Susie and me
Two weeks ago, my best friend Susie passed away.
I had been grieving her for nineteen months, ever since she was diagnosed with glioblastoma and we began to watch this brain cancer change her life. I thought, in some way, I had been preparing for the loss. But the finality of her death hit me harder than I could have imagined. This is the first time I’ve been able to write about her this way.
We met when I was a freshman in high school and she was a junior, and we became inseparable. We were silly together. Adventurous. She was funny on her own, but somehow the two of us made each other funnier. Through 42-