Elizabeth Alison Scully

BRUNSWICK – Elizabeth Alison Scully – Libby to all – died peacefully on April 30, 2025, at the Thornton Hall assisted living facility in Brunswick, after a period of declining health.

Libby was born in Portland on Aug. 21, 1929, during one of her family’s annual summer-long trips to Prout’s Neck in Scarborough. She would not return to live in Maine full time until 2000, however, growing up instead in the suburbs of Philadelphia and New York. In Philadelphia, she lived on what she would later call a “suburban farm,” with chickens and geese.

For high school, she left home to attend the Masters School, a boarding school for girls in Dobbs Ferry, NY that was focused on college preparation. She graduated in 1947. After that, she attended Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where she majored in music, graduating in 1951. Her time at Smith was an experience which she felt “opened doors” for her throughout her entire life. There she also developed her lifelong interest in music, playing piano until late in life and singing in choirs as well as attending many concerts.

Ater college, Libby studied occupational therapy in Boston and began working in rehabilitation for adults with physical disabilities in New York at Columbia Presbyterian and Bellevue hospitals, among other places.

Her job at Bellevue led to her moving to Miami, Fla. in 1961 to work as a secretary for Dr. George Papanicolauo, the inventor of the Pap smear cervical cancer test, who was setting up a cancer research institute there. Papanicolauo died soon after, however, but Libby found a similar position in the area working for Dr. John Lilly, who was doing research on dolphin cognition and communication.

Following two years in Florida, Libby returned to New York and resumed working at Bellevue.She wrote later that she “worked with disturbed children. I became interested in children with language and reading problems.” She enrolled in a masters program at Teachers College at Columbia University and graduated in 1970. She continued to work at Bellevue as a pediatric occupational therapist until 1976, when she left to become a reading teacher at Chapin School in New York. She taught reading in schools and in private practice until 1985, when she wrote that she “found my life taking a different direction.”

From her interest in hatha yoga, Libby began to practice silent meditation, something that would be an important part of her life for years to come. “It is in silence that we discover God,” she wrote. Her work began to assume a spiritual dimension at this point as well. She wrote of an experience she had with the son of some friends who had been in a psychiatric ward and refused to eat. Libby visited the man who she tried to soothe by talking quietly to him. By the end of the day, he had begun to eat, and when she went to visit back a week later, he was eating regularly. “This was the first dramatic example that I had that God was working through me,” she wrote.

In 1985 she became a Chaplain intern at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York, still working part time in the schools, and also studying chamber music. She went on to study at the General Theological Seminary in New York where she received a Certificate in Spiritual Direction in 1993. She continued to work as a Chaplain intern which, she wrote, served to “crystallize my feelings about spiritual direction…What people want is comfort, hope, and the assurance that God loves them.” Her experiences at the hospital also brought her sorrow, however, at “how neglectful we are in this country of the care of the elderly.”

As the years went on, New York became too tiring, and in 2000 Libby moved to Brunswick, Maine where she had rented a summer cottage in years past. She settled into a relaxing and active retirement, playing tennis and bridge often and attending lectures and concerts at Bowdoin College. It was while playing bridge, one of her lifelong favorite activities, that Libby met the love of her life, Dick Wallace.

Dick was another retiree in Brunswick, who had run a summer camp nearby in years past. The two were inseparable for many years, playing bridge, travelling, and going to concerts together. Dick had a sparkle in his eyes that brought out a joyous side of Libby few others had ever seen. Sadly, Dick succumbed to dementia and died in 2021, but the two had many years of love and laughter together.

Libby once wrote “I haven’t lived a traditional life. But then, I believe as the Buddhists do, ‘All that matters in the end is the quality of the heart that has carved the trace in the world.”

Contributions in her memory can be directed to:

Smith College,

Northampton, Mass.