MELINDA

I am really late with this post. I have written and rewritten about Melinda's death and nothing seemed to satisfy me. She was the daughter of my very dear friends and the loss was very devastating to all of us. She was such a smart young lady, a wife a mother and the only child of my friend Helen. Edna sent me this article and it seemed to say just what needed to be said about Melinda so I am including it instead of my humble offering. Thanks to John Lynch for this article about Melinda.

Judge Gilbert, 46, dies

Elected in ’08, she was devoted to kids, families

JOHN LYNCH
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Melinda Gilbert died Wednesday after a long battle with a degenerative nerve disease, leaving behind friends and colleagues who remembered her as a scrappy but compassionate courtroom battler who was devoted to the welfare of families and children.

One of the 6th Judicial Circuit’s three juvenile-court judges, Gilbert was elected in 2008 to replace Rita Gruber, who was elected to the Arkansas Court of Appeals. Gov. Mike Beebe will have to name a replacement for Gilbert who will serve until the next judicial election in two years.

Friends and colleagues recalled Gilbert’s tenacity and her compassion just hours after her death Wednesday from multiple system atrophy, a rare condition that affects the nervous system with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease. It is incurable, according to information from the National Institutes of Health, and more likely to be found in men over 60 than it is in a 46-year-old woman like Gilbert, the mother of teenagers Caroline and Connor and wife of 21 years to Carroll Eugene Walls Jr.

“She was a fighter,” Judge Vann Smith, the district’s administrative judge, said. “It’s a sad day for the judiciary. Not only was Melinda a fine judge, but a great person who really cared about children.”

Gilbert was a “formidable opponent,” but a warm and outgoing friend who could leave those differences behind outside the court, attorney Sam Hilburn said.

“When we would tangle up, it was a fight,” said Hilburn, who served as Gilbert’s campaign treasurer. “You knew you’d been in a trial, but win, lose or draw, she was still your friend.”

Fellow Judge Richard Moore said his 15-year friendship with Gilbert grew out of his respect for work she did for him while in private practice.
“She was as smart as any lawyer I’ve ever known and worked harder,” he said.

Diagnosed with the disease in the fall of 2009, Gilbert fought hard to resist its advances and to keep working, Moore said, even as the condition forced her to use a walker and then a wheelchair before she was forced off the bench in the fall of last year.

“There’s not many who would still be working as long,” he said.
The best description of Gilbert he’s heard is that “if toughness was a cure, she’d be cured,” Moore said.

Gilbert had to go through two elections to win her seat. She lost the first, coming in second against a better known opponent who outspent her, but the 1,180-vote loss was good enough to get Gilbert into a runoff, which she won by 4,580 votes.

She told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that year that the judgeship was the pinnacle of her legal career, which focused mainly on family law.

“I have spent the majority of my career trying to make the legal proceedings more user-friendly for children and also championing the legal rights of children and families,” she said. “It’s [the culmination] of everything I’ve done for the last 20 years representing juveniles and families.”

Gilbert gave the credit for her victory to her supporters, but friends said it was Gilbert’s efforts at personally meeting voters that gave her the victory. She spent the last two weeks of the campaign standing in front of Little Rock City Hall for 11 hours each day to greet early voters, even though she was suffering from pleurisy, bronchitis, an abscessed front tooth, a kidney infection and other problems.

“My grandfather taught me early on that anything worth having is worth working for,” she said. “And you can’t ask volunteers and friends to come out and help if you’re not willing to do it yourself.”

Gilbert