For as long as anyone who knew them can remember, wherever you saw Linda Segrest, Tom Segrest was bound to show up pretty soon.
From Port Gibson to Oxford to Jackson to Columbus and, finally, Birmingham, the Segrests were inseparable.
What was true in life turned out to be true in death, too.
Tom Segrest, who practiced law in Columbus for more than 40 years, died Saturday in Birmingham at age 77, just 17 days after Linda died at age 74.
The 17 days between their deaths may have been the longest they had been apart in the almost-55 years they were married.
“Oh, gosh, I hadn’t thought of that before, but I can’t remember if they were ever apart after they were married,” said Sarah Emerson, the Segrests’ only daughter. “Mom liked to travel, especially to Wyoming to see her sister, but she wouldn’t travel alone. And like a lot of moms, when I had my daughter, mom came to take care of me and the baby for that first month. Only she didn’t come by herself. Dad came right along with her and stayed the whole month. They had their own hobbies and interests and friends, but more than anything else what they liked was being together.”
Accounts vary, but Linda and Tom’s first date was Tom’s prom, either his junior year at Port Gibson High School in 1964 (when Linda Hudson was 14) or his senior prom the following year.
“What I know is that the only way Linda was allowed to go was if it was a double date,” said T.J. Segrest, the couple’s oldest child.
After Tom finished his accounting degree at Mississippi State University in 1968, he reunited with Linda at Ole Miss, where she was a standout student in the music department while Tom attended law school. He proposed to Linda while there, but then 18-year-old Linda waited a year, honoring the wishes of her dad.
When Tom moved to Jackson to clerk for Robert G. Gillespie, Chief Justice, Mississippi Supreme Court in 1972, Linda pursued her master’s degree at nearby Mississippi College.
In 1973, the couple moved to Columbus, where Tom practiced law for more than 40 years at the law firm of Graham and Segrest, LLP. Linda taught music and piano at Mississippi University for Women for more than 30 years. They were both active members of First Presbyterian Church.
Together, they raised three children, T.J., Hudson and Sarah. T.J., a former journalist who once worked at The Dispatch, is an attorney.
Hudson is a cardiologist. Both live in Birmingham. Sarah works as a fundraiser for Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
T.J. and Sarah said it wasn’t until they became adults that they recognized what a tight bond their parents had.
“They were always a model for me for what a marriage can be,” T.J. said. “They didn’t do separate vacations. There were no guys’ weekends or girls’ weekends for them. The most important thing for them was their time together.”
Sarah said it was her own impending marriage that made her reflect on her parents’ relationship.
“It was probably when I was in my late 20s and met my husband and was getting ready to get married that I started thinking about what my parents had together,” she said. “It was something I wanted, too. One of the things I noticed is that while they would disagree about things sometimes, they found a way to put it aside. They never went to bed angry because what they had together mattered so much more than the things they disagreed about.”
After Tom retired in 2018, the couple moved to Birmingham to be closer to their kids and five grandchildren.
It was there that Tom’s battle with Parkinson’s disease began to take its toll. Linda, meanwhile, appeared healthy and insisted on taking care of her husband as his illness progressed.
That changed abruptly. Linda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late April. She passed away about two weeks later.
“With that kind of cancer, you often don’t get an early diagnosis,” T.J. said. “It was a shock, but mom was totally at peace. She would not let anyone else take care of dad. She continued to make his meals and look after him right up until the end.”
By then, Tom’s condition had deteriorated to the point where he wasn’t always sure of his surroundings.
“But he knew she was gone,” T.J. said. “They were two sides of the same coin and until she was gone, he would not let anybody else take care of him. He just quit eating. He couldn’t imagine going on living without her. So he didn’t.”
Among older people with long-time spouses, it is not uncommon for a spouse to pass away within a few months of the passing of the other. It’s called the Widowhood Effect.
Although her father was in the later stages of his illness, Sarah believes that phenomenon was why her dad passed 17 days after her mother’s death.
“I don’t think it was something that can be easily verbalized in the state he was in, but deep in my heart, I believe it,” she said.
Linda was buried on May 18 at Shelton Cemetery, just outside of Port Gibson.
As it was with their lives together, they were never going to be apart for long.
Tom will be buried next to Linda on Wednesday.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [emailprotected].
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