Lenox, Mass.

"Bad news, dear friends," the email from Judy Sanders began. "The time has come for me to say goodbye after having been diagnosed with ovarian cancer five years ago."

The Emmy Award-winning former WRGB Ch. 6 reporter and official photographer for three governors, long respected for her journalistic grit, had not buried the lead.

For the past two months, Sanders, 63, has been greeting a steady stream of visitors at a rental condo near The Mount, the Edith Wharton estate, with a lovely view of a sweeping lawn and the bucolic Berkshires. A sister and niece live nearby. She has been saying a lot of long, poignant goodbyes. It might strike some as uncomfortable, a bit like attending one's own wake, but Sanders has a grace and courage that puts people at ease.

"Let's celebrate life," was how her email inviting visitors put it, "and what comes after."

Sanders has been trying to put a lot of things in order during the final stages of her terminal disease. She is receiving hospice care and a nurse comes once a week. Doctors predicted she had six to eight weeks to live. That was more than 12 weeks ago.

"I'm beating the odds," she said, and noted wryly that she outlived her Lenox rental agreement and will need to extend it.

During a three-hour, freewheeling interview in which she answered all manner of deeply personal questions and intrusive queries about her medical condition, only twice did Sanders briefly falter in her stoicism. She choked up and cried when she explained why she didn't want a Times Union photographer to take her picture. She has lost her hair and a lot of weight. She wears a wig and complained about looking "emaciated."

It is perhaps the final indignity for an impeccably put-together professional woman who invested much time and money on her looks and wardrobe.

"I want people to remember me as beautiful," she said.

Her journey into the country of cancer began at the end of February 2009 with a nagging pain in her lower right torso, but she shrugged it off as the price of carrying heavy camera gear. Recurring headaches followed. She went to see a doctor. An ultrasound and test confirmed a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. She was 58 years old, thin, healthy and active, and hardly ever got sick. It was a lightning bolt out of the blue.

A week later, Sanders underwent the first of several surgeries and procedures at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Surgeons removed a cancerous mass the size of an orange. Eight rounds of chemotherapy and an experimental drug trial failed. Stents were installed in her kidney and bowel to allow them to work after the cancer spread and blocked vital functions.

"The cancer is like a spider web now," she said. Treatment has ceased. The only medication she takes is to manage the pain.

She kept working as executive photographer throughout her five-year ordeal and shared her diagnosis only with family members, a few close friends and her employer.

"Judy didn't want to be pitied or thought of any differently while she kept working," said longtime friend Susan Novotny, whom Sanders confided in from the outset. The two went on an African safari together last year. "She has gone through it all with such remarkable dignity and courage."

Lately, Sanders has been forced to slow down — she used to drive all across the state on short notice to photograph governors at events, always on call — and to ponder the meaning of life. She meditates and reads spiritual texts including "The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying."

"I always felt death was separate from life, but there's such wisdom in that book as it describes the continuum of life and death, with all the tides and waves," she said. "It was a revelation when I understood that. I've always been so busy all the time, a human doing. Now, I'm trying to be quiet, to become a human being."

She has been touched by an outpouring of love. Former first lady Silda Spitzer drove up from New York City and spent the afternoon. Bill Kennedy and his wife, Dana, have been regular visitors. Her former bosses, Governors David Paterson and Eliot Spitzer, called to reminisce and to offer support. Her mailbox, computer inbox and phone message machine overflow with healing thoughts and good wishes. Her old pal and fellow TV personality John McLoughlin sent flowers and a note with the sign-off: "Here's lookin' at you, kid." Joe Bruno called and was warm and gracious.

"I thank you for your ongoing commitment and hard work," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a typed thank-you note after Sanders sent a framed photograph of Cuomo at Whiteface Mountain as a Christmas present. He added a handwritten postscript: "You are an artist — truly."

Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy sent a two-page handwritten letter last month that Sanders said "moved me to tears." Duffy wrote, "You have always been such a 'ray of light' in the administration because of your kindness, million-dollar personality, and great work ethic. ...You lit up every room you entered."

