Lynne's column about Mary

Two really funny people died recently. Art Buchwald was one. As much as I liked his witty political and social satire, I was really moved by his decision, along with friends Mike Wallace and William Styron, to be public about each of their battles with depression.

The ability to share one’s biggest problems, most threatening experiences, is a gift to others.

Which makes me think of the other funny person – Mary Catherine Webster -- my friend since our freshman days at Forest Quad in 1972. An Irish wit and storyteller, she attracted friends like a magnet.

We took several Religious Studies classes together during our years at IU, each on a quest to find our spiritual home. Eventually, she changed from her childhood Catholicism to Episcopalianism. I converted to Judaism. We often spoke of what a favorite religion professor, Anne Carr, had said: that the kind of questions you’re asking are more important than the answers you think you’ve found at any given time.

I think our friendship endured because we were always asking the same kinds of questions. And, if we had talked a week ago or a month ago, our conversations never failed to illuminate the important things -- where we were going, what we had learned, our goals, our hopes -- sometimes, our weaknesses. And always with laughter.

When I visited Mary last fall, I spent Sunday morning at Grace Church in Colorado Springs, watching her as she worked with teachers and students in her job as Director of Religious Education there. (We joked about how well she had put that degree in Religious Studies to use!)

In January, as she began a workshop for her Sunday School teachers, she prayed: “Thine is the kingdom and the power and glory” before she became too short of breath to continue. She did not survive a massive heart attack that day.

For Mary, interest in politics and thoughtfulness about material goods and charitable giving was a natural extension of her spiritual life. To observe her 50th birthday a couple of years ago, she wrote a letter to women friends asking them to contribute to charity instead of a gift; and began a course of study which would have resulted in her becoming a lay deacon of the Episcopal Church, a role in which ministering individually to people plays a big part.

How does thinking of Mary Catherine Webster connect to Art Buchwald, besides their ability to make life more colorful by the stories they told?

During our sophomore year in college, I was very, very depressed – enough to skip a couple weeks of class, weeping, feeling sorry for myself, wrapped in my wounded pride.

Mary was the friend who called and said “I love you and I want to be friends forever. But if you don’t call today and get yourself into some counseling, our friendship is over.”

I got the counseling. It changed my thinking. It gave me the tools to recognize, later in life, when I again needed some help.

Just as Art Buchwald called Mike Wallace every night when Wallace was on the road, helping him to make it through his depression, Mary was the one who gave me the push to make it through mine.

She would have made a great deacon.


Lynne Foster Shifriss is assistant to the editor of The Herald-Times.

Note: A favorite book of mine is “Seems Like Yesterday,” by Ann McGarry Buchwald, about their romance and lives together in Paris in the ’50s. You can find used copies on Amazon.