When a dear friend of mine started to struggle with her words both in writing and vocalization, most of her friends and family thought her difficulty was caused by a recent concussion.
A writer of very considerable talent, Judy was struck by a teen driver as she crossed the main street of a quaint village in Upstate New York. No slight accident, the one that hurt my friend killed her sweet little dog and knocked Judy unconscious. She was hospitalized, examined, and released, everyone breathing a sigh of relief that Judy would soon be fine and feeling like her vivacious self again.
That was not to be the case. Her recovery seemed to take far longer than expected, and after a series of frightening dizzy spells, she was briefly hospitalized again. She came home, more, not less, confused than ever.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said over the phone to me one afternoon. “I can’t seem to sustain a thought.” We had been working through her memoir manuscript revisions together.
“You’ve experienced a severe concussion,” I unwisely advised. “Give yourself time to recover. Try not to be impatient with yourself.”
But time would be of no help to Judy, her words disappearing almost before emerging. This was particularly frustrating for her because Judy was deep in final revisions on a collection of her short stories and in the midst of editing her own book-length memoir, “I Owned a Castle.” It was to be her seminal work.
I loved her memoir in progress. The writing was so detailed, expansive, nuanced, and compelling. Sometimes I would read one of her pages or hear her read a phrase, find a startling metaphor, and feel such envy, thinking, how does she do that?
Judy stopped calling me, came to only a few more meetings of our writing group, and her friends continued to be puzzled but optimistic for her full recovery. People do recover from concussions. But something was not right, and if we allowed ourselves the honesty, we felt rather than knew Judy was not improving. Rather, her health was getting worse.
Following a CT scan, new information revealed not the extent of the head injury which was expected but an inoperable brain tumor.
I took her call on a Monday morning. “Nancy, I’m dying. It’s a brain tumor. I thought you should know.”
Struck dumb, I suddenly fumbled with my words. How was this possible? Why hadn’t any of her doctors or the hospital personnel caught this tumor during her many previous exams? For an instant, I considered she might be so confused that she believed she was dying when in fact her injury had induced temporary dementia syndrome. I didn’t want to argue with her because she appeared so sure of herself yet also fragile.
Judy was right. A doctor had finally, after nearly a year and a half, discovered her growing brain tumor. She had weeks—not months or years—to live.
In those final days, a parade of her friends and family visited her at home where she lived with her loving sister. On my last day with my friend, Judy looked thin and fragile, but her voice was clear. “Nancy, it’s just, I have more to say.”
Judy’s friends at an independent publishing house, Clare Songbirds, put out the call, asking their editors for a monumental effort to finish the work in order to produce Judy’s book of stories. Just before her death, a physical copy of Rising Up on Ordinary Days by Judith McGinn was placed in her hands. But Judy had drifted into unconsciousness. Still, her stories were in the world, I kept telling myself in a losing effort to be consoled.
There is no real consolation to such a loss, however. I have thought many times about Judy’s unfinished memoir about the castle she and Michael owned before her husband’s untimely death. This particular work she was still writing held details about life, about how language is used, about the interplay of writing, the making of art, and how we live. I wondered if I might try to complete her memoir, but such a product would have felt false. Only Judy could write her unfinished story.
There is an especial poignancy to the death of a writer in her prime and without the wider recognition her work so justly deserved. The loss of those unfinished words hang forever in liminal space. The loss of the incredible human being Judith McGinn is far greater than the loss of her words, but her words were also her extraordinary gift, her unique voice in this ever-changing dynamic world in which we appear briefly before disappearing. Her words brought in the quiet moments, the aspects of life we might miss if not paying the kind of attention a profoundly good writer notices.
Within days of my last visit with her, Judy was gone. On many levels, I could not accept this fact. I kept hearing her final words to me: “I have more to say.”
Still, I read again the words in her stories, from her opening line, “When the devil came to possess my family the summer I was nine,” to her closing ones:
“Mimicking the fishes’ movements, Naia gathered her strength, and with a powerful swish of her caudal fin, disappeared into the deep,”
and “Surrender was as natural as rain,”
and “The next morning, hoofprints in the sand were the only evidence they had ever been there at all.”
There are never the right words for consolation in a loss of such gravity, especially of one so admired. Remember, however, her legacy can continue as her words are shared; I think those of us who "remain" can share in the heaviness in that we can share their words, keeping their spirits vivid in the minds of those who didn't have the honor of knowing them. This sharing pays their great tributes homage, and you, as always, have started that journey for your dear friend. Judy's words can now live on in the collective voice of those who remember her. Sending you lots of love as you navigate this difficult journey. <3
My gosh, this is so beautiful and heartbreaking. I'm so very sorry to read this news, Nancy, but I am also grateful for even a glimpse into Judy's mind. If those sentences are any indication, she was an incredibly talented human being. Sending you all my love.