A perfect May morning in Gatlinburg. The mountains were clear, the flowers were bright, and we came to honor a woman who folded towels for 23 years.
As an ordained minister, I have officiated a handful of wedding and funerals over the years. I don't take that responsibility lightly. I want to tell you about Wednesday morning, because it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever been part of — and it happened right here in Gatlinburg, on a hillside with a view of the Smokies that Marina herself would have chosen.
We gathered at Smoky Mountain Memory Gardens to say goodbye to Marina "Nina" Torres Casas. She was 69 years old. She spent more than twenty years at Mountain Laurel Chalets, folding towels and sheets in our laundry department and cleaning cabins. She was the mother of Jazmin Hawks, who leads our entire housekeeping operation. She was the mother-in-law of Corey Hawks, our COO. She was, in every way that matters, family.
About 100 people came.
Of course, her immediate family as well as a WhatsApp stream to include family in Columbia. A graveside in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, broadcast in real time to a family in Colombia. Marina would have loved knowing they were watching.
They came from the community too — cleaners, maintenance workers, former employees, homeowners. The mayor's wife was there, because she loves Jazmin and works alongside her at the county schools. Friends from a local church came, including members who participate in Special Olympics, because that is the kind of community that surrounds this family. Flowers arrived from Gatlinburg-Pittman Junior High and the high school, and from MLC, and from the people who loved her. The tent was full. The hillside was full. The Smokies were right there, clear and close on a stunning May morning, as if the mountains themselves had showed up to pay their respects.
Jazmin had ordered monarch butterfly pins for everyone to wear — small, golden, in honor of her mother. Ana-Rose, Marina's granddaughter, handed them out. If you know anything about the weight a moment like that carries, you know that watching her do it was almost more than a person could take.
Then Yira sang.
"Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee — how great Thou art." Yira Gomez, daughter of Marina Torres Casas, May 20, 2026.
Yira Gomez is Marina's daughter. She is also blind. She stood at her mother's graveside on a clear Wednesday morning and she sang "How Great Thou Art" — three full verses, in English — with a voice so clear and so powerful and so certain that it stopped being a song somewhere in the middle of the first verse and became something else entirely. A sermon. A testimony. A daughter proclaiming the greatness of God over her mother's grave with everything she had. The crowd sang with her — mostly the chorus, because the chorus is the part that rises up out of you when someone else starts it and you simply cannot help yourself. The mountains were still and the sky was blue and 100 people sang together and it was one of the most purely beautiful things I have ever witnessed.
After the singing, Yira read from John 14:1-6. She read it in Spanish, from her braille board, her fingers moving across the page. No se turbe vuestro corazón. En la casa de mi Padre muchas moradas hay. Let not your hearts be troubled. In my Father's house are many rooms. A daughter, reading scripture by the electronic braille board, at her mother's graveside. I don't have a word for what that was. I only know that the whole tent felt it.
I spoke from the same passage. Jesus, the night before he died, gathering his closest friends and saying: I go to prepare a place for you. I talked about Marina's faith — quiet in the way she carried it, but never uncertain. I talked about how she prayed over me every single time I left the office, in broken English and Spanish, her hand on my arm: Sir Tom, Jesus is right beside you, and I pray He will keep you safe and drive right next to you every step of the way. Every time. For years.
And I talked about the towel.
In the last week of her life, when her body was giving out and she could no longer come to work, Marina would sit up in her bed and fold a kitchen towel. The hands that had folded towels and sheets for twenty years simply would not stop. They kept doing what they had always done — quietly, faithfully, without asking for anything in return. A towel cleans. A towel serves. A towel comforts. A towel absorbs what others cannot carry. A towel is humble. It never asks to be noticed. It just does its work, and then it is folded neatly and put away.
As we closed in prayer, Janet — a former MLC cleaner who has remained part of this family after her time on staff — stepped forward and sang another hymn in Spanish. Her voice filled the tent. It was the kind of moment that makes you wonder why we don't end every gathering that way.
And then, as I was closing in prayer, a yellow monarch butterfly flew in under the tent.
You can make of that what you will. I know what I make of it. The people standing there knew what to make of it too. It was a moment the kind that moves through a crowd when something happens that nobody planned and everyone recognizes. Marina Nina Torres Casas, making sure we knew she was pleased.
Afterward, we invited everyone to join us at the Pottery House Café, where we had a room reserved. About 40 people came — friends from Yira's church, MLC employees, maintenance workers, cleaners, laundry staff. The room was full of people who loved Marina and who had spent the morning saying so, and now they were eating and laughing and telling stories and passing food across tables and not wanting to leave.
The room was full. The laughter was real. The monarch butterfly pins were on every lapel. This is what family looks like at Mountain Laurel Chalets.
Laughter. Prayer. Love. Family and friendship and good food and the kind of hospitality and warmth that you cannot manufacture or automate or scale into existence. It has to be grown, over years and decades, by people who mean it.
Marina meant it. For twenty years she meant it, every single day, in every towel she folded and every home she prepared and every prayer she prayed over the people she loved.
My heart was full driving home.
At Mountain Laurel Chalets, we say that your family is our company. Marina Torres took that literally. She made us her family. She gave us twenty years of faithful, generous, unhurried care. And on a beautiful May morning with the Smokies in the background and a monarch butterfly passing through, we gave her the send-off she deserved.
It was a fitting way to end the day. It was a fitting way to honor a life.
Rest now, Marina. The towels are folded.
Marina "Nina" Torres Casas — June 1, 1956 – May 12, 2026. Twenty-three years a faithful member of the Mountain Laurel Chalets family.
