Mary E. Reuland

Mary E. Reuland died peacefully in her sleep Saturday, August 9, two months shy of her 86th birthday. She had fallen and broken her hip a couple weeks earlier, which seemed not what fate would have foretold yet nevertheless seemed to tell her it was time to go. Her husband, Robert J. Reuland, went last year in similar fashion. Both died at a comfortable rest home in the Iowa cornfields with their daughter by their side.

All things considered, it was a dignified end and no one will begrudge her the right to leave. She would have been, if anything, displeased by all the fuss made over her, and likely she would have told us all just to go about our business and not fret too much, but thankfully her sharp wits hadn't lasted quite as long as her body. A state high school champion guard in her youth, she had always been fit, regularly humiliating her son and his neighborhood friends on the driveway basketball courts of Dubuque, but after her husband Bob passed she was no longer the person her friends and family remembered. Sometimes health or at least physical health is not altogether a blessing, for the body may linger after the mind has gone, so truth be told had Mary not gone the way she did there might be more grief than now, and her passing is the lifting of a weight to all who wished the best for her.

Mary, known to those close to her as Peach, was to those same people simply the best woman they had ever known. Born into a large family of six sisters and (much to the undoubted dismay of her farmer father) but a single son, Peach Snider met Bob Reuland in Ames where he had come from Philadelphia to study nuclear reactors at Iowa State University. She fell in love with the somewhat exotic PhD with the flattop haircut, and the pair often told stories of driving from the laboratory with radioactive samples in the trunk of their borrowed '54 Chevy. After a brief stint in Dallas, Texas, they returned to Iowa to raise a family in Dubuque. Bob taught chemistry at Loras, while Peach received a bachelor's and then a master's degree and taught science to bright Jefferson Junior High middle schoolers who later in life would write her letters of thanks after becoming doctors, for instance.

Peach would have no regrets right now. She lived a wonderful, happy, and fulfilling life, with two children and a passel of grandchildren, regularly flying to France and Italy where Bob would take carefully composed photographs of buildings while Peach would drink wine. After retirement, she threw herself into the Dubuque Arboretum and her growing family. She leaves behind a son in Vermont, Robert, and his wife Renee; a daughter Liz and husband Dave in Wisconsin; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren with two more on the way.

Mary will be missed painfully and remembered lovingly. She made the world a better place by living in it. Nothing greater could be said of anyone. Goodbye, Peach.