Judith Lawrence Wells

From her first moment on this earth she was many things to many people, and for the next 75 years until cancer claimed her on Christmas Day, 2021, she was constantly expanding her circle of love and influence. Her birth certificate said she was Judith Lawrence Ridgway—no E, thank you—born April 27, 1946. But that very day she was also daughter, to nurse Mildred Muriel Taylor and Lawrence Ridgway, a veteran of both World Wars. She was sister, to Karen. She was a Taurus, stubbornly guided by her own path. And although the term wasn’t even ready for her at the time, she was one of the earliest Baby Boomers, at the leading edge of the new generation that started in 1946.

Judy, Puddy, Ridge, Judes, Juders, the Jedi. Growing up in Halifax she was a student at Tower Road School and Queen Elizabeth High. At age eight, she joined the congregation at the Anglican Cathedral Church of All Saints. She played volleyball and basketball, she ruled the tennis courts at the Waeg, she joined Hi-Y, she was a debutante. She got a BA in English at Dalhousie University, played on the championship-winning field hockey team and joined the Alpha Gamma Delta fraternity, which she was active in to the end of her life.

Judy moved to the United States, where she received a master’s degree in education from Springfield College and got closer to a New England man she’d met at Dalhousie. For a stint she was Mrs. Shaw of Hyannis, Massachusetts, where she socialized with people in the orbit of Camelot, legendary estate of the Kennedy political dynasty. Judes knew a member of the Kennedy household staff who gave her hand-me-downs from the most famous children in America.

After the marriage ended, Judy returned to Halifax with her awesome kids, five-year-old Kyle and infant Lesley, moving in with her widowed mother Mildred. It was a complicated life. Here Judy was mom—her proudest title until she eventually became grandmother—but also a struggling single mother. However, she seemed untouched by the effort to make ends meet.

She was beautiful and photogenic, and made a point of taking photos at gatherings of friends and family. Juders was optimistic and energetic. She drove a gas scooter or her bike when she couldn’t afford a car, and she tried out different jobs before finding one she liked at the phone company, MT&T. She coached and volunteered at the kids’ schools, along the way building her own bonds of deep friendship with other parents.

And even from her earliest, hardest days in Halifax, Judy made Christmas special.

Come December 25, that modest south end house was overflowing with colour and magic, and somehow Judy always managed to get the perfect rare gift. Reader, if you’re old enough to remember the Cabbage Patch Doll craze, you’ll know what a miracle it was when that doll was waiting under the tree. Few challenges were too big for Judy, who seemed to thrive on making possible the impossible.

Her second husband might be another example. Judy met Hume Wells at a party. Soon they were dating, although they made an unlikely pair. Hume was from New York City, a direct descendent of US founding father John Jay. Judes was sixth-generation Nova Scotian, rooted in Purdy, Taylor, and Thompson stock around rural Oxford, a fan of the monarchy by temperament and Loyalist blood.

Hume had settled in Halifax years before to enable his passion for sailing in Chester, on the South Shore, where he had a strong community of friends and golfing buddies. Golf was practically the only sport Judy didn’t excel at, the inland town of Truro was her dream destination and she was famously terrified every time she dared sail with Hume. He voted Progressive Conservative, she was a red-sweater-wearing Liberal. He already had three adult children, she had two young kids.

But they were truly in love, and their community embraced them. After they tied the knot, for the rest of her days she was happily known as Judy Wells. They were married at Judy’s church, the Cathedral, on December 28, 1985, and had 23 happy years together.

Judy built a tennis court at Hume’s summer place in Chester, establishing it as their cottage and pulling him to her game. He in turn brought her to golf. Her smile and charm made Judy a natural fit in Hume’s chummy Chester crowd, while her supportive friendship created new bonds and strengthened old ones. Sailing remained a no-go zone for Judy, even as her kids became crew for Hume and he and Judy spent many vacations on cruise ships. But that wasn’t a source of friction in their marriage, because Judy had a passion of her own to indulge on the South Shore.

The date and location of Judy’s first visit to a Guy’s Frenchys used clothing store is unfortunately lost to history. It was, however, the start of a beautiful relationship. As a Baby Boomer, being a free-spirited consumer was her birthright. But she was an early Boomer, born on the cusp of the generational divide, raised by parents who endured the scarcity of living through wars and the Depression. Judy effectively had a foot in both camps, and embodied diametrically opposed approaches to spending and saving; the racks and bins at Frenchys stores around Nova Scotia let her shop with abandon, while secure in the knowledge that even the biggest haul of treasures wouldn’t cost too much. And like Judy, Frenchys doesn’t discriminate. Whether that shirt is a silk Giorgio Armani original with the Bloomingdales tags still on, or a well-loved plaid from Sears, it’s the exact same price.

In her later decades, Juders’ generous nature took flight through Frenchys—plus countless church tea-and-sales, fundraisers like the IWK children's hospital’s Kermesse (where she volunteered for decades) and clearance sales at “regular” stores. She shopped relentlessly for the people in her life, a circle that was ever-expanding thanks to Judy’s comfort chatting with strangers as if they were family. The young mother working Christmas miracles for her kids became the Grammie who rarely passed 24 hours without giving something to someone, as if Christmas could be every day.

Christmas even shadowed her final year of life. Judy was first diagnosed with lymphoma on Christmas Eve of 2020, marking a cozy COVID Christmas the next day with family at her son Kyle’s Halifax home. She started chemo early in 2021, successfully driving the cancer into remission by spring, before plenty of people who knew her ever realized she was sick.

