I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship over the past few years. What I’ve come to realize is that those who have had the most profound impact on my life, are the individuals who have this intuition about them and are able to connect with others on a deeper level. They can sense what it is that you are questioning about yourself and have the ability to change your perspective or ease your sense of self-questioning without you ever having articulated it in the first place. While our paths crossed only briefly, one of those mentors for me was Tom Henderson. As an administrative assistant at Sanford Heisler, with no interest in pursuing law as a career, I was nervous the first time Tom invited me and a few legal assistants out to dinner; I thought I would have nothing to contribute to conversation. Little did I know that Tom was a true patron of the arts – spending part of his summers in what we jokingly called “adult summer camp” where he listened to lectures about literature, music, painting, and other fine arts, as well as at a weeklong theater festival that he raved about – who saw in me a sense of doubt about my future in the humanities and quelled it. I left that dinner, hours later, with a new perspective about pursuing a doctoral degree, as well as a better understanding of the importance of the judiciary, the difference between dairy and beef cattle, and the need to get away from the noise of everyday life by spending some time in the country…perhaps at an idyllic ranch just a drive away from the city…These dinners, always in a quiet restaurant (Tom's requirement) so our group could really talk and listen, demonstrated to me what it means to be a mentor; to see the person in front of you, to help them to really see themselves, and to encourage their connections with others. I will forever be grateful to Tom for that gift. His empathy and compassion were unbounded and rare. I'll miss you, Tom.

It’s so hard to speak about all of the ways I relied on Tom and all of the reasons why I love him, because so many of them involve things that I didn’t feel like I could or should talk to anyone else about. But it’s necessary to speak about some of these things in order to get anywhere near conveying who Tom was, not just to me but to so many people who have passed through this firm over the years and who one after the other had the good fortune to meet him on our way, only to find ourselves now in possession of so many good things that he gave us, or more accurately so many good things that he helped us to find for ourselves.

I had a miscarriage at eight weeks between my first and second child. I had a mediation scheduled for the next day, and it was Tom who I called in tears with all of my questions, at that point of intersection between how to be a lawyer while also being human: Is this something I can talk about? Can I postpone the mediation? How much is it appropriate to say about this, or even safe to say, in all the different ways one could mean that word?

And it’s notable that the person who I felt safest calling in this very gender-related, very emotional and intimate moment was this 60-something-year-old, sometimes irascible White man who you could tell was coming to the conference room by the sound of his cowboy boots echoing down the hall.

And when, a few months later, I had a job offer withdrawn after I told the employer that I was five weeks pregnant with my daughter who is now six, it was Tom who I called, crying again. I said to him, “I’m not sure that the two things are connected, I mean they can’t be, right?” And he said, or maybe yelled, “Of course they’re connected!” And then he talked me through the totally separate question of what to do next, which meant giving to me advice that I have given to many clients since then: Above all, count yourself lucky to have dodged that particular bullet.

I can’t think of anything Tom didn’t teach me about how to be a lawyer. When I needed to learn how to defend depositions, and then how to take depositions, I read Tom’s depositions. I remember dealing with my fear of opposing counsel being aggressively nasty to me or to my clients by writing Tom’s deposition objections more or less verbatim into my notes. I felt confident that I could rely on them both for their legal merit – knowing Tom wouldn’t put some BS out there, because that just wasn’t his way – and for the feeling that they would give me of borrowed cowboy boots, so to speak, until such time as I had acquired a pair of my own. So to speak.

And I embrace the double entendre right there, acquiring a pair, because Tom’s plain-spokenness and candor were qualities he must have been born with, in abundance – the sort of abundance that suggests that, as my mother likes to say, he stood in the line for plain-spokenness and candor maybe one extra time before he was born. But it was also so artful, the way Tom deployed these qualities to such great effect in his lawyering – to take people down a notch when they needed it, and to lift people up when that was what they needed. And by his example, which none of us could imitate, he taught us also to do these things, in our own ways, but with his spirit always behind us.

A friend of mine who worked with Tom for a summer 10 years ago wrote me the day before our firmwide memorial that she remembers every conversation she had with him, and I bet that’s the case for so many people who just knew him for a short time because those are the kinds of conversations Tom had. The conversations that made us come to him, and then made us send all sorts of other people to him – lawyers and clients and humans of all stripes – when they were in trouble, or needed good advice, or just to hang out and talk with him because he was awesome and everyone should. Especially if you were trying to be both a lawyer and a human being at the same time, which can be difficult, but Tom did that really exceptionally well, in a way that inspires and helps the rest of us to do it better ourselves. And to pass it along, like he did; and to fight the good fight, like he did; and to keep giving them hell, just like he did. I will never do those things in Tom’s absence for the rest of my life without feeling his presence behind me, and I love and thank you Tom so much for that.

And thank you so much to Tom's family, and especially his children, for sharing him with us. He was so proud of y'all, so tickled to see your adulting. It was a joy to witness.