Mary Neal "Muggy" Sanders, resilient and sometimes outspoken mother, sister and grandmother departed this life on Sunday, November 16th after a brief final battle with cancer.  She was born August 20, 1936, on a Texaco Oil tank farm in Drumright, OK in the midst of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to Charles Henry James and Celeste Konneker James.  Mary was one of six siblings born to this union, but she and her younger sister Martha were more than a decade removed from the older siblings.  They were inseparable throughout life, and for the last few years they lived in apartments across the hall from one another and frequently talked to each other on their iPhones which Muggy loved.  She truly did ask "Sherry" aka Siri everything.

Muggy was in a word, tough.  Raised on a farm without plumbing or electricity, her early years were not easy but as she said, they always had food, clothes and a warm home and that's all anybody really needed.  She was an excellent student, who after graduating from Blue Jacket High School in OK, made her way to Springfield, MO where she entered nursing school.  It was in this first year of school that she met and married her first husband and had to drop out of nursing school because they didn't allow married students.

Thirteen years later she would endure one of the toughest times of her life.  She had a difficult divorce from her first husband, her father had recently passed, she was back trying to work and put herself through nursing school, and then her mother was tragically killed in an auto accident.  She said there were times she didn't think she'd survive but the Lord was faithful and had restored her.  He gave her a new career, her second husband DeBoyd, and her only child DeAnn as well as the family she gained by marrying DeBoyd.

In her nursing career she was part of the new heart unit at St John's hospital in Springfield, MO which performed the first open heart surgeries in this area.  Muggy would later become the Assistant Head Nurse over the Cardiac Step Down Unit, known as 2 Northeast and her picture still hangs in the front hallway of Mercy hospital where this "new" unit from 1972 is featured.

In her later years she settled into the life of being Muggy and devoted herself to being an involved grandma, but she was still tough.  She was a two-time cancer survivor, beating both colon and breast cancer.  She survived breaking a hip (which she said gave her a better hip), a traumatic shoulder injury, and a broken femur.    Even at 89 with all of these health events she was still going to get her hair done and enjoying a hamburger or a chili dog every week.  She and her walker went wherever she decided she wanted to go, which mostly included a birthday or holiday party or a drive to see Christmas lights or the pretty leaves in the fall.

For Muggy, there was rarely a day that went by that she wasn't texting or calling or checking on "the boys" as she called her grandsons, even when her grandson Zach was in France or New York City for school, or when her grandson John was on a basketball or football bus or even when he headed to Missouri State.  She always had her finger on them and would start the day asking if they'd seen that LeBron James or wondering if they'd heard what "fool thing" Trump had done today.

Muggy was a life-long Democrat who could always be counted on to speak her mind whether you liked it or not.  She lamented not being well enough to protest Trump, she looked forward to watching Meet the Press on Sundays and she read political news daily.  She was also unwavering in her belief that FDR was the best President of her lifetime and lamented that Zachary had not yet visited Hyde Park since he'd moved to New York.

It is particularly hard to lose Muggy during the holidays as she loved Thanksgiving and Christmas and she particularly loved all the good food.  But although she is gone, she will never be forgotten as she was the catalyst by which all our traditions were created, and we will carry happy memories of her throughout the year.

Mary was preceded in death by her husband DeBoyd Sanders, four siblings: Virginia (James) Shepherd, Charles James, Robert James and Frank James, as well as two of her stepchildren Michael D. Sanders and Jody (Sanders) Vandermeyden.  She is survived by her sister Martha James, her daughter DeAnn (Sanders) Short and husband Steve Short, and her stepdaughter DeLynn Hartman and husband Tim Hartman along with a host of grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

Funeral Service will be held Saturday, November 22, 2025, at 11:00 AM at Gorman-Scharpf Funeral Home. Visitation will follow at the funeral home.