Martha Mabey Contacts

Family friend Martha Mabey shared these thoughts in a book she wrote about her friends; the book was shared at Martha's funeral in Noveber of 2019. Clearly, she had been working on that book for some time.

My friend, Sarah Williams, is lost to me now. She's in a residential home outside Atlanta for Dementia and Alzheimer's patients, where I visited once and she held my hand. She knew I was someone close, just not who I was. The rich, wonderful years of our friendship will never vanish like the memories of her life, though. When we first met and talked for hours about the British author, Charles Williams, I was convinced Sarah was an angel, allowed to walk around and hang out with people like me who read such strange, obscure books. Sarah and her husband, Loren, moved to Richmond's Fan District and enrolled their son, David in the Richmond Montessori School when I was Head of the school. It was 40 years ago — David and Lars became inseparable friends, and when Lars died in 1987 Sarah phoned me where we then lived in White Stone, Virginia, every day for months to make certain I was surviving. Sarah and Loren, who as Director of Medical Education at the Medical College of Virginia, loved to travel and visited my husband and me in both Oaxaca and San Miguel, Mexico, where we celebrated a surprise birthday for Sarah, with flowers, dinner and a mariachi band. Sarah as been a librarian, a social worker, a weaver and ultimately (to my body's benefit) a massage therapist. She loved her job at Westminster Canterbury in Resident Services just as she loved the Episcopal Church — both in Richmond and in Boone, North Carolina, where she and Loren moved when he retired. They opened a B&B on a mountain with spectacular views. In many respects Sarah and I were like sisters — introverted intuitives whose energy and tempo were in quiet harmony. As couples we spent every weekend together in Richmond, grilling on each other's decks, drinking more wine than I can believe and when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi coast, they came to Biloxi to help us rebuild. A deep sense of quietude unites my heart with Sarah's. Her children (David, Steve and Loren) rise up and her call her "blessed."

- Martha Mabey