Mary Claire Osbourn Nau

August 30, 1939 – July 20, 2026

The stars over Cheyenne, Wyoming danced the night of August 30, 1938, when Mary Claire Osbourn was born. The only child of Lewis Allen Osbourn and Clara Kristine Larsen Osbourn, Mary lived a life of service to others, devotion to many causes, and spent as much time outside as she could enjoying the wind, trees, birds, and her garden. She died peacefully, surrounded by her children and a grandson, on Monday, July 20, 2026, in mid Missouri, just a month shy of her 88th birthday. The stars danced that night, too, in celebration of a life well lived.

A service will be held Tuesday, August 18, 11 a.m. at Messiah Lutheran Church, 925 E. Seminole Street, in Springfield, Mo; visitation at 10 a.m. A meal at the church will follow the service.

A 1956 graduate of Cheyenne High School and former starting catcher on the Dirty Socks softball team coached by her father, Mary completed her first year of college at Colorado Women’s College in Denver where she might have gotten locked out of her dorm and slept in a car one night after staying out too late with friends. After that freshman year, she transferred to the University of Wyoming where she completed her BS degree in business education in 1960, traveling the state her junior year as a homecoming queen candidate wearing the required white cowboy hat. Go, Pokes!

Immediately after graduation, Mary worked for the Wyoming Democratic Party, typing mailing labels in an office in the Plains Hotel in downtown Cheyenne, located just across from the Union Pacific train station where her dad worked, and within walking distance of her childhood home and church. A year later, she married Earl Nau, her college sweetheart, on the same weekend he graduated from the University of Wyoming and received his commission in the United States Army.

Mary moved with Earl to Colorado Springs, Colorado, then to Georgia, for his training and assignments, and eventually landed in southwest Missouri after Earl took a job in banking. Along the way, Mary held several teaching jobs including at York School in Springfield, Mo. Soon after arriving in Missouri, they bought 40 acres just outside the city limits of Republic, where Mary was happiest, enjoying farm life, raising three children and countless animals. She kept the farm after her divorce, eventually expanding the acreage, and lived there until the last nine months of her life.

In 1982, Mary completed her MS in guidance and counseling at Southwest Missouri State University. That lead to a successful career first in the home visitor program and then as director of the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, both with the Springfield-Greene County Health Department. Mary finished out her career working as a counselor for many years in Burrell Mental Heath’s Family Preservation unit.

Upon retirement, Mary continued to pursue lifelong passions of gardening, volunteering with her church and their many worthwhile causes, enjoying the performing arts, sewing, reading, and caring for the environment.

Over the years, she was a devoted and active member of Springfield, Mo.’s Messiah Lutheran Church, which she began attending almost immediately after moving to the area and which she was lucky enough to attend with her parents after they moved from Cheyenne, Wyo. to be near her and their grandchildren. Mary also attended Westminster Presbyterian Church for a time and was similarly active with causes there.

Mary could take on snowy slopes and expertly manage black diamond course moguls as a result of skiing many weekends of her youth while growing up in Wyoming. Mary loved bike riding, starting in her youth, and continuing on through adulthood. Her children recall long bike rides with her. Really, really long ones. When bike riding was no longer feasible, she started taking long walks. In her last years, Mary regularly walked in the evenings with one son.

She was an excellent seamstress having learned from her mother. She sewed many a western-themed shirt and matching skirt in high school in anticipation of Cheyenne’s Frontier Days rodeo, formal dresses for her daughter’s high school dances, quite a few Scout merit badge patches for one grandson, and completed of an array of quilts. Later in life, Mary pieced countless quilts for Messiah Lutheran Church’s service projects. Having grown up gardening with her parents, Mary maintained an impressive vegetable garden all of her life, knew how to can, and kept her freezer full through the winter months for soups and casseroles. An avid tennis player in her youth, Mary continued to play through college and into adulthood until she got busy with her young children.

Mary was never too busy to read. She kept a varied library of titles at her home, ranging from classics in literature, to topics of religion and philosophy, feminist ideology, conservation and green living as well as poetry. She must be in the running for most items checked out of the Springfield Greene County library system in a lifetime, especially from the Republic branch where she faithfully took her children to register for summer reading and kept many a librarian busy with inter library loan and research requests. Mary was an active member of many book clubs. She also loved to read a newspaper, devouring it from start to finish daily, reviewing nearly every article, and checking the box scores for the latest on the Chicago Cubs, the Wyoming Cowboys, Greenwood Laboratory School, Tolton Catholic High School, and the University of Central Missouri.

Voting and the democratic process were so very important to Mary as witnessed by her display of years of “I voted” stickers on her deck door. She never missed an election, even when driving herself to the polls was no longer an option. Over the years, her beautiful handwriting and perfect schoolteacher’s cursive signature graced many a letter sent to Jefferson City, Mo. and Washington, D.C., imploring elected officials to care about clean water; protect endangered species; support farmland, prairies, and natural habitats; to pass the Equal Rights Amendment; to support a woman’s right to choose; and to care about civil rights.

Mary loved to travel, especially by train given the many trips she and her parents took with her dad’s Union Pacific employee pass. In adulthood, she took many trips with her daughter, including an especially memorable one to Europe and one to Wyoming. In her later years, she went to the Florida beach with one son and his family, and took a glorious and final trip to Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyo. in summer 2023 with one son, her daughter, and two grandsons. Oh, how she loved Wyoming, its prairies, the big sky, the rodeos, and the deep snows of winter (snows in late fall and spring, too).

Music played an important part in Mary’s life starting as a young girl, listening to her mother play piano in the evenings. Mary played piano and cello as a girl, and kept up with her piano playing throughout her life. She was a member of the handbell choir at Westminster Presbyterian Church, and sang alto in Messiah Lutheran Church’s choir for years. She loved listening to classical music on public radio stations and enjoyed attending concerts with family and friends.

Survivors include her twin sons, Eric (Megan); Kris (Suzie); her daughter, Marie; grandchildren Kelsey (Jordan), Christian (Sera), Garrett (Kara), Belle, Robert, Lewis, Beckham; Olivia, Anna, Greyson, and Ashton Hitt; and great grandchildren Jackson, Wyatt, and Elaine.

Sincerest thanks go to the staff of Cox Hospital South’s seventh floor west, The Baptist Home in Ashland, Hospice Compassus, and family friend Richard Barohn, MD, for their thoughtful and responsive care in the final months of Mary’s life.

Memorials are suggested to Messiah Lutheran Church’s endowment fund, the Sierra Club, or to a charity of the donor’s choice that corresponds to Mary’s lifelong passions of women’s rights, peace, the environment, voting rights, education and children’s rights, literacy, the arts, public radio, and public broadcasting.

Mary’s children hope that you will honor her memory with a long walk outside (without a phone in your hand), by checking out a good book from your local library, and by always getting to the polls to vote. Also, please pick up trash and throw it away when you see it, just like she always, always did.