Mary Galbraith

This morning, I learned that Mary Galbraith had died.

I could not believe it. I'm having a hard time with it, not so much emotionally as physically. Mary Galbraith, dead? Not possible. People die. Physical laws do not. If Mary Galbraith has gone, she has only disappeared from this dimension with a force that has sucked all the air out of the space she occupied.

It is that vacuum that I'm trying to understand. I know about death. Mother, father, icons, wife. I have mourned, grieved, raged, denied, processed, adjusted. This thing with Mary is new. She was fantastic, and those she knew will miss her always, but that's not it. Mary was energy posing as matter. Energy cannot be lost. Or so the physicists say. How, then, to explain the space I'm in, where Mary Galbraith was? What has changed in the universe this morning?

I didn't know the complete Mary. Her third child, Dub, and I became close friends in the seventh grade and remained so until his death in 1981 in a highway accident. I knew Mary from the time I spent at her house, 1349 Ross Ave., which was considerable. If statistics had been kept, I believe that 1349 would rank first in visitor traffic, from 1952 through 1961, in Abilene, and maybe in Texas. Mary and Gubo had six kids, Gail, Gervis, Dub, Julia, Kandy and Deborah. Gail was head cheerleader and Gervis was a quarterback in the middle 1950s, when Abilene High was on a long, historic winning streak, and all those kids loved to come to Mary's house, and Dub and our gang then took their place. I wonder how many people feel as I do, a member of an extended family before which Mary placed thousands of bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches and gallons of iced tea. Her funeral is Saturday in Abilene, at the cavernous First Baptist Church, and I wonder how many of those kids will be there.

Mary was brunette and loved music, loved to dance. She could be a little rambunctious. She would much rather have been one of us. She had the lowest threshold of pleasure of anyone I have known. She did not have an off switch. When it was just them, her kids might have had to beg her for some peace and quiet, and not the other way around.

She never lost a friendship, that I know of. Ours continued after Dub's death, and my move to Southern California. I would see her for iced tea and a visit and nine million laughs when I was in Abilene. Pictures would never do Mary justice; you need the sound track, too. In the 1960s, I said to her, "You look like Suzanne Pleshette." She laughed and took to it, and after that, whenever I called or saw her, I said, "Hi, Suzanne." I loved having a unique connection with her.

After Gubo died, she moved into a house on Blair Street, filled it up with photos and memorabilia and lived alone. I don't imagine she was hard-up for company. If it were up to me, I would position an easel in the church on Saturday, and on it place an enlarged photo of Mary, just her face, looking up at the moment more kids are trooping into her kitchen at 1349 Ross. In that face, you will see the energy that this morning has created a strange void, like air displaced behind lightning. No doubt Mary's life was a bolt of lightning. Now that it's over, the air is closing behind her, just taking awhile following along behind a bolt that was decades long. It will reach us as thunder. When I hear it, I will know that it is her, and what a unique experience I've had. If thunder rumbles through First Baptist on Saturday, it's the sound track.