Judy wasn’t the sort to talk widely about the cancer, for fear people would worry about her. Instead she returned to a normal busy summer. Golfing, socializing, driving herself back and forth from Halifax to Chester. COVID-stuck in Nova Scotia, she took trips with friends from one end of the province to the other, including the shopping grand tour with her niece Katherine, hitting every Frenchys store from Coldbrook to Yarmouth, and from Yarmouth back along the South Shore to Bridgewater. Along the way she listened to plenty of Queen (in her 70s she’d discovered and become passionate about Freddie Mercury).

By the fall of 2021, with loosening pandemic restrictions Judes was prepping for her annual solo drive to spend months with daughter Lesley’s family on Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. The rest of the Halifax-based relations were also plotting various holiday travels. None of Judy’s family was planning to be in Halifax for Christmas.

Then Judy started feeling a telltale fatigue. Tests showed the lymphoma had returned, carried by the toughest, most resilient cancer cells that eluded the treatment at the start of the year.

This disease moved quickly, and wasn’t slowed by chemo drugs. Lesley left Lookout Mountain in November to be by Judy’s side, first in the hospital then at home. Halifax family cancelled their plans to leave. Judy’s sister Karen and the rest of Lesley’s family hastily made plans to get to Halifax, working against the rise of omicron and returning public health restrictions.

With Christmas looming, Judy was at the heart of yet another miracle, as every member of her immediate family made it to her bedside. Grammie’s final days were spent at home with five grandchildren, her two children and their spouses, her sister and her niece. She allowed only a small group of friends—more like family—to call or visit, keen to avoid a fuss to the very end. But she permitted her priest to perform a communion service beside her bed.

Finally it was Christmas Eve, one year exactly from her original cancer diagnosis. She was surrounded by family the whole day. Then it was midnight. She’d made it to another Christmas. At 2:25am she gently died at home, letting go while being held by her loving children to the last. She faced death as bravely as she had faced life.

Nobody, least of all Judy, wanted the cancer to happen. But true to her, she made the very best of a horrible situation. While in the hospital, she’d dispatched people on shopping errands, and on arriving home she oversaw days of wrapping. She wanted a final Christmas, and she got it. Her presence was felt around the tree as a Christmas spirit when the entire family gathered again at Judy’s house to open the gifts she’d collected.

Among the gifts were things from Frenchys that Grammie stockpiled over the years, plus some of what Judy called “real presents”—paying full retail was often a determining factor. There were even a few of those amazing gifts that (almost) nobody saw coming. Despite the long cancer year and its devastating autumn, despite chemo ravages and palliative care and omicron, Judy managed to evoke pure surprise and delight just like she used to, granting impossible wishes one last time.

Or maybe, just maybe, nothing is impossible to accomplish in Judy’s name. Mere days after her death, despite Christmas business shutdowns and pandemic restrictions, Judy’s family attended a small, COVID-compliant service at the Cathedral, where church dean Rev. Paul Smith spoke warmly of Judy’s generosity (he’s a fan of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, so Judy naturally brought him a steady drip of Sox merchandise from Frenchys). Her ashes were placed in a columbarium at the Cathedral’s St. Alban’s Chapel, beside her husband Hume’s ashes, on December 28, 2021, the 36th anniversary of their wedding. It was a beautiful end to a cruel year.

Juders was predeceased by her parents and her husband Hume Wells. She is survived by the families of her son (Kyle Shaw, his wife Christine Oreskovich and their daughter Sasha Oreskovich), daughter (Lesley (Shaw) Wingfield, her husband Jackson Wingfield and their sons Stoney, Shaw, T.H. and Tru), sister (Karen Woolhouse and her daughter Katherine) and Hume’s children (Nancy Wells and Michael Wells), as well as countless friends.

Judy was a joiner, a doer, an athlete, a catalyst, a source of energy, a magnetic presence, a true friend, a proud grandmother. Among her many affiliations, she served on the Halifax Regional Library Board, was the first investor in The Coast newspaper, hurried hard as skip of her team at the Halifax Curling Club, studied art and travelled with a group at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, moved money with the Citadel Investment Club, was past president of the Senior Ladies International Curling Club—SLICC—and a part-time resident of Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where she belonged to a ladies’ Bible study and attended Church of the Good Shepherd.

She bowled, knit and even did the reading for book clubs. She understood the value of showing up and never missed an event, no matter how small, that was an opportunity to support someone in her life, from theatre shows to author readings to art openings. She was a fan, cheering on her grandchildren at myriad McCallie and Citadel High School sporting events. She helped out and volunteered and lent a hand, and she never wanted to be a burden on anyone else.

Omicron willing, Judy’s family is tentatively planning a church service and celebration of life in Chester this summer. If you wish to make a donation in her name, the Chester Food Bank, the Chester Art Centre and the Wells-Woolhouse Scholarship Fund at Dalhousie University were close to her heart.

But to really honour Judes, consider passing along a little kindness in your life. If you received one of Judy’s t-shirt finds, or a used “book on tape,” or super-soft baby clothes, a gumdrop cake, church bake sale squares on a white Styrofoam plate, a ball gown, a grocery store gift certificate, printed photos of yourself from an event, bottles and/or cans of maple syrup, golf balls that were “too nice” for her to use or some other little surprise that made Judy think of you, think of Judy as you pay it forward.

And if you ever find yourself stuck, spending valuable time trying to decide whether or not to buy something that ultimately doesn’t cost very much at Frenchys, stop dithering. Think what would Judy do, and just get it already.