In Memory of My Friend Christine McDermott

My first boss Christine McDermott passed away this year from breast cancer. It was in honor of her that the boys and I joined “Team McDermott” at the breast cancer walk last weekend.

Christine was the director of Delaware Volunteer Legal Services when I came back to Delaware after law school in 1991. My job was to travel around to churches, senior centers, homeless shelters, and state service centers and offer free legal services to Delawareans who couldn’t afford lawyers. Christine was my supervisor.

I had a sense of what I was in for even before the job started. Christine came up to my law school in early 1991 for a national conference on Women and the Law, and she saw posters in the law school advertising a birthday party that my friends were throwing for me. She came to the party, and promptly took it over—reprimanding my friends on the quality of the “punch” and teaching them how to fix it, volunteering to stair dive if it would help liven the party up, and ultimately teaching my then-girlfriend how to do some type of ‘60s style dance. I wasn’t aware of the dancing—for the good of all Americans, I avoid it—but some time around 11:00 one of my friends came up to me and said “Matt, your boss is doing the Batusi with your girlfriend. You have kind of lost control of the social situation here.”

Christine was a great boss. She taught by example, and what I respected most about her was her unmitigated passion for the people and causes she believed in. A lot of what we did at Volunteer Legal Services was domestic law—protecting children or spouses who were stuck in bad home situations. It was emotionally draining work, and although I always did my very best legal work for my clients, it was sometimes hard for me to get as upset about the 30th domestic abuse case of the month as I had about the first. Christine would have none of it—any time someone was treated unfairly, she was outraged and wanted it fixed.

Christine also inspired me by the confidence she had in me as a brand new lawyer. Normally first year lawyers are kept on a very short leash. Christine told me that she knew I could handle myself and to go out and do some good. One day in my first couple of months in the office I had been up most of the night working on a brief for a group of tenants who were being unfairly evicted, and I accidentally overslept and missed a meeting that was scheduled first thing the next morning. My first major screw-up as a new lawyer, for which I deserved to get dressed down. I came into the office at 9:30 frantically looking for Christine to tell her what had happened, and pulled up short outside her office because I heard her yelling over the phone at the man with whom I had missed the meeting. By the time the conversation—which I shamelessly eavesdropped on—was over, I could tell from Christine’s end of it that the guy was somehow apologizing for having had the audacity to complain about my standing him up. Then she came down to my office, asked me what had happened, and laughed about it. A small thing, but I never forgot how she stood up for me.

After I left DVLS, I would see Christine from time to time at bar association events or when I just happened to be around the law school and dropped in on her. She never changed. She loved her students, she loved her clients, and she would crawl through glass for either one of them. She finally retired and moved down to North Carolina with some of her family for some much-deserved peace and quiet, and instead somehow ended up running a battered women’s shelter in rural North Carolina because no one else was doing it and it needed to be done.

I am not sure how Christine is going to deal with heaven—she seemed happiest when she was fighting against injustice, and my limited understanding is that there isn’t supposed to be too much of that there. One thing I do know is that here on earth, better than anyone I have known, she lived out Micah’s edict to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.