Rich Soil for a Blooming Friendship

Laura Murphy and daughter Sarah.

Elizabeth Coleman knew Laura Matlaw Murphy because they were both lawyers in Atlanta. “We were acquaintances,” Coleman says. “Women lawyers’ paths tend to cross.”

It would’ve been difficult not to know about Murphy: Her incisiveness and keen mind made her one of the best law clerks to serve the Georgia Supreme Court. Equally focused in her spare time, she was a nearly unbeatable runner, a star in Atlanta track circles. She and her daughter were a familiar sight, flying past course markers.

“About six years ago, I ran into Laura and I could tell something wasn’t right,” says Coleman, who now directs the New York State Trial Lawyers Association. “When I heard later she had ALS, I felt a bit strange in writing a personal letter out of the blue, but I sent it anyway.”

And in the way ALS has of cutting things to the quick, Coleman and Murphy became friends. “Laura just flowered after her diagnosis,” Coleman explains. “She made everyone around her open up, including me. But she wasn’t sugary—just ask her about the chewing-out she got from a cashier who thought her slurred speech meant she was drunk.”

At times, Coleman says, Murphy could push aside the scrim of human misunderstanding:“With decreased time and mobility, I’d have thought I wouldn’t be interested in spending time with any but close friends. But I’ve been delighted to have found friendship and love in unexpected places. For my cynical soul, that’s been enough to push me into something like faith.”

When Murphy died last September, The Coleman Foundation donated $12,000, in her name, to support the Center’s hallmark investigators’ meetings.

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Noah Lechtzin, M.D., is a Hopkins pulmonologist who sees ALS clinic patients regularly.