If Grace’s life in these years was full of remarkable developments — buying a house, completing her masters, changing jobs — she was soon to add another. On May 28, 1971, she married again. William D. “Dub” White was a longtime friend and faculty colleague at St. Andrews. Grace wore the blue chiffon gown I’d worn to my brother’s wedding. Dub wore a tux his sister had given him, first owned by her late husband, Jim Reeves — the velvet-voiced Gentleman Jim.

In July, fresh off their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, Grace flew to Iowa City for the much-anticipated seminar on Richard Wright, whose work so compelled her and whose life she was researching.

Then, in August, another development: Grace was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a radical mastectomy.

Woven through the coming months would be the medical challenges and the work she was determined to do despite them. Grace would write to us that she was feeling better; then something would appear in her hip. She’d say she’d been walking with a stylish cane but no longer needed it. Then a lesion would show up in her shoulder.

In September, she wrote a friend: “I am teaching two classes but doing very little counseling until I feel stronger. Each day, almost, I see an improvement, but it seems slow when I want to do so many things and all I feel like doing is lying down after my classes.”

Later that month, a letter from the academic press at the University of Missouri about her proposed article on Richard Wright brought stirring news: “What you describe — the entire route of it — sounds most exciting. In fact, your ‘Retracing Wright’s Footsteps in Memphis’ is perhaps our most exciting possibility to date (and most original). And I think that you are surely gallant, in view of your illness, to push on with the project.”

In letter after letter that fall, Grace did indeed push on, searching out people who had known Wright in Memphis, pinning down addresses where he’d lived, determining where he had worked. Then, in an October 1971 letter to the National Council of Teachers of English, she asked with great regret to be relieved of her responsibility as a discussion leader on curricular innovation at their upcoming convention in Las Vegas. She was due back at Duke for treatment.

In January of 1972 for “winter term” she and Dub went to Nashville, staying with my brother and sister-in-law. Grace was doing research at Fisk University for a possible textbook on African-American writers. I came from my cub-reporting job in Colorado Springs to join them, bearing clippings. She wrote to a friend, “You would be really proud of G’s newspaper work — by the quality of her writing, by her beat (City Hall) and by her special features.”

In a March 1972 letter to me, Grace writes that she is very much looking forward to seeing my sister and her family during spring break. Afterward, Dub and she will take the train to New York. “Classes resume April 4. That week on Friday I return to Duke and again the following Wed-Fri. By that time maybe changes of some kind will be observable.”

A letter to a colleague reports that “I have not walked on crutches since I returned to teach the spring term. But my shoulder developed a small lesion and I had to go back every day for a week to take cobalt in that area. I return to Duke this week. The shoulder trouble has evidently not cleared up but seems to have spread under the arm and in certain spots across my back. Now the possibility of cancer appearing looms larger in my mind than it once did. I will be relieved to find out something definitive this week.”

Later in the spring, she wrote to a friend: “I am getting along very well although I take 5 lethal anti-cancer drugs daily and/or weekly. You would be interested to know that these are drugs developed during World War II for use in chemical warfare. Isn’t there an ironic poetic justice in this? Of course they are a shot in the dark and whether they will contain my cancer is knowable only through time.”

She adds that they plan to leave St. Andrews right after commencement for Nashville, where she has a grant to pursue more research at Fisk for her proposed textbook. They expect to be in England in July for a meeting Dub is to be part of.

Next in the letters file appears one of those periodic reflections Grace wrote to herself over the years — a rather curious one. It must have been written shortly after her marriage to Dub, though it’s not dated: “As I look at myself today, I find I can gain perspective by looking at the four men who have influenced what I now am. My father, a large, warm, much-liked, outspoken native Texan gave me a sense of pride in who I am and a challenge as to what I might become… My former husband, father of my three children, was brought up in a home conditioned to ‘the woman’s place is…’. My son: Our relationship is a very good one — warm, honest reaching-out, open. For many years it was tense. I am thankful he had the strength to stand up for who he was and that I was able finally to see that I was hurting our relationship because of my own lack of clarity about his needs and my expectations… My present husband, who accepts my abilities, and we share all aspects of achievements.

“As I think of my future life, I do so now in a freer way — free from the restrictions imposed by society or from my own interpretation of them. I understand now that my own self-concepts were both positively and negatively affected by men, and that I have both lost and gained myself.”

In her last letter to me, Grace proudly enclosed what she called “THE article” — her deeply researched piece on Richard Wright’s Memphis years. “If you can find time, take 15 minutes to snap out a critical response. I’m interested in your evaluation because I respect your knowledge and skill, and also because I think this is written as a journalist rather than as a literary scholar.”

“My thoughts go out to you often, hoping you are finding your way through the things we talked about. I am happy that you have such a productive job; that is one of the most important things in life, I know.“

By early summer, changes had indeed become observable, and not for the better. After a long hospital stay, Grace asked the good doctors at Duke to send her home — along with a great deal of pain medication.

She died on Sunday evening, July 16, 1972. We were all at her bedside.

Her funeral, at Laurinburg Presbyterian Church, brought the little North Carolina town together — high school and college, black and white, young and old. “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” followed upon “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” The minister ended his remarks by saying, “When grief is done, and we are freer than we are today, have a party, and invite people you might not usually think to invite. Make them welcome, and give them a chance to experience the grace inherent in such an act and the love which transcends lifestyle, appearance, age, politics, race, education and station in life. That will honor, and that would have pleased, Grace.”

She was 58 years old. She’d had just six years of that new life she’d struggled to reach — along with the rich, complicated years before.

On the eve of her marriage to Jim, Grace had written a long list of goals she had set for herself, concluding: “These are the things I want in my life. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

Damned if she hadn’t done it.