PARIS – Hours before she died Saturday – three days shy of her 97th birthday – Alice B. Cornwall remained as sharp as a tack.

She was in her bed at Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway. She often lovingly called Stephens the “best little hospital in the world.”

Into her room came William Medd, her doctor and friend of many years. She had recruited Medd when he was a young doctor to practice in the Oxford Hills.

Do you think there will be room for me in heaven, she asked?

Medd assured her that heaven was a very big place indeed.

“And when she gets to heaven, she’ll be Mrs. Cornwall up there, too,” he told her family and friends as they gathered on her birthday Tuesday at the First Baptist Church of Paris on Paris Hill.

Medd knew her as Mrs. C, a woman of means who was a generous benefactor and fund-raiser for good causes at both the hospital and the schools.

“She was 65 when I got here,” said Medd. That was more than 30 years ago.

“Thirty years ago she was just beginning,” he added. “Needless to say, Mrs. C was a major presence on the board at that time.”

She served as a hospital trustee from 1961 to 1997. Through the years, she spearheaded many fund-raising efforts for the hospital, including its Christmas tree lighting project and the Caring Tree walkway campaign.

She supported the hospital in ways both big and small, from leading capital campaigns for building expansions to knitting baby caps for the obstetrics department. She was active in causes right up to the end, including her work on behalf of homeless children.

She truly loved the Oxford Hills community and was “an incredible can-do person,” Medd said.

She had definite opinions about what was best, but she was also willing to listen to others and change her mind, he added.

When he arrived here in 1976, Medd said he immediately saw the need for a hospital morgue. But Mrs. C. was adamantly opposed to having a morgue “because she could imagine herself lying there, cold,” said Medd.

He went to her house on Paris Hill, her home since 1954, and talked reason to her.

“She was the kind of person that if you gave her a rational argument, she would change her mind.”

The Rev. Don Mayberry of the 1st Congregational Church of South Paris returned to his former church to officiate at Mrs. Cornwall’s service. He said she had planned it in every detail, right down to the ringing of the church bell, 97 times.

“Would any of you be shocked if I told you that Alice was very good at making her wishes known?” Mayberry asked.

Laughter filled the church.

Mayberry said that Mrs. Cornwall was much more than a “businesswoman through and through,” as one person saw her.

“There was much more to her than that. She was loving and very spiritual,” he said.

In a visit to her hospital room in her final days, she told him someone came in and saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, feet dangling, eyes closed.

“Are you sleeping, Mrs. Cornwall?” Mayberry said the man asked.

She said no, but told Mayberry later she wished she’d told him she was praying.

“I seem to be praying a lot,” she told him.

SAD 17 Superintendent Mark Eastman said Mrs. Cornwall could champion the big causes, like getting people to fund the $500,000 high school theater-seat campaign. But if she’d hear about a small need, she also went about meeting it, Eastman said.

She saw to it that all SAD 17 schools had a defibrillator. She created funds for kids who didn’t have money for books or winter boots. She encouraged people to buy school supplies while they shopped for groceries so children that needed them would have them.

“She was mindful that real philanthropy is demonstrated one life at a time,” Eastman said.

Last spring, Mrs. Cornwall brought a basket of goodies to Eastman in the hospital when he had hip replacement surgery.

“She was just a real caring and compassionate person.”