The funeral home created a photo montage of Lucy Trujillo for her services. Here is Lucy as a girl, round-cheeked and chubby-kneed. Here she is, proud North High graduate, class of 1969. Here she is at her godson’s graduation from Notre Dame. Here she is with her mom and dad, Helen and Leo, and her brother, Michael, who died in 1995.
I’m sitting with Lucy’s parents in their living room a little more than a week after the funeral. Lucy was 59. She died three years and five months after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. By the time she was diagnosed, she was in the late stages of the disease, which is typical of this cancer. She had surgery, underwent chemotherapy and enjoyed a remission, known as that happy test result declaring “no evidence of disease,” also known as “dancing with Ned.”
It seems an especially apt phrase for someone like Lucy — magnetic, dynamic, cooking up a pasta sauce with vegetables from her garden, heading to a family gathering where she would dance with every cousin, auntie and uncle she could drag out onto the floor.
Lucy was born in Wyoming during the years her dad was working the coal mines. You need your education, Leo would tell the kids. You need your education, Helen would tell the kids. When Helen was growing up, she would hear people say, “Why do girls need an education? They’re just going to get married and pregnant.” The day Lucy graduated from Colorado State University was a proud day.
I’m sorry I never met Lucy, I tell her parents, and ask to see some pictures. Her godson, Thomas Cordova, pops the montage CD into his laptop. Here Lucy is thin. Here she is stout. Here her hair is spiky. Here she is bald. She didn’t bother with wigs, says her cousin Dolores Bachand.
“She was open and honest,” Thomas says. “She wanted to find the educational point in everything.”
In every picture, Lucy is beaming, and I realize that, in fact, I had met her. But I can’t place where and am chagrined to think I could have forgotten such light.
It could have been through any one of her community projects. Family strengthening, parent education, fatherhood initiatives, equal access to quality health care and education. Lucy long understood a city’s strength lies in the opportunity it offers its people. She helped create opportunity, and in that way, she improved the lives of people she never met, people who never knew her name — and that was fine with her.
“She just had an innate sense of fairness and justice,” says longtime friend Carol Mehesy. “Where there was no justice, she was on the case.”
Lucy had once been vice president of programs for the Partnership for Families & Children. She served as a past executive director of the Colorado Minority Health Forum. She co-founded the Colorado Multi-Ethnic Cultural Consortium in 2006. Until shortly before her death, she was executive director of the Colorado Ovarian Cancer Alliance.
She started there as a consultant in the summer of 2008. By January 2009, she had become its first executive director, and she helped turn it into a viable nonprofit.
I learned Lucy was generous and passionate and sometimes bossy. I learned she worried about her parents, losing first their only son and now their only daughter, that she used to tell people to look for the good qualities in others “because they are harder to find.”
I learned she struggled with her faith and with her sexual identity before coming out as a lesbian. Mary Phillips, president of the board of directors of COCA, would say this: “She was a woman we needed to have around longer.”
But this is how I think Lucy, ever searching for the teachable moment, might want me to use my last few sentences:
Women, listen to your bodies. Ovarian cancer can be hard to diagnose because the symptoms are generic — bloating, nausea, difficulty eating, back or pelvic or abdominal pain, urinary frequency. But if these symptoms persist and intensify, see a gynecologist.
Take care of yourselves.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
