The very first person I met on the 2nd floor of Building 149 was Dee Dee Correia. Nervous about my upcoming interview, a stack of unwieldy books and papers in an old satchel, I stopped by the women’s restroom to take a look at myself (never of much avail, but one must try).  Same person in the mirror, then, as I turned, another. I was of course in my late 1980’s era suit, and the woman who had unexpectedly appeared gazed directly at me for a moment with clear eyes, then a slight smile. I smiled, and without a word passing between us, thought, “She is a part of this and will help decide the hire.” And she did; I interviewed with Dee Dee after meeting with Bruce and before meeting with Tom. I can’t remember a thing she said, but I remember her eyes. I told her later, “I knew I was going to be meeting with you…” “How?” she asked. “I don’t know; it was your eyes.”

Dee Dee contributed far more than some blank surveillance over the multitude of forms that combed through the early years of NMR imaging research at MGH. The grants could be hundreds of pages long – without exaggeration – and she read every line, put every page through the copier, sorted and packaged the files to be reviewed. Of course we helped her – dubious chorus of small fry staffers and graduate students who did not think in advance about the budgets or the bios or, unless directly ordered to do so, the timelines – but she was the one who was always present, checking, rechecking, amused and amazed at what was left to do, but getting it done, the interminable list of items inserted into their proper place and packed out for review (post haste) with a steadiness and wit impossible to imitate.

She liked and didn’t like among the people who passed through, as do we all, but she was professional to each of us, and personable as well. For the many, many whom she befriended, her steadiness and cool reason were anchors, but did not over-reach either her heart or her askance inquiry whenever the latter was warranted. She remains an important figure in the actual conduct of contemporary science to me, one never in danger of being eclipsed. At work and beyond it, Dee Dee came through on so many occasions: the patience in teaching the intricacies of the various NIH funding instruments, the sleeping bag for my daughter’s first scouting camp-out, the warning that administrators had come asking about me after a town hall meeting’s comment, the reserving of judgment during a period of difficult personal decisions, and above all the sense I always felt from her that she wanted the best for each of us as we worked, whether she liked us so much or not. It wasn’t about ‘seeing the good’; it was seeing that the good matters. It is easy enough to state those sorts of thing; another entirely to try to put one’s shoulder to the wheel in preserving and bringing them to bear. Dee Dee was among those who don’t say so much, who don’t have to in order to make their points understood, who certainly don’t intrude, but who care, matter-of-factly and sincerely and, in that uniquely Dorchester-North Shore-New England way of reserved interest, without limit.

Perhaps given a long experience with statisticians, I’ve never set much store by palm-readers, sooth-sayers, and the like. Thus the dream I had on a Thursday night before Dee Dee and Dian were to come to lunch the following Saturday, which disturbed me so greatly that I called my daughter’s father and begged him to keep her with him that day, was really a kind of out-of-the-blue experience. The dream consisted only of someone giving me a present, which when opened turned out to be a blue nightgown. I sat straight up in the bed and said, “Something is wrong with Nahede.” Nothing at all happened on Friday, so little and so ordinary, in fact, that by Saturday, with Dee Dee coming over and a perfectly normal morning conversation with my little girl in California, I truly began to be myself dumbfounded at what on earth could be agitating me so. We had planned the lunch for some time, but I cannot tell you anything about what it was, what we talked about – I was a wreck, still caught by that dream. We were in Weymouth, not so far from a great ice cream place in the nearby countryside, and to try to break the spell we decided to head there for dessert. We piled into the car, got about a quarter of a mile away, and I turned apologetically, almost helplessly around. “I have to go back to the house,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

What Dee Dee said in response, I cannot remember – but I do remember a straightforward compassion in her eyes. She surely must have thought I had lost my mind, but she did not disparage. She was a mother too, and I never heard her mention anything that brought greater joy into her life (and concern, the prerogative of all parents) than her son – well, at least not until Max was born!  (“Are you a grandmother yet, Joanne?” she asked me in an email, replying to news I had sent. “I am…” and there were pictures I love to remember, in the happiness of her news, as well.)

So we turned around, Dee Dee and Dian insisting on seeing the addled mother home too, where, walking through the door, the phone was ringing. Nahede was on her way to the hospital – appendicitis. I turned to Dee Dee and said something like, “I’m not just crazy.”  I remember a broad smile and a twinkle in her eyes, but it escapes me as to whether or not she concurred.

Of all the grants, and talks, and visits I had with Dee Dee, all the science that comprised our years together, all the differences in our approaches despite so much overlap in our views, when I think of Dee Dee at work, I think of steadiness, intelligence, and aplomb in dealing in an even handed way with our motley, driven crew. She was no actress – maybe that is where we connected – but she cared about being fair, and if not always so, she got pretty close.

I saw Dee Dee last in 2014, momentarily in the crowd of Martinos Center people who are also missing her irreplaceable presence, and the next day in her second floor office, where I had first talked with her nearly a quarter century earlier. We age, but most of us are who we are all our lives. Of course I was raised with an adamant concept of heaven, but my dream and its odd aftermath, to which Dee Dee served as unintentional witness, rather than having a companionable lunch, offers some hope to me, some glimpse, that there is more to our lives than meets the eye. But I won’t argue that point. When working with novice science writers, who are certain to be sorely tested by those whom they try to assist, I have long said, “Your job is not to get scientists to believe that you can help them in their work. Your job is to help trained doubters doubt their doubt.” Dee Dee earned the full and complete trust of many of the very best of them, because she too was among the very best of trained doubters, those willing nonetheless to see the imaginary enacted, embodied. Science doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants anymore, if that ever held true; it rests on the reach of people like her.