Judith A. McBride

Judith A. McBride died peacefully at her home at the Hermitage in Richmond, Virginia on March 10, 2025. Her three daughters were all with her during her final weeks in hospice care and her final hours of life.

 

Judy was born on January 15, 1937 in San Francisco, CA. Her parents, Hamilton and Jeanette Anderson, were passionately committed to public health. Her father was an MD whose focus was pharmacology and her mother was a lab tech. Together they traveled across the globe to treat leprosy and tropical diseases. Judy lived in Beijing, China as a toddler and in Beirut, Lebanon as a teenager when her father worked with university pharmacology departments in those cities, building capacity to save lives.

 

Judy attended Pomona College in Southern California, where she met S. Dean McBride Jr. Judy and Dean married soon after graduation and moved across the country to Somerville, Massachusetts, where they lived while Dean obtained his Ph.D at Harvard Divinity School. During that time, Judy worked as a secretary at Sasaki, Walker and Associates, an architectural landscaping firm. As she and Dean moved across the country to pursue faculty positions from Pomona, CA to New Haven, CT to Evanston, IL and finally Richmond, Judy continued to bring her exceptional clerical and administrative skills to organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Virginia State Bar.

 

She was also the primary caregiver for her daughters, born between 1965 and 1972. She was an early advocate for cooperative child care centers like the one she helped create for families of staff, students and faculty at Yale Divinity School. She was a working mother who taught her children to share the load and contribute to the running of the household, from weekly chores to each having responsibility for a dinner night. She put up with a lot of tuna melts and breakfasts-for-dinner in order to work full time and live her values of gender equity. She was an early adopter of recycling and conservation: collecting cans in parking lots for redemption, hanging plastic bags to drip dry over the sink, and deploying her eagle eye for “good goods” at thrift stores in every city she lived in. And she modeled speaking out, volunteerism, and political activism for her children and grandchildren.

 

After she retired from the Virginia State Bar, she and Dean moved to Kilmarnock, VA, where she became a stalwart volunteer for the local Democratic Party and the Northern Neck Land Conservancy. She was a keen observer of the wild birds and mammals that visited her backyard and a shrewd card player who enjoyed teaching her grandchildren how to play poker and then beating them regularly at family games.

 

After Dean died in May of 2020, Judy spent one more year appreciating the peace of the Northern Neck and then moved back to Richmond to live at the Hermitage retirement community and be closer to her daughters. At the Hermitage, she rediscovered her talent and passion for creating art. She enjoyed painting at the art studio and conversations with her new friends over communal meals. She received excellent care from the amazing frontline Hermitage staff and Richmond hospice team as her health declined and her Alzheimer’s disease progressed. She is survived by her three daughters Elissa, Sharon and Doran; her “wonderful sons-in-law” Algernon, John and Curtis; and her five loving grandchildren: Isaiah, Sarah, Frankie, Hillary and Lucas.