I heard the news of your passing as I sat at my desk in the Orangeburg Library.  The desk where you were a frequent visitor for years, and then a less frequent visitor this past year.  I burst into tears.  I allowed myself to sob, as our doors would not open for another five minutes.  I had been thinking of you this past weekend, wanting to visit you, but knowing you were in hospice care, and not wanting to intrude on your family.  I kept blindly hoping you would recover.  Were you saying goodbye to me, when you popped into my head a few days ago?  I wish I could have said goodbye to you.  But perhaps you know that tears are streaming down my face as I write this, and it will suffice in some small way.  I loved you Judy.  I love all of our patrons, even the ones who are hard to love.  But you were supremely easy.  You made me laugh, hard, every single time you came in for audiobooks.  You were a voracious book listener, and had excellent taste.  For years now, when I would order non-fiction audio books, I would think of you, and whether or not you’d like it.  If I thought you’d like it, I bought it for the Library, because I knew: buying with Judy in mind, is buying a quality book that others will enjoy too.  You loved memoirs.  But not the self-aggrandizing me, me, me, poor me memoirs.  You wanted to read about triumph, and you wanted to laugh.  So I sought out stories of lives lived through extraordinary and ridiculous circumstances to come out scathed and bruised but living with a wink; and of ordinary lives written so well, the mundane was transformed into the astonishing.  You knew a good writer, because you yourself were scrupulous in writing of your pain, without the self-pity you so loathed.  Thank you for the gift of your book, after your stroke this year.  One of my dogs (I suspect which one) ate the corner off the cover.  But it is somehow fitting.  We do not make it through this life without pieces getting ripped out of us or going missing.  I believe if you knew what my dog had done, you would laugh.  It is your laugh I will keep with me, reverberating throughout this public space that you loved and supported.  And it is your disdain for pity that I hear in my head as I write my own book.  You will live on in my writing, as you will continue to live on in unique ways in the lives of everyone you touched. 

With love and affection for your lightness of being . . .

Your librarian, Cheryl