When Pat Groom ran, she sailed across the ground on bare feet, her dark, curly hair streaming behind her. She ran with the smile of someone who, having survived a difficult childhood, had learned to value simple pleasures — like a conversation with good friends, or a jog in the park.

Mary Hussman wants to remember her partner of 30 years that way. She was so unlike the frail woman in a wheelchair who in the last few weeks of her life was so ill from a genetic lung disease that she required oxygen around the clock.

Despite her fragility, friends say Ms. Groom was a tenacious woman with a passion for speaking out against injustice. She successfully fought a supermarket chain over her false arrest for shoplifting, winning a jury award of $750,000 in 1997. Faced with years of potential appeals, Ms. Groom eventually settled her case against Safeway for about $50,000.

Last Saturday, Ms. Groom told Hussman and their friend SP.J. Sheehy that she needed some time alone and was going to drive from their Seward Park-area home to Lake Washington to feed the ducks.

"We filled up the oxygen tank, got bread out of the freezer for the ducks, and orange juice. She was so reassuring that afternoon," Hussman said.

In the final stage of Alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency, a fatal genetic disorder that settles in the liver and destroys lung tissue, Ms. Groom had been depressed since fracturing her back.

Ms. Groom drove to SeaTac, where she rented a motel room. She stretched out on the bed, took an overdose of her medications and turned off her oxygen tank.

When she didn't return home that afternoon, Hussman called the police. Thirty friends began combing the neighborhood, checking all the places where she might be — even the ocean beaches, a favorite area of hers.

On Monday afternoon, Ms. Groom was found by motel staff. She had died in an apparent suicide, according to the King County Sheriff's Office.

Word of Ms. Groom's death brought friends from her neighborhood to the house she shared with Hussman, offering flowers, food and condolences. Some called her the "toy wizard" because she bought toys for children and kept a stash near the front door.

Ms. Groom, 58, grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the oldest girl in an Italian-American family of eight children — four who eventually died from Alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency. After a difficult childhood, she left home as a teenager and did not stay in contact with her family.

She lived at Venice Beach, Calif., where she played bongo drums and worked as a welder. She later moved to Seattle and started a landscaping business with Hussman.

Hussman said Ms. Groom was a marathon runner who frequently ran in races. But in 1992, when chronic respiratory problems she'd developed worsened, she was diagnosed with the genetic disorder and told her life expectancy was five years.

On July 20, 1995, Ms. Groom and Hussman were shopping during the grand opening of the Rainier Valley Safeway when an off-duty police officer working as a security guard falsely accused Ms. Groom of shoplifting a package of prawns. He spun her around, grabbed her purse and emptied it.

Even though it did not contain the prawns and she told him she put them in Hussman's shopping cart, he handcuffed her and marched her to the front of the store.

Fighting the food chain was a matter of principle, she believed. "If they could do that to her, a handicapped woman, they could do that to anybody," Hussman said.

Sheehy, another friend, said Ms. Groom felt she had done something right by bringing an awareness of how she was treated to the public's attention by filing a lawsuit.

Yet she clearly suffered during the trial as lawyers for Safeway "impugned her character," said attorney Elena Garella, who represented Ms. Groom in the suit.

The following year, Ms. Groom had a portion of both her lungs removed to try to halt the spread of the disease. She began relying on an oxygen tank, which Hussman said made her feel "like a dog on a leash."

Even so, where the Safeway case was concerned, "she was not going to back down. She was a very independent and determined and principled woman," Garella said.

Week by week, Ms. Groom lost more of her ability to breathe and to function. When she lost the ability to run, she turned to gardening, and could grow anything — even avocado trees — from seeds. When she could no longer garden, she turned to feeding and watching birds.

When her world again narrowed, she became an artist, channeling her love of life and some of her sorrow, from the unspoken parts of her past, into her work.

Finally, all that was left was her smile, her friends said. She gave it freely, although she worried about causing "us grief and pain," as she slipped away, Hussman said.

By taking her own life, "I suppose she thought it was a gift to all of us. But all we wanted was her," Hussman said. "We'd rather just see her, have had her here to take care of."

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com