Mary Pride

Mary Lois Pride
 
A supervising nurse, hardened by complaints, pokes and kicks from dementia patients, cried openly. She had just been told that Mary Lois Pride's dogged fight against Alzheimer's disease was over.
 
“I’ve never seen a patient so determined,”  nurse Della Brown said, with tears streaming down her face. She’d been informed by Lois’s son Jim Allen, who was in the nursing home room with his mother and her husband Ron Pride on the afternoon of April 26, 2025 when ‘Lo” drew her final, struggling breath. 
 
Jim, who had been trying to soothe Lo by rubbing her arms, noticed that her breathing had stopped. He kissed her forehead and whispered "Ron."  The 91-year-old husband barely heard him, or didn't want to. Jim called his name again, and Ron rushed to Lo's bedside and kissed her lips, her mouth open and eyes closed as they had been for days. The son and the husband hugged each other and continued to cry.
 
Mary Lois Pride, who was 87 and four years younger than Ron, had always insisted that she would die first.  She wanted to be sure she could open the door for her retired newsman, less religious husband.
 
Love of God had always played a major role in Lo's life. She was the daughter of very devout church goers, Nolie and Lellage Eubanks, in small-town Sylacauga, Alabama. Money was tight for the couple, who worked in a cotton mill, but they managed to raise three children, Emogene, Lois, and Paul. Lois played football with her young brother, and later in life often claimed she was athletic.
 
Ron questioned that, even though Lo brought a shelf full of bowling trophies, won between marriages, into their Gainesville, Florida home, and a tennis club coach once told Ron that he never had a member as determined as Lo to learn that game. Determination was in her blood, as a high schooler she couldn't wait to leave the quiet Sylacauga lifestyle. 

She first went to a Nazarene college in Nashville. The money ran out during her second semester, but she met and married  Jim Allen, a fellow student from Gainesville. They had three smart, good-looking kids, Cindy (now Williams), Debbie (now Morgan), and Jim Allen (junior).  When the marriage broke up, Lo went to work, mainly in secretarial positions. 
 
With her Doris Day smile and a terrific sense of humor, Lois quickly made friends who would soon love her. Not a big joiner, she frequently befriended the less popular people she'd run into. For much of her time in Gainesville’s Magnolia Ridge nursing home, she'd pat the hands of women in wheelchairs and sit with them in the day room.  And always looked forward to husband Ron’s almost daily visits, as well as those by son Jim and daughter Debbie.

Lois and Ron enjoyed three decades of very close and happy marriage. With a push from her daughter Cindy, Lo had placed an ad in the Gainesville Sun in 1995. She and Ron were each looking for a new love and, before the year ended, they sealed the deal.
 
In addition to Ron, Lois’s loving survivors include her forementioned children Cindy Williams, Debbie Morgan and Jim Allen, her sister-in-law Frankie Eubanks, daughter-in-law Johanna Allen, and sons-in-law Charlie Morgan and David Williams. She also leaves four grandsons and two great-grandkids on her side of the family.