“I want to see you.” When your twenty-eight-year-old RCWMS board chair with stage four metastatic cancer calls from a hospital in Columbia, SC, and says those words, it’s time to drop everything and get in the car. So Dwight and I drove through a rain storm that resembled a car wash and arrived in Columbia on a Friday evening in late May.
The next morning, we made our way to Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia and found Liddy in reasonably good spirits and only moderate pain. We were joined in her hospital room by three of her friends from L’Arche in Arlington, VA, where she worked for a couple of years after college, two friends from Durham, and a set of grandparents. Her dad welcomed us all. It was a happy day for Liddy with these beloveds at her side. She grinned and giggled and hugged people as they came and went. She loved people well, and they loved her back.
I met Liddy in 2019 when she applied to be an intern with the Resource Center. She was a Duke senior when she began with us in August of that year. We arranged an internship for her and Shelley, a Duke Divinity student she knew from the Duke Wesley Foundation. The two of them sat on our office sofa and transcribed Meinrad Craighead tapes for hours and hours. We were working on some Meinrad videos to post on the web. When I look at that sofa now, I can almost see her sitting there. Liddy and I hit it off as sometimes happens with interns. After she graduated and took the job in Arlington, she’d stop by when driving between DC and her home in Columbia.
I told Liddy I liked the essays she had published in the Duke Chronicle so much that I thought we should collect them into a book. Her beautiful essays were about living with pain, which she did because of scoliosis and an operation that straightened her spine but left her with persistent pain. As she said, living with pain made her more compassionate toward other people. We published her collection, Flesh & Bones: Learning to Love this Body, in 2021.
When RCWMS needed a board chair this year, Liddy graciously accepted the position. She missed her second meeting as chair, because she was in the hospital. Liddy died on May 30, 2026 at the age of twenty-eight. I will always treasure my memories of this bright, beautiful, kind, funny young woman who gave so freely of her time, love, attention and wisdom. Liddy Grantland is now with the ancestors. Not only that, she has become one of them.
Thank you, Jeanette. I always love your pieces about one of your many interns and helpers. I’m thinking of sending my own ms. to the RCWMS soon, although, as both women’s history and memoir, it’s not likely the kind of work you usually publish. Am waiting for final answer from Bloomsbury, which gave a positive reply to my long (7 p.) book proposal to their stipulation.
Again, thank you for introducing me to Liddy. I wish I had known her.
Maggie McFadden