Remembering Judith Arcana

Judith had been part of Chicago’s underground abortion service known as Jane—never the Jane Collective, she told me later. That was a journalist’s language, never hers. As one of the Janes, she had helped facilitate 11,000 abortions in Chicago in the years before Roe v. Wade and was even arrested for it. Though she wasn’t directly involved in NWAAF’s work, the abortion fund carried on the legacy of the Janes, connecting people seeking abortions with funding and compassion when state-level policies stood in the way—a dynamic that long preceded the gutting of Roe.

The story of the Janes was made into movies and books, but Judith was, before everything else, a teacher. In Portland, she was known as a writer and a poet. She was someone who could be described as a feminist icon, but she was also approachable and generous, a friend to many.

We didn’t meet in person until years after she sent me that postcard, when I wrote a profile on her for a Seattle-based outlet. I had left the Mercury to work for The Seattle Times, and after years of general assignment reporting that left me feeling scattered and unfocused, I returned to the subject I knew best: abortion policy.

The first time I called Judith for the story, I could tell she didn’t really want to speak to yet another journalist. But the more we talked, the more we got along. Sometimes you meet someone and you just have a feeling that they’ll be important in your life. Anne of Green Gables called them kindred spirits. Though she was already on the edge of her 80s, and I was barely in my 30s when we met, Judith was a kindred spirit. She connected me with other Janes for the story—fascinating, generous women who had been brave in ways that made them the subjects of movies and books. They had survived ordeals in jail and illegal abortions in underground economies, and recounted those experiences to me in full, horrifying detail, but also shared their personal obsessions and pleasures. I talked with one of them about my reality TV fixation; she recommended the Discovery Channel’s Alaskan Bush People.

I met Judith in person for the first time at Case Study Coffee on NE Alberta. We sat in the upstairs space at a long table, and talked until closing time, then outside on a bench. It was not a warm day, but the business at hand was too important not to keep talking about it. My phone battery died, my fingers cramped in the cold as I took notes, and I knew that as long as Judith wanted to talk, I would want to listen.

After the story came out, we became friends, or perhaps that’s what we’d always been. I would let her know whenever I was coming to Portland, and she would email me ahead of time if she had a reading in Seattle. In the meantime we corresponded regularly.

When you meet someone already nearly 80, you know your time with them will likely be limited, but her death in December still surprised me. I think it surprised me because she and the other Janes were so sharp in their intellect and sense of justice as to seem ageless, but of course they were not.

The last time I saw Judith was in July. She’d recently moved, and I met her at Coffeehouse-Five on N Killingsworth. It was a much nicer day than the one years ago, when we’d sat outside in the wintry dark. We found a different bench, under the trees in the sunshine at Portland Community College. It was one of those perfect Portland days, when the sky is slightly golden—more golden than it is in Seattle, an atmospheric quirk I have never quite understood—and we talked about the current political situation, which we were both following with dismay. Judith was the kind of person who didn’t buy into false hope. When you said something was bad, she would agree, and in that clarity, you would feel held. It was awful, but you were in the struggle with Judith. That was a good place to be.

And the fight could also be beautiful. As we sat together on the bright-green lawn, the sprinklers kicking into high gear, Judith showed me pictures on her phone of the Great Columbia Crossing 10k walk she had taken 10 years prior. The organized walk takes place every year, starting from Dismal Nitch in Washington state, then taking the 101 and crossing the entire impossible span of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, the behemoth of engineering that runs four miles across the Columbia. The bridge was the highlight of Judith’s walk, and she talked about it excitedly. We talked about going together the next time the walk was held. “People say we cross a bridge to get to the other side / and that’s true, though there’s more– / on the bridge one day, we walked through the sky,” Judith wrote in a poem about that day she sent via email when I’d come home.

When I heard of Judith’s passing, I looked back through our correspondence. We had written each other after our visit in July, but she had never responded to my final email. When I read my last email to her, I think I understood why. I was surprised by my own message. After some griping about managing a public media newsroom while the president defunded PBS, I said I hoped to see her again next time I was in town, then signed off like this: “Thinking fondly of your walk thru the sky, Megan.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this is how I will remember Judith forever. It is the final memory and image she, a poet, would leave me with—that of a slightly younger Judith, on that compelling walk, feeling free in her body, marveling at the world around her, a world shaped by her own bravery and moral clarity, showing all of us what is possible.