The Essence of Judy

Judy Hammontree is a slim, red-haired lady with eyes the color of emeralds and an outlook as bright as a day in spring. It’s hard to believe she might be dying.

“I won’t stop fighting,” she said to me one day across a bowl of Halloween cookies in the Huntington Park house she has occupied for 20 years. No sign of the rare disease that threatens her life was apparent. “I’ll fight every day I live.”

It is a statement that is not debatable. One senses determination in the manner of her speech, her gestures and her attitude, supported by the man who stands by her side. He’s her husband, her lover and her friend.

She was Judy Caylor when she met Gary Hammontree on the Internet last December. Burned by divorce and bad relationships, at first she resisted his relentless efforts to meet but eventually gave in. She needed him.

“What we discovered,” Gary says, “is that we were one person. Everything she liked, I liked. Everything I liked, she liked. We were meant for each other.”

They were married last March, three months after they met . . . and five months after Judy discovered she was afflicted with aplastic anemia, a disease of blood and bone marrow that is too frequently fatal.

They decided to fight it together.

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I first heard of Judy from her husband. He wrote me of her illness and said one of her wishes was to meet me in person. A psychiatrist seeking to motivate her urge to live asked her to make a list of 10 things she wanted to do in life and to vow to do each one. Meeting me was on the list.

The Hammontrees asked nothing of me but to say hello. What I discovered was a woman worth writing about, the kind who takes in stray animals and who cares enough to risk herself when the welfare of others is at stake.

For 14 years she volunteered as a civilian worker for the Huntington Park and South Gate police departments, taking part in drug buys as an undercover agent to keep narcotics out of the hands of kids, including the six she was raising more or less on her own.

“A brother died of an overdose when he was just 12,” she said on a day that gleamed with sunlight. “I didn’t want that to happen to anyone else.”

Her home is painted a bright yellow in a neighborhood of ordinary houses, as though to declare the luminescent nature of her personality. The inside shines with the same golden tones, from the furniture in the living room to a bouquet of chrysanthemums on a table.

During her police work, the program “Fox Undercover” asked her to pose as a young girl on the Internet to catch what they thought was a pornographer. Fox soon backed out of the project, but Judy pursued it on her own.

What she discovered was that the “pornographer” was a 30-year-old retarded man who thought he was 12 and had no idea he was doing wrong. She ended up getting him help and becoming his friend. “Now,” she says, “he won’t even talk to a woman under 20.”

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It was last October that Judy learned she was afflicted with aplastic anemia. She owned a coffee shop in Glendale at the time, the Know Room, and was suffering from a weariness more intense than any she’d ever known. But it wasn’t from overwork.

Tests revealed the bad news. “When I was first told I said, ‘No, not me!’ I’ve never accepted illnesses. If I had accepted anemia, I’d have shut down completely. I couldn’t do that.”

The moment of denial passed in painful realization. Although treatment is limited, she accepts whatever they can do, which amounts to building up her immune system with drugs and vitamins. She suffers nosebleeds and bruising. The weariness remains.

“A ‘bleed-out’ is the ultimate result of the disease,” Gary says. “Blood pours out of your skin.” He pauses and shakes off the thought, then: “She is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, the most truly good person I have ever met.”

I couldn’t imagine at first why he had contacted me. I was skeptical. Everybody wants something. But they’re a rare couple. What he wanted for her was simply to meet me because she was too shy to ask.

It was a humbling experience. I met a couple deeply in love and a woman unwilling to bow to a disease that causes her anguish. I could hear Gary’s words as I drove from the bright yellow house, a house of love and caring: “Please, God, stabilize her right now, the way she is. . . . “

Yes. Please.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com