Like David in the Book of Samuel, Pamela O’Dwyer is facing a giant as she stands at a trailhead into the woods behind her vine-covered ranch house in McDonald. This Goliath did not set up camp among the towering oaks and pines that cover the lion’s share of her 80-acre sprawl but rather claimed territory within her and threatened to end her life, not with a sword but with a sickness for which there’s no easy cure.
It’s early autumn as the 76-year-old O’Dwyer steps into the woods, a knobby walking stick in her right hand and a red merle Australian Shepherd named Bamsi at her heels. As if powered by a coiled spring, the 9-month-old pup suddenly darts ahead of her and plows into the undergrowth.
O’Dwyer sticks to one of the thin trails that wind the forest like veins on the back of an aging hand, the canopy of browning leaves above her splitting the afternoon sun into golden shards. She’ll never catch up to Bamsi, whom she named after a hero in an ancient Turkish epic, but her footing is sure and her pace is quick.
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a rigorous exercise routine,” says O’Dwyer, a trial attorney who specializes in railroad crossing fatalities, as she nimbly sidesteps a pile of horse apples. “I owe my good health to walking. I walk a mile every morning and a mile every evening.”
O’Dwyer says she also eats a wholesome diet and, until recently, wasn’t taking any medication. When people would ask her when she was going to retire, she’d say, “Never. I feel great.”
O’Dwyer scolds herself for being arrogant about her health, leaves crunching underfoot as she ventures deeper into the forest. But she’s being too hard on herself. As the daughter of the late Selma Cash Paty (1927-2016), a lioness of the local bar when she was alive, O’Dwyer had reason to believe she had many years of active practice ahead of her.
“Mother never stopped working,” O’Dwyer says. “Someone would wheel her into the courtroom in a wheelchair, and she’d rise out of it and creep to the podium, where she’d tear the flesh off of a witness, and then she’d return to her wheelchair and collapse. Her appeals continued to come in after she died.”
O’Dwyer also had five great aunts live to be 105, although she frowns as she notes this. “I called my Uncle Joe, who was 97, and he said, ‘Pammy, I have good news for you: your Great Aunt Esther just died.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know I had an Aunt Esther.’ He said, ‘She’s your fifth great aunt who lived to 105. None of them were ever sick.’ I said, “Why is that good news?’ He said, ‘Because you’ll probably live to 105.’ I said, ‘Call me when you have better news,’ and hung up. Who wants to hear that? Please spare me.’”
Then came the day a health scare nearly did spare O’Dwyer the fate of becoming a centenarian. Jan. 11, she experienced an ischemic attack (an event that mimics a stroke) in her stomach. The pain was excruciating, she says, and while she was being transported to the hospital, she went into shock, which triggered a heart attack.
During the days that followed, tests led to scans that revealed lumps the size of marbles and pingpong balls in O’Dwyer’s lungs and throat. As she lay on a table in a hospital, a large needle piercing her back during an especially agonizing procedure, she wondered, “How close am I to being redundant, and how far behind does death follow?”
Relevant v. redundant
O’Dwyer hugs the shade at the edge of a clearing as she steps out of the woods. Months after the battery of biopsies, and surrounded by the auburn beauty of fall, she’s still wrestling with the specter of irrelevance.
“Geraldo Rivera went from relevant to redundant when he quit his job,” O’Dwyer says, referring to the mustachioed broadcast journalist who ended a 50-year career when he exited Fox News in June. “Who wants to be the last, and not the first, of those two words?”
Not O’Dwyer, who’s practiced law for 55 years. Born in Lebanon, Tennessee, while her parents were attending law school, O’Dwyer says she and her four siblings grew up in Hamilton County’s courts. Around age five, people began asking her if she was going to become a lawyer, “like her mommy.” She always said yes.
“I was a good little girl who wanted to please everyone – and everyone was pleased,” she recalls.
As O’Dwyer grew older, however, she was drawn to languages and the arts. At age 16, she applied to Beloit College in Wisconsin, which had a foreign exchange program that would allow her to travel to Europe to study. Her mother secretly intervened, she says.
“She decided I was too young to go away to college and threw the application away. She confessed this to me many years later. So, I went to the University of Chattanooga and then to law school.” (O’Dwyer continued her love affair with the arts, however, and has penned and published four books of poetry.)
O’Dwyer pledged her professional fidelity to the Tennessee Supreme Court at age 21. Another attorney dropped her first railroad case, Mahoney v. CSX Transportation, in her lap in 1987.
“A California family lost their daughter at the Wildwood crossing in Georgia,” O’Dwyer says. “A female lawyer who knew the family sent me the case.”
In a 2013 interview with the Hamilton County Herald, O’Dwyer recalled a chilling phone call between her and a man at CSX. “I said, ‘The family is really upset. They’d like to save lives. Could we arrange to put up crossing gates and lights?’ He said, ‘Lady, that’s a private crossing, and we can kill as many people as we want.’”
The issue of federal preemption carried the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“If federal funds were used for a safety upgrade at a public crossing, it was an inoculation for the railroad against their liability for failing to install safety devices at that crossing,” O’Dwyer says, her jaw tensing. “That issue is still the subject of calls from other railroad crossing lawyers across the country.”
Although O’Dwyer lost the case, the experience lit a fire in her that would never need to be stoked. Since Mahoney v. CSX, nearly every case she’s handled has involved railroad work – as well as her zealous representation, she adds.
O’Dwyer was nearly dismissed from her next visit to the high court, which took place in 1993. Accustomed to wearing unconventional attire to court in Hamilton County, she arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court to present her case in CSX Transportation v. Eastwood dressed in a swallowtail coat. A court officer seized her by the elbow and escorted her to the counsel’s table, where she learned only the solicitor general is allowed to wear the elegant jacket.
O’Dwyer stood her ground and claimed her only victory of the day. Although the incident upset her, it failed to pinch out the flame of nonconformity that burned within her. In 2005, she began to wear an antique gun holster to court.
O’Dwyer secures the holster to her waist with a belt and a silver buckle that sports the image of a bear her son Charlie regretted killing in Alaska.
Like the owners of all good horse stories, O’Dwyer has embellished the origin of the holster over time, she admits. “It currently goes that Uncle Jim Houston gifted it to me when I’d broken enough bones to qualify as a bareback rider. Uncle Jim founded the Jackson Hole rodeo and was a world-famous bareback rider.”
O’Dwyer is wearing the holster, which provides a snug home for her phone, as she hikes through Powder Springs, the farm she purchased when she was 20. She and her fourth husband, attorney John Chandler, are its only human residents, while an extended family of horses, mules, goats and chickens also inhabit various portions of the homestead. (O’Dwyer, who acquired her last name from her third husband, married early and often but has been with Chandler for the last two decades. “Looks final to me,” she quips.)
While the holster might seem like an odd accessory for court, O’Dwyer is merely keeping the people she’s loved close to her. This also explains the small photo of Charlie, who was killed in a vehicular wreck in 2004 at the age of 27, she’s tucked into the rim of the hat she’s wearing.
Her quirks on full display, O’Dwyer has continued to win and lose cases. She says one of her best-fought victories involved a Chattanooga man who was injured when a railroad spike fell from an open trestle and struck his head.
“The railroad denied the spike was theirs. Instead, they suggested an assailant bought it at a flea market and used it to strike (my client), even though the train had rattled by overhead as he was walking under the bridge,” O’Dwyer remembers. “I asked the jury if they believed the spike fairy existed and won.”
O’Dwyer has been just as unyielding during mediations, which she says she loathes. “I don’t believe I’ve ever completed a mediation without walking out,” she huffs. “My co-counsel has to finish them. I say, ‘Hell no. I’m not agreeing to that.’”
There are many lawyers like O’Dwyer. At the same time, there’s no one like O’Dwyer, who’s persona is a blend of blithe eccentricity and philosophical musing. The former is hard to miss; to see the latter, however, one must unearth the place where her faith resides.
No easy cure
Biopsies revealed O’Dwyer had cancer. In time, the disease impacted her ability to speak and forced her to stop working. After serving as a voice for her clients for more than five decades, she was crestfallen. “Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I’m a work-identified woman,” she says. “The irony was bitter.”
The only way for O’Dwyer to return to her job – and to relevance – was to endure chemotherapy and radiation. The chemotherapy was unpleasant, O’Dwyer says, while the radiation treatments were harrowing, mostly because she’s claustrophobic.
Before each of her 33 radiation treatments, O’Dwyer’s radiologist strapped her to a table and placed a mesh-like mask dotted with hundreds of tiny holes over her head, neck and upper torso. She then remained rigid as the radiologist shot beams of intense energy into her neck.
To transport her thoughts to a place where there was no cancer in her throat and no mask on her face, O’Dwyer listened to songs in foreign languages. Sometimes, she imagined she was singing in Gaelic to her mule, Annie From Ireland, in the pasture outside the barn near her house.
A Jew, O’Dwyer also prayed. “I’d say, ‘Adonai, please, I’ll say the Shema every day. I’ll do anything You want me to do. I’ll pray anyway You want me to pray. Because I want to continue to do what I do best. And I don’t want to–” O’Dwyer stops and declines to say the thing she fears the most.
She doesn’t have to because it’s written across her face like sad poetry as she speaks about how cancer has kept her from working. It’s not fear of death; it’s fear of living without purpose.
O’Dwyer’s says her faith is different from that of her Christian friends, who pray expecting a good outcome. Instead, she prays believing God will carry out His will – whatever it is. “I’m not a God-fearing person; I’m a God-trusting person,” she explains. “And I can only trust Adonai to either smite me or kiss my cheek.”
Either way, O’Dwyer says, she’ll exclaim, “Zeh hayom asah Adonai, nagila v’nismicha vo,” which is Hebrew for, “This is the day God has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).
Even so, O’Dwyer seems more brooding than joyful as she turns back toward her house. “Anything could happen,” she says. “I could die.”
Back to work
Two months later, autumn has started to resemble winter as O’Dwyer lowers herself into a rocking chair in her home and then reaches down to ruffle Bamsi’s fur.
The worry that had etched itself onto her face has faded and her expression brightens as she tells the story about her return to court to cross-examine a defendant in an alimony trial. She stops short of saying she tore the flesh from the man, who hobbled in on a cane and claimed he was unable to work or pay the money he owed his ex-wife, despite owning an expensive boat and pricey motorcycle.
“I had some difficulty speaking, but I was able to get through it,” she reports. “I shouldn’t brag, because it’s not good to not be humble, but when you’re overcoming cancer, you lose all humility because you want so badly to do your job.”
Afterward, O’Dwyer says she flew out of the courtroom, fueled by adrenaline and thrilled she was able to use her voice for good. “I want to be vigorous and in motion. I can’t do retirement if it means being sedentary. I live at a fast pace. I get up at 5:30 and do half of a day’s work before most people have their first thought.”
O’Dwyer doesn’t say she’s beaten cancer; she says she’s overcoming it. A recent PET scan revealed no evidence of disease in her throat; however, the pingpong ball in her lung “lit up a bit,” she says, so her doctor will be keeping an eye on her.
In addition to returning to work, O’Dwyer is serving as president of Orion’s Angels, a 501(c)(3) that hosts railroad safety seminars and provides an outlet for the families of people killed or injured by railroad negligence.
“We help people understand how someone can be hit by something as big and loud as a train,” O’Dwyer says. She’s heard railroad executives rhetorically ask juries this question in their defense more times than she can count, and she says she’ll continue to explain how as long as Adonai allows.
“He’ll either smite you or kiss your cheek. You can’t count on either one. He’s kissing my cheek now, but He smacked me pretty hard in the process. I feel challenged and ready, though.”