This past Monday, Carolyn at work forwarded to me a message that Judy Butler had passed away on Saturday, December 8, after a long illness. At 50, she had apparently been fighting cancer, quietly, for the last few years.
Judy was one of the first people to welcome me into the Unit when I first came to work for the Bureau in 1992. By then she had nearly eight years' experience and was one of the senior analysts on the account I joined. When I left the Unit in 2000 to become a supervisor elsewhere, we stopped working together until 2004, when a reorganization brought her nominally into my ambit again until 2006.
We never worked together again. I had not known she was ill; but then, it would have been entirely consistent with her sense of privacy and secrecy that none but her family and very closest friends would know: I understand she hid it from her colleagues until the hair loss from chemo became just too noticeable.
The difficult aspect of Judy's passing isn't entirely in her age (not far removed from my own), or our past collaboration for what is now a third of my Bureau career. It's that, in our mutual work, we became two scorpions in a very small bottle, with a couple of arguments I can still recall years later, ones which never really reached closure. And now, through--call it what you will--inaction, pride, stubbornness, or my own brokenness, I have missed any chance at mending that breach in this world.
I learned a lot from Judy. I learned a lot about our mutual target, although I couldn't call her a mentor at the time. I also learned a lot about people, and now she's taught me another lesson--the importance of seeking closure, forgiveness, whatever is needed. John Mayer reminds us to "say what you need to say," and he's right: before it's too late, and you're left either continuing an argument by yourself, or saying "I'm sorry" to a casket at a funeral home.
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