Mary Robichaux

1955 - 2010

MOSS POINT — When Michael Robichaux crossed paths with the spunky medical clerk more than 30 years ago, she thought he was cocky and arrogant and didn’t mind letting him know.

But Robichaux, an attendant with an ambulance company, kept asking her out until she said yes.

Mary Cluff finally came around and even told friends Robichaux would be the one she’d marry, before even telling him.

“She was right,” said Robichaux, now a major with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department. “She was the love of my life.”

Mary Cluff Robichaux died at her home May 8. She was 53.

She worked for Singing River Hospital and then Bienville Orthopedics for more than 30 years combined, but it was being a mother to Aimée and Jonathan that gave her the greatest satisfaction.

She was blunt, but tactfully so.

“You never questioned where you stood with her,” Aimée Robichaux said.

She was honest and expected that of her children.

“She’d tell us, ‘It doesn’t matter how bad it is, nothing can be worse than lying about it,’” she said.

Robichaux’s fascination with the weather grew after Hurricane Katrina reduced the family’s Washington Avenue home in Pascagoula to a slab.

She posted often on an online weather forum and became the go-to person for storm details by friends and family.

She’d seen “Twister,” the 1996 Helen Hunt-Bill Paxton movie about tornado chasers, at least 25 times, her daughter said.

And during a high school band trip to Universal Studios she chaperoned, Mary Robichaux experienced the movie live.

“We must have gone on that ride 12 times,” she said.

The Robichauxs’ engagement came on April Fool’s Day, but their marriage was no joke.

They showed compassion and consideration to each other, teaching their children how to love.

“I haven’t found the love that my parents had. My parents had a love like none other,” Aimée Robichaux said. “She’d always say ‘I love you’ before he walked out the door, because she never knew if those would be the last words he said.”

-- Donna Melton, Sun Herald