Geraldine Bryan

1924 - 2025

Geraldine Parker Jones Bryan of Raleigh died peacefully in her sleep on Saturday, December 6, 2025, at the age of 101.

Geraldine Bryan was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and spent most of her youth on Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She was a graduate of the University of Chattanooga with a bachelor of arts degree in English, and of the Cadek Conservatory of Music and Fine Arts with a diploma in drama. She taught drama for several years at Fairfax Hall in Waynesboro, Virginia, and performed in the McCarter Summer Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. In "A Goose for the Gander" she played second lead to Gloria Swanson. She also taught for several years at Meriwether Lewis School in Ivy, Virginia, and for a year at Montreat Preparatory School. She lived in Raleigh for 60 years.

Her contributions over the years to the Community United Church of Christ in Raleigh - spiritually, morally, and aesthetically, as well as materially - are immeasurable. She was for many years a docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her own walled moss-garden is itself an exquisite work of art. She was wife to Robert S. Bryan, with whom she reared three honorable sons.

Geraldine Bryan was a liberal, an intelligent and insightful contributor to the New Age, an uncommonly good Samaritan, a woman of style, wit, flair, and exceptional taste. She shaped her life by books, close friends, her extended family, all things beautiful, and an abiding, personal relationship with someone she called "Spirit".

She was a person to whom the right thing came naturally. Geraldine Bryan had more people who loved and cherished her than many of us have casual friends.

She was pre-deceased by her husband, Robert Sedgwick Bryan. She leaves her three sons, Robert Sedgwick Bryan, Jr. and his wife Jennifer Lee, Sherwood Parker Bryan and his wife Leslie Dare, and William Samuel Bryan and his wife Stephanie Welsh; and four grandchildren, Robert Sedgwick Bryan, III, Stuart Bryan-Curry and her husband Scott Curry, Hannah Bryan, and Zenna Bryan.

While she lived, Geraldine Bryan expressed the wish that her obituary simply announce her death and the time and place of her memorial service, but such an obituary would surely have been unseemly. No reason for her to be embarrassed by only the barest observations on a life richly and generously lived.

A memorial service will be held at the Community United Church of Christ (814 Dixie Trail, Raleigh) on Friday, December 19th at 3:00 p.m. Contributions to the Community United Church of Christ may be made in her memory.

This obituary was written as a tribute by Geraldine's husband Robert prior to his death.