her happily disappearing into her room with a stack of books, beginning the new year by entering someone else’s world for a while. For Anna, a new year deserved a new narrative.

For all the things Anna could do, though, the role that seemed to come most effortlessly was motherhood.

Motherhood was one of the many difficult things Anna had the nerve to make look easy. She raised four children, Alex, Daniel, Sarah and Samuel. The parts of motherhood that exhaust most people, the repetition, the tending, the thousand invisible tasks required to make another person feel safe and loved, seemed to come to her with an almost baffling grace. She had a gift for caring for children, and when her own grew up, they gave her an entirely new audience for it.

Her grandchildren were, without question, her masterpiece.

Lainey, Kinley, Kaleb, Kaylee, Nora, Henry and Anna became the great loves of her later years. She gave them her time, her imagination, her patience and the kind of attention children instinctively recognize as love. She got down on their level. She played. She listened. She made things with them and for them. And she created the sort of small traditions that children may not realize are traditions until years later, when they discover they can remember every detail.

They knew, for instance, that Nanna’s boxes were always worth opening.

Anna collected boxes. Little ones, beautiful ones, and ones that surely had no practical reason to be kept except that she liked them. Her grandchildren learned that somewhere among them there was usually something interesting to be found. Sometimes candy. Sometimes a tiny treasure. Occasionally a stray sewing needle, which added an element of risk to the enterprise.

They looked anyway.

If there was one thing Anna’s family understood by then, it was that life with her rarely followed a predictable script. Anna had always operated on her own timeline. Appointments, expectations and, eventually, medical statistics were often treated more like suggestions.

When Anna was diagnosed with cancer, she was given predictions about what the months ahead might hold. She proceeded to spend the next eighteen months making those predictions increasingly unreliable. She endured treatment after treatment, setbacks followed by recoveries, and more than a few moments when medicine offered one version of what came next and Anna supplied another.

People called her a fighter, and she was. But Anna’s particular brand of fighting was less about grand declarations of bravery and more about continuing to be herself. She kept reading. She kept laughing. She kept thinking several steps ahead. She kept loving and being loved. And she kept spending her time with the people who had always been at the center of her life.

There were many of them.

Anna is survived by her parents, Cynthia Marzluff and Alistair Mair; her sisters, Julia Mair (Andy Pratt) and Jane Krekeler (Dave Krekeler); her aunt, Kathy Allyn; her former husband and lifelong friend, Dan Schultz; her children, Alex Schultz, Daniel Schultz, Sarah Holm (Gregory Holm) and Samuel Schultz (Veronica Sanchez); her grandchildren, Lainey Bors, Kinley Schultz, Kaleb Schultz, Kaylee Schultz, Nora Holm, Henry Holm and Anna Holm; her grandson Samuel, expected in November; and many nieces and nephews.

She was preceded in death by her grandparents, Jane Phillips and William Allyn; her stepfather, P.J. Marzluff; and her granddaughter, Harper Schultz.

A list of names, of course, can only tell you who remains. It cannot quite explain what Anna left with them.

She left paintings on walls and things made by hand. Gardens she had planted and books she had loved. Stories that will be told and retold, almost certainly with embellishments she would have appreciated. She left her eye for beauty, her curiosity, her humor and her habit of noticing things other people missed. Her children will hear her in themselves, and her grandchildren will grow up discovering all the little pieces of her that became pieces of them. And somewhere beneath all of that is still the girl from Canterbury who never entirely left the English countryside behind.

There will still be gardens, and birds singing in them. There will still be that particular green she remembered. There will be books worth disappearing into, pianos waiting to be played, things worth making and ordinary afternoons worth turning into stories.

For a woman who spent her life creating, perhaps that is her greatest work: she made a world around her that was more beautiful, more interesting and considerably funnier because she was in it.

And in the people who loved her, that world carries on.

A celebration of her life will be scheduled at a later date.

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