It was perhaps reflective of that modesty that when she died on Dec. 8 at 101 in an Ithaca nursing home, the news did not travel widely. Newspapers in central New York carried a brief obituary, but her death went unreported virtually everywhere else.

It was only after the announcement by the Coast Guard on Thursday that she would be buried with full military honors on Saturday at Pleasant Grove Cemetery in Cayuga Heights, N.Y., that word of her death spread nationwide.

Indeed, the almost five-month delay in her memorial owed something to Mrs. Finch’s solicitous nature. Near death, she had made it clear that she did not want her funeral to disrupt her relatives’ Christmas holidays or to make mourners travel during a dark and icy Southern Tier winter. (Besides, she relished the annual resurgence wrought by spring.)

So it was put off. The funeral is to be held in Ithaca, with the military honors coming afterward, a ceremony befitting this Philippine-born daughter of an American father and Filipino mother — one who, in 1947, received the Medal of Freedom (the forerunner of today’s Presidential Medal of Freedom), the nation’s highest award to a civilian.

When the Japanese occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, Mrs. Finch posed as a Filipino, but she became a United States citizen after the war. “Because she was over 18, she could have chosen to be American or Filipino,” Ms. Murphy said. “When the Japanese landed, she chose to be mum, but in her heart she had chosen to be an American.”