The RIP Thread...

I hope your wife is OK Jesse, finding a loved one dead is never fun even if it isn't a total surprise.
 
Condolences to your family from mine Jesse. Buried my own mother this morning. Glad to hear things are getting more normal for you and yours.
 
In 1975 I met a fellow student at the University of Delaware. Mary's father had just died and we found ourselves talking endlessly and getting to really like one another.
We rode our bicycles everywhere and cooked and ate great food and when the semester was over we bicycled to Allentown, PA to see her mother.
By the following December we headed down to Georgia for their family Christmas gathering, and it felt like there was good reason for the family to be meeting me.
Soon after she broke it off, and later I found out she had fallen for a less-than-ethical, married professor twice our age.
I still feel like she was emotionally trying to replace the father she'd lost.

Over the years we stayed in touch, she in Atlanta and I in Delaware. Every March we'd exchange newsy birthday cards, our births being all of 14 days apart. We kept our respective distances; her life was hers and mine was mine, but there was always, always a ton of mutual respect, despite the pain of our parting.

This last March she wrote of how the graphic design business was slow but improving, how she was traveling to Europe with her brother and his family, and running in marathons. I last saw her when I was at a nursing conference in Atlanta in 1999. I'd brought a three inch high stack of photos and we ate Indian food and she got to see my five children growing up in pictures. She'd never married. We walked all over Stone Mountain that next day and talked of people who had been in our lives back in 1975 to 1976.

Tonight my wife texted me asking how soon I would be home. I thought she was annoyed I was again at my parents' place for endless hours helping them with their latest crises.
When I got home she told me I had received a call from Mary's brother; calling to say that Mary had succumbed to breast cancer...
I'll be in Atlanta this thursday for the Celebration of Mary's Life.
 
We were young, alive and vibrant. I'll miss being able to speak with Mary as we cycle on in our memories...

PatMaryBikeTrip1975.png


Bicycle Trip in 1975
 
Jay,
Just got back from Atlanta and the memorial service for Mary, and a wonderful visit with Mary's family and friends.

The bicycle is a Peugeot PX-10 from the early 1970s, though I can see from the paint and decal set why you'd think it was a Bob Jackson.
Mary was riding a Motobecane, another French bicycle at that time:

MaryAndMotobecane.jpg
 
Mary stayed fit and still succumbed to a health problem while still relatively young. Misfortune. Hope that she found a satisfying life during the time that she had. I catch a little mischief or sarcasm, and vulnerability in her eyes.
 
You're perceptive Jay,
She could be mischievous, but was the kindest soul I have ever known; caring for people and animals all her life. Mary was a graphic design artist who used minimalist lines to produce drawings full of feeling; a true artist. Here's a sketch she did when we were in the local karate club:

oi_zuki.jpg

She was also a 5th level black belt, and an avid marathon runner.

During the floods in Atlanta which drove everyone else from her neighborhood two years ago she waded through chest deep water with cat boxes and collected cats from several homes and placed them in her second floor rooms.
When her friends finally got her to answer her cell phone and realized she was still in the area they brought a canoe and picked up Mary and the cats.
Mary wanted to go back for more pets when the local fire department commandeered their canoe to reach folks still in danger.

Mary and her family lived in Japan in 1963 and 1964. Her mother told me there was a mild temblor on Christmas Eve and they told her it was Santa Claus and she'd better go to sleep, and she willed herself to sleep in just a few minutes.
 
MaryInTheRain.jpg

One more picture, then I need to lay this to rest.
It shows the fatigue on Mary's face after a windy, and sometimes wet 80 miles bicycle ride.
By the way the rain coat she is wearing is one of the earliest Goretex Jackets produced in our area (a friend and I knew Bill Gore and were test subjects for the first raincoats).
 
Just seeing this set of posts and pictures about your friend, Pat. Hold the memories close...in the end it's all any of us really have.
 
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