Christa's mom lived to be 94 years old:

[quote] Grace Corrigan, mother of Christa McAuliffe and education advocate, dies at 94

Not quite four months after she watched in horror at Cape Canaveral in Florida as the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing her oldest daughter and six other crew members, Grace Corrigan stood before an audience and spoke about everyday courage.

“The little things are the stuff of success,” Mrs. Corrigan told the 1986 graduating class at Framingham State College, an alma mater she shared with her daughter Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher who was the first private citizen selected to serve on a space mission. “She was a hero in the most meaningful way, the ordinary way,” Mrs. Corrigan added, and that was something they shared, too.

From a childhood during which her parents died when she was young, and on through retirement years when her daughter’s death thrust her into an international spotlight, Mrs. Corrigan met life’s reversals with candor, clarity, and a determination to keep doing good.

“It was a loss for me, just one of those overwhelming things,” she told the Globe in 1993, speaking quietly about her daughter’s death. “What can you do? You can’t go back and do anything about it. Except what I’ve been doing all along, which is to ask myself, ‘OK, Christa, what’s the best thing I can do here?’ ”

Mrs. Corrigan, who had returned to college to get a teaching degree after her five children were grown, was 94 when she died Thursday. She had lived in Framingham for much of her life.

In the years following the Challenger explosion on Jan. 28, 1986, Mrs. Corrigan devoted considerable time to advocating for well-funded school systems and extensive community involvement with children’s education.

“She had an impact on so many people, and she did it in a quiet, determined way,” said Mary E. Liscombe, director emerita of what is now the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning at Framingham State University.

“Grace was basically carrying on what Christa would have done herself, had she survived that flight,” Liscombe said. “She would always talk about Christa’s devotion to teaching and to the children.

As the first schoolteacher chosen to be part of a shuttle mission crew, Christa McAuliffe was a historic figure in the education community and was idolized by children everywhere. The tragedy of McAuliffe’s death, which enshrined her iconic status, left Mrs. Corrigan and her husband, Edward, to grieve a child’s death while the world watched.

Mr. Corrigan died of lymphoma at 67 in 1990. Before his death, he and his wife began collaborating on a book that included excerpts from McAuliffe’s letters and diaries. “A Journal for Christa” was published in 1993.

“Ed had strong opinions about NASA,” Mrs. Corrigan told the Globe that year. “He read all the reports and was bitter he’d lost his daughter. We made an agreement not to speak out publicly or to seek publicity by giving interviews, but I know it bothered him terribly.”

Both of the Corrigans traveled widely to speak to organizations and to participate in fund-raisers. “He missed Christa every day of his life,” Mrs. Corrigan said for his Globe obituary. “We incorporated her in everything, because she was part of us. He spent the last four years doing what she had left undone.”

In the 1993 Globe interview, Mrs. Corrigan recalled that after her daughter died, she took measure of the possible ways she could continue Christa’s mission in life.

“Maybe that involves working with schools or teacher organizations or the Girl Scouts,” Mrs. Corrigan said. “If I weren’t doing something I felt Christa approved of, I’d feel guilty.”

She added that “the important lesson we can all learn from Christa is to do what you want to do and do it as well as you can. I could have done without the losses in my life, I guess. But everyone suffers some loss along the way. You cannot escape it. Who promised us a rose garden?”