Even before she was stricken with Parkinson’s disease and cancer, Miriam E. Tillery told her children she wanted to donate her body to science. Recently, when her health was failing, she reiterated her wishes. “She thought it would promote developments in people understanding how the body is affected by these diseases,” said her son, Kenneth. Mrs. Tillery, 90, died of Parkinson’s disease Wednesday, Sept. 22, in Tower Hill Healthcare Center in South Elgin, where she resided. Born in Elkhart, Ind., she grew up in South Bend. She received a degree in elementary education from Illinois State Teachers College, now Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. She taught 3rd grade in Middlebury, Ind., for a year and in 1940, married Earl F. Tillery, a fellow student at George Williams College in Chicago where she also studied. They moved to Elgin in the early 1950s and raised three children. In the late 1950s, she took a teaching job with Community Unit School District 300 in Carpentersville. She taught 4th grade for a couple of years before retiring because of health problems. Mrs. Tillery was passionate about world peace, her son said. “She wasn’t out demonstrating, but she was always very adamantly against the Vietnam War,” he said. For more than 50 years, she was a member of the American Association of University Women. She was a member of the First Baptist Church of Elgin. Other survivors include another son, Adrian; a daughter, Bonnie; a brother, James C. Toothaker; a sister, Lettie Johnson; and five grandchildren. A service will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday in First Baptist Church, 1735 W. Highland Ave.
