Mary Lou Gibson has one of those bell-clear voices. She was born in 1939, but at times, she sounds like a woman in her 30s. She says she hasn’t noticed.
Her house is bright and tidy in the afternoon. An angel hovers above the couch, painted by her granddaughter. Most of her decorations are black-and-white family photos. They hang in the short front hall – “my wedding wall” – and stand up on an antique desk made of marbled wood. She asks me to pardon the blanket that is neatly draped over a chair. Her 2-year-old corgi mix Wendy is shedding a lot this spring.
Gibson, a trained journalist, has a basket of magazines and newspapers by the hearth. There’s a new issue from a Nebraska high school’s newspaper and copies of two of the Catholic publications which regularly publish her articles on the lives of saints.
It’s been more than 300 articles, over 30 years. In an office with lilac walls, she has two shelves full of books on saints, each shelf two rows deep. Most of the books, she says, have been gifts. She’s become a fixture in Catholic Spirit, the magazine delivered to 80,000 households in the Diocese of Austin. She says she’ll never run out of saints because there are thousands. But she has one restriction: She does not like to write about martyrs. The descriptions of torture stick with her. She pauses. “Anyway! What else?”
“Anyway! What else?” – Mary Lou Gibson’s signature pivot phrase
This is her signature pivot from darkness to light in our interviews. She can sum up bone-deep grief in a single sentence – bring you into the hospital room where her husband came to peace with his death, for example – and, after a beat, she perks up, tilts her head, and says in a bright tone: “Anyway! What else?”
At times, Mary Lou seems opposed to darkness. Literally, she told me in 2023 that she wasn’t interested in walking her dog at night anymore. Why? She just didn’t feel like she belonged in the dark anymore. She used to love night walks. In fact, she asked her doctor about her new dislike for nighttime, and he said that’s fine. She hates when the answer is: Well, you’re getting older. That’s all she has to say about that. “Anyway!”
It’s not that she ignores pain. When she talks about martyrs, or her parents’ separation after her father returned from the war, or the loneliness that comes with being a widow, there is, in each case, a certain squinting curiosity that comes over her. It’s a look of quiet teenage rebellion, the kind of sharp stare at a dinner table that might presage an escape out of a window. She says she has “an issue” with Good Friday, when Christians remember the crucifixion. “I think about how the soldiers drove nails through his hands. How did they do it?” She asks no one in particular, and the squint begins. “How did they feel? How did they go home to their families?” For a moment we sit in the silence that follows that thought, and it seems like she might actually work out the answer. “Anyway! What else?”
Gibson is not one to use flowery language, although she is an avid reader and writer. Her husband Ron was a writer, too. They met working as journalists in a newsroom in Nebraska, and in his last job he was adviser for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at UT-Austin.
Her most precious memories with him involve very few words. When he proposed to her, which came as a total surprise after a few months of going steady, they were standing in a park in Nebraska on a beautiful day. He pulled a box out of his pocket and opened it. She mimics how she reached her hand out, how he slid the ring on her finger. She teased him for 40 years: “You never said the words. You never said, ‘Will you marry me?’”
When they first moved to Austin for his graduate education, they brought three little boys with them and moved into married student housing converted from hastily built World War II army barracks. That first day in Texas, Midwestern Mary Lou opened a cabinet and saw cockroaches. She simply closed the cabinet and said: “Ron, take me somewhere nice.” They went to Zilker Park. It is still her favorite place in Austin. That first year, they ate Christmas dinner outside at Zilker. “Because we could.”
Shortly before Ron died in 2002, Mary Lou visited him in the hospital room where he was receiving dialysis. He told her, “I’ve been speaking with the Lord.” She said, “Oh really?” He said, “It’s going to be okay.” Simple. Ron was a man whose Ph.D. centered on Joseph Conrad, with his meandering prose, who wrote weaving sentences like: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” Ron lived to celebrate their 40th anniversary in August that year, and he passed away the next month.
Ron was fun. He made Austin fun, and so did the other students they met. The former barracks had thin walls that they could hear their neighbors through. Once when their eldest son was awake struggling with asthma, a neighbor spoke through the wall: “Do you need some cough medicine?” Mary Lou replied: “No thank you, Dave.”
In their six years at the Brackenridge apartments, their neighbors became like family – all of them far from home, all of them broke, all of them raising little children, all of them without family nearby to help. They watched each other’s babies, went grocery shopping together, and barbecued together. To Mary Lou, this kind of camaraderie is one of Austin’s defining features. It is a place where few people are from, but where many people find each other. UT-Austin, the magnet that creates this dynamic, is still central to Mary Lou’s life. She could attend the ornate 19th century Catholic cathedral Downtown, St. Mary, but she is dedicated to the simpler St. Austin right by campus. She loves to see the students.
I first interviewed Mary Lou more than a year ago, and none of our interviews have gone too long. Mary Lou’s got things to do – an impressive rotation of volunteering responsibilities, and church events, and, of course, Wendy needs her exercise. Mary Lou is a doer. There’s a sticker on her fridge that says: “Preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words.” Sitting at her kitchen table, she tells me she needs to head to the Bullock Museum soon, but I’ve asked her so many questions. She wants to interview me now.
This article appears in May 9 • 2025.
