Memorial to a great person and a great friend - Christine Gilbreath Borget May 2022

Last week, May 10, 2022, the friend I knew for the longest time of my life died. We were exactly the same age, 76. Christine Gilbreath Borget was the most wholly good person, aside from my mother, that I ever knew. She was loyal, dedicated, had immense personal integrity, and used her energy in good causes throughout her life.

Christine was a school teacher, as was I. She taught in the Cinnaminson School District and was beloved by her students and admired and liked by her teacher colleagues. Chris attended what was then called Beaver College in Glenside, Pa. Like my old alma mater, Glassboro State College, Beaver has since changed its name to, I think, Arcadia. When I think of my old friend, and we were friends from about the age of 12 or 13, I have a flutter of old photographic memories, and one of them was from her college. Chris changed my life in so many ways, and one of those ways was the vision she provided of college. I remember one autumn I visited, maybe it was the first visit after she matriculated. The trees were full but some leaves were beginning to drift down, and there were small winding paths throughout the college grounds with girls in plaid skirts and knee socks peddling bikes rolling around. Chris took me to tour the building I always called the tower but it was like a castle, and I remember girls sitting in the window seats in the turret with books open, studying. Chris got to live in the castle for part of her years at Beaver. She showed me a world I had never known existed, and one I never had dreamed of or wanted until I saw it, then I wanted it for the rest of my life, the way some girls wanted a wedding. My old school is now Rowan University.

Chris was a scholarly girl all the time I knew her. In the beginning we were very different, but over the years, I became more and more like her. She was one of, if not the most, profound influences on my life. When we met, we were both strangers in a strange land. She had been the daughter of a Coast Guard father and so she and her mother and brother had lived in many places, most recently, Hawaii. She was new in our small town and I was new in our small town. I was a weird kid from the City of Philadephia, an unbalanced kid wobbling clumsily like an animal from a dark place suddenly forced into the bright sun. I didn't know where I was. Christ always knew where she was. She was at home in herself. I truly loved her. I believe she truly loved me too. One of the things we had in common was books. We both loved to read. Another thing we had in common was intellectual curiosity and a desire to know and understand. Something she had in full bloom but which lay dormant (or nascent) in me, was a spiritual guidance. I didn't know what to be or how to be and I was pulled by the winds of vagrant emotions, unstudied and unexamined. Chris was circumspect and steady. She had a clear and compelling sense of right and wrong. She taught it to me with endless discussions on all sorts of urgent questions of the times in which we lived, racism, sexism, the war in Vietnam. And we marched together in all of those causes. We marched against the war in Washington D.C. and we marched for Abortion Rights in Trenton, NJ. We both loved Gloria Steinem and books and history about the Suffrage movement. For my birthday this year, she bought me a subscription to MS. Magazine, which I had dropped decades ago. When I read it I will think of her.

Chris's brother, Mike, was two years younger than she as is my brother, Joe. Mike became an infectious disease expert and worked with the CDC. My brother, like our father before him, became an ironworker and a war veteran. Both of our brothers still live. Our mothers died relatively early. Chris's mother died of Lupus, a disease she suffered throughout our adolescence but of which I, as a feckless teen, took little notice. Her mother was acerbic, biting, and witty. Pat Gilbreath and my mother became best friends and they strolled through the Cherry Hill Mall together, took ceramic classes together, and hung out together when the kids were all in school; they sat in our kitchen drinking coffee and smoking menthol cigarettes. My mother's brand was Salems, but I can't remember Pat's brand and I can't ask Chris now either. That's something that happens when someone dies; you can't call them up for fact checking anymore.

We teens lived in a cul de sac in a new development somewhat cut off from the rest of the town of Maple Shade by the Pennsauken Creek on the north, a huge meadow on the east, that may have been part of the farm where the development was built. The other Shaders had all grown up together. Another of the Roland Avenue kids died recently, Jo McGuigan, and some years ago, Diane Judge. We played in the meadow and we swam in the creek until I came down with hepititis from the raw sewage being dumped by the overwhelmed municiple sewage plant into the Creek. Several kids got sick. I spent months in the hospital at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden and the rest of the year in bed on home-bound instruction. Chris was spared that time. I became an even more passionate reader and artist.

Chris and I shared an ardent Feminist awareness and she acted on it. She helped a group of women save and establish the Alice Paul Institute on the farm of the Paul family in Mount Laurel and for the rest of her life Chris was involved with the API. She was also a passionate Democratic political activist and worked for the Andy Kim campaign the past several years. She put action behind her views.

Although to this day, I wouldn't claim to have ever reached the level of goodness and self sacrifice and dedication that Chris embodied, she showed me the way to be a better person. We were just different. I was alway more drawn to the worlds of Art and Literature and I was more introverted and solitary. Chris was more outgoing and political.

All the memories of our childhood that I have, being teenagers together, going to high school together. We didn't stay as close over the intervening years but we also made sure to keep our contact open and alive, and we got together regularly for lunch, and we talked on the phone regularly, though there were long periods when Chris had no time to herself. She cared for her husband Art, who had diabetes which killed him. She rose from the awhes of her grief because they were so completely in love with one another, and she summoned the energy to take care of her father after her mother died. He father lived into his 90's and I always thought Chris would as well. She didn't smoke or drink, and didn't indulge in the drug fueled counter culture that I did, but cancer got her anyway. Well, both of us outlived our mothers, but I did hope for an old age toether.

Needless to say, her death brings mine ever closer and almost every day I feel as though I am saying a long last loving farewell to this exquisite and heartnbreaking world.

Sometimes the Happy trail is a trail of tears - Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com (if you wish to write me use the e-mail not the comments section which is basically an Outhouse for spam these days Thanks.