In memoriam: Beth Dudley

Beth Dudley loved her job.

As an office administrator, Dudley — who passed away… Beth Dudley loved her job.

As an office administrator, Dudley — who passed away Friday at the age of 40 — did the little things that too often get taken for granted.

“She didn’t have a lot of family,” Pitt student Lexie Bond said. “The office was her baby.”

Bond, who worked with Dudley in Pitt’s Disability Resources and Services office, received a text message Friday from a friend asking if she knew why Dudley didn’t show up for work.

“She wouldn’t just not show up. It was really strange,” Bond said.

Around the same time, police arrived at Dudley’s Bellevue home to look for her. They found her body inside.

It will take at least three months for the lab to determine a cause of death, but it will take much longer than that for her friends and colleagues to overcome their loss.

“Beth Dudley only had a size 5 foot,” Bond said, “but she left some big shoes to fill.”

When Pitt grad student Renee Williams heard the news, she came to the office to offer an extra hand. Williams used to work with Dudley and had been friends with her for the past five years.

“She’s so young, it just doesn’t feel like it’s real,” Williams said.

Bond echoed Williams’ sentiments.

“It was very hard to accept,” Bond said. “This was someone I see every day. What makes it real is walking past her office and looking in, and she’s not there.”

Dudley began her tenure at Pitt 15 years ago, with a job in the Arts and Sciences dean’s office. For the past eight years, she worked in the Disability Resources and Services office, helping to run its general operations and communicate with professors about students’ tests.

“She was so sweet — unless she had to be tough with professors. Then she’d be a bad*ss,” Bond said.

Dudley’s sweet-but-bad*ss persona wasn’t just for professors. She held herself to the same standards.

Dudley was a fitness fanatic and kept herself on a strict calorie count, which she tracked in writing. Every day, Dudley would bring with her an English muffin with fancy peanut butter from Trader Joe’s, her favorite food store.

But even she had her weaknesses.

“She really liked Dozen cupcakes,” Bond said. “Anything that was bad for you, but worth eating, was called ‘splurge-worthy.’”

Bond and her colleagues used the term during a donut breakfast yesterday morning, when they met as an office for the first time since Dudley’s passing.

“As much as people were crying, we just kept bringing up funny stuff about her,” Bond said. “It’s almost like it’s not sad. You can’t really be sad when you think about her.”

“Everybody had their own little inside joke with her,” Williams said. Dudley and Williams would exchange funny movie quotes in otherwise bland office situations. “We laughed and joked about everything.”

Dudley used to call Bond into her office in the middle of work, only to ask if she saw last night’s elimination on her favorite show, “The Biggest Loser.”

Their shared passion for fitness brought Dudley and Bond close together. Dudley used to bring in her fitness magazines for Bond to have.

“I’ve never had to subscribe to anything,” Bond said, laughing.

Dudley looked out for the health of all of her friends. If you were ever sick around her, you could expect to receive a full bottle of vitamin water and a mandate to drink every drop.

Despite her young age, Dudley was admittedly a bit behind the times. She had an Internet connection put in her house last week and was supposed to pick up her first laptop on Sunday. She preferred things be done the old-fashioned way, like her handwritten checklist of tasks to be done before the office could close — right down to the watering of her miniature cactus.

Bond can still envision Dudley’s quirks.

“She hated the cold. She’d be talking to you, but you’d notice her drifting toward the radiator mid-conversation,” Bond said. “She’d eventually be sitting on it.”

Outside of the office, Dudley was pursuing a communications degree from Pitt. Inside the office, she was the glue that kept it together.

“I don’t care who tries,” Williams said, “No one will ever be able to replace her here.”

Dudley is survived by her father, George.

Editor’s note: Liz Navratil contributed to this report, and Lexie Bond is a staff blogger for pittnews.com.