LEBANON — As an elementary school reading specialist, Terry Grigsby helped students develop reading, writing and phonics skills. Sometimes she provided more than academic support.
“I don’t think my life would have turned out like it has if I didn’t have her support and love,” Tonya Mansur, a former student, wrote in a Facebook message.
Grigsby and her colleagues made it a point to get to know their students as individuals, said Mansur, 36, of Canaan. “They all seemed to just know that I needed to be taken under their wing and that’s just what they did, no questions asked,” he wrote. “I was never judged or put down. Even to this day I always talk about how I loved school because of my teachers.”
Grigsby, a longtime Lebanon resident, teacher and former city councilor, died on Aug. 11. She was 79. The obituary for Grigsby said she took advantage of Vermont’s 2013 Medical Aid in Dying law, which gives people with terminal diseases the option to be prescribed medication that will hasten the end of their life.
In January, Grigsby had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. At the time, she was already in her 13th year of battling chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
Grigsby grew up in Barre, Mass., where her Italian-immigrant parents worked in a wool mill. Education was a priority.
“In an effort to encourage my mother to go to college and stay there, they had my mom work in the wool mill in the summer,” Grigsby’s son, Casey, said in a Zoom interview along with his brother, Greg.
She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst and decided to become a teacher. During college she met Alan Grisgby, a fellow English major. The couple married, had two sons and for a time settled in Hudson, N.Y., where Alan managed a newspaper.
The family moved to Lebanon when Alan took a job as general manager of the Valley News in the mid-1980s.
Grigsby started working at Hanover Street School in 1986, where she quickly made friends. Among them was Jill Janas, with whom she taught for 18 years. The two worked with small groups of students in grades 3 to 6 on their reading skills.
Grigsby was always patient with students and adjusted her teaching style to meet their individual needs, Janas, 84, said.
“If the kids didn’t get it some way, she tried it some way else,” Janas, of Croydon, said. “She never gave up on anyone.”
Grigsby embodied the teacher ethos that “You don’t teach reading. You teach children to read,” Ellen Kavanagh, 85, of Keene, who worked as a special education teacher at Hanover Street School, said. “She was kind, but took no nonsense.”
Grigsby could tell which students were struggling at home, as well as in the classroom. She noticed when a student had sneakers with holes in them and knew that families might not always be able to afford new shoes. She also understood parents might be reluctant to accept help and asked them before she took any action.
“If she heard about someone who needed a coat for the winter or boots or sneakers … she would get the kids what they needed,” Janas said. “It was kept secret that she did it. I don’t even know if the kids knew.”
She took students out for pizza and kept in touch with them after they aged out of elementary school.
“She always reminded me that she was there for me no matter what,” Mansur wrote.
Sometimes, the weight of the world got to Grisgby. She took on other people’s problems and wouldn’t let them go, especially if she knew that she could be part of a solution.
“She just internalized other people’s hardship with the mind of trying to fix it or help them fix it, which … is a big burden to carry as a human,” said Casey Grigsby, 51, of Sharon.
She struggled with depression throughout her life, which she was open about with her family and friends. That also put her in position to help others with similar struggles. Over the years, she’d meet with people who were struggling with depression, providing them with a listening ear and resources that could help them, Janas said.
“I think helping others was a way for her to help herself manage that and cope with it,” said Greg Grigsby, 53, of Grantham.
She was also a big believer in the ethos that if you’re going to grumble about something, you’ve got to be part of the solution. That was one of Grigsby’s motivating factors for running for Lebanon City Council in 1999.
Steve Wood, who overlapped with Grigsby on the council, described her as a “good egg,” who was “firm but not combative” and open to changing her mind if different facts presented themselves.
“I agreed with her more often than I disagreed with her,” Wood said. She held a firm belief that city policies should benefit residents and was mindful of the tax burden residents carried.
“She was in favor of supporting the current residents as distinct from the potential future residents,” Wood said.
During her years on the council, Grigsby, continued to be an advocate for children. She supported Lebanon building a new outdoor swimming pool, the Valley News reported at the time. She was also concerned about the money the city committed to its regional airport.
“I think Lebanon airport no longer serves the citizens of Lebanon. … It serves the elite few who can afford planes,” Grigsby said during a November 2020 city council meeting.
Grigsby served on the council until 2005. She retired from the Lebanon School District in 2009.
Initially, her sons were worried their mother would be bored in her retirement. She quickly proved that wasn’t the case.
She volunteered at Listen, among other organizations, went to church and traveled, sometimes with her ex-husband. After she and Alan divorced in the early 2000s, they remained close friends. She also delighted in spending time with her grandchildren.
She regularly spent time with a group of a half dozen or so women that she called “the besties” who had all retired from the Lebanon School District. They went to lunch, got ice cream and helped each other with medical challenges. Each summer, four of the besties would go to Ogunquit, Maine, where they’d walk through the surf holding hands.
“I can still see her jumping the waves and she laughed a lot,” Kavanagh said.
After she was diagnosed with blood cancer, she advocated for Dartmouth Health to better address the mental health concerns of people undergoing treatment for cancer. She had no problem going straight to the top, if she thought her concerns weren’t being taken seriously.
“Please make every effort to care for sick people’s brains as well as you do their bodies,” Grigsby wrote in a 2018 letter to DH CEO Joanne Conroy, the Valley News reported at the time.
“She was just a very strong advocate for patients’ rights,” Greg Grigsby said.
Grigsby participated in focus groups about patient care and made it a priority to attend each meeting. Even as her health declined, Grigsby kept at it.
When she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, she made the decision to use Vermont’s Medical Aid in Dying law. Her brother had died from the same cancer.
“It was a kind of a horrifying experience for her,” Casey Grigsby said. “So when she got this diagnosis, literally the first words out of her mouth (were) ‘I am not doing this like my brother’.”
Her sons planned a goodbye celebration where loved ones could stop by to see her. She was adamant that she did not want a celebration of life because she did not want to put her sons through it, they said. She left her body to the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
In the months since Grigsby’s death, her sons have heard from her former students, eager to tell them about the effect she had on their lives.
Mansur credits Grigsby and her “kind heart” with leading her to a career in education. She now works as a paraeducator for the Mascoma Valley Regional School District.
“I wanted to make a difference for those kids that go to school happy to be around people that love them and care about them,” Mansur wrote. “Her warm hugs will never be forgotten. She will always be one of my guardian angels who pointed me in the right direction.”