Working as a state employee, with extraordinary access to the Executive Chamber, was a career about-face for Sanders after Paterson hired her in 2006. She spent 27 years as a hard-nosed reporter at WRGB, many of them as chief political reporter at the downtown Albany bureau. She stalked the Capitol's marble corridors of power in stiletto heels and built a reputation as the nemesis of corrupt politicians.

"She had an uncanny ability to run in high heels," said Sonja Stark, a freelance videographer and former WRGB producer who worked with Sanders for many years in the Albany bureau. "It seemed like the higher the heels, the faster she went. I can remember many times her clicking down the hallway with some legislator trying to dodge her questions and she'd be right there with a microphone in his face and I'd be struggling to catch up with the camera on my shoulder."

"She was a ferocious reporter and when she walked into a news conference, the politicians kind of bristled because of who she was," said Ken Screven, former WRGB Ch. 6 reporter and Sanders' longtime office mate in the Albany bureau. They socialized and forged a close friendship.

"She was completely different from the image people have of her on TV," Screven said. "There's something almost vulnerable about her."

Screven never knew the genesis of a cruel, well-traveled nickname: Judy Slanders. "It took on a life of its own, but we never discussed it," he said.

"It was hurtful," Sanders conceded. She's not sure who started it, but she first heard someone say it to her face two decades or so ago after she reported a story on political corruption in Hudson.

Sanders just kept on working and rose above it.

"Anytime Judy was on a story, you had to work harder," said Doug Myers, a former WTEN Ch. 10 news reporter who's now spokesman for the Albany International Airport. "She was so persistent. She raised the level of professionalism in the broadcast industry in this region."

Sanders won a New York Emmy for breaking news after she located an abducted baby at a Stewart's Shop in Troy in 1999, ahead of police investigators in Albany and Troy, and chased the abductor down the street — in high heels, of course. It was like a scene straight out of "Broadcast News," only it was true.

"That was classic Judy," said Stark, who worked the abducted baby story with Sanders. The two women jumped out of their company car, doors open and engine running, in the Stewart's parking lot. It was still there when they returned a long while later.

"Judy was dogged in pursuit of a story," Stark said. "But it was all about the story. It was never about her. She had a refreshing lack of ego."

Sanders, who never married, prides herself on a single, independent life in her Albany townhouse. She had a serious four-year relationship with a man who proposed. She turned him down. "It just wasn't right," she said. "Plus, I never wanted to be domesticated."

Sanders spent decades around male politicians, including many with well-earned reputations as womanizers. She never had a problem. "I think I intimidated a lot of men," she said.

It was fitting that Sanders, raised by a fiercely independent single mother of four, was the first woman hired as a governor's official photographer. She had an unorthodox childhood. Her mother, Beverlee Sanders, left her father, a salesman for book publisher Random House, in Sarasota, Fla. She loaded the kids and Buffy, a mutt, into a big black Buick and drove to the Catskills. She earned a living selling real estate, relocated the family to Hollywood for a year, and came back to settle in the Berkshires, where she died in Lenox at 86 in 2003.

"She overcame so much and was an amazing woman," Sanders said. "I got from her a deep-seated sense of faith and the power of life."

Her mother also imparted a keen fashion sense. High heels presented a problem when Sanders started sailing on J-24s at Lake George Club with Novotny, owner of Book House at Stuyvesant Plaza.

"She said she liked the way heels made her legs look and hated boat shoes or flats," Novotny said. "We looked all around and came up with a pair of flip-flips with a slight heel for Judy."

Sanders recently gave Novotny a silver necklace with a locket. Inside, there are two tiny paper scrolls. She asked Novotny not to read what she wrote until after her death.

In Lenox, Sanders paused to admire the majestic power and beauty of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" as it played on a stereo.

It was nearing the end of our afternoon conversation, when her eyes welled with tears for a second time.

I asked her what she thinks about when she thinks about "what comes after," as she phrased it.

"That beautiful walk into the light," she said softly, as tears ran down her cheeks. "I don't fear it."

pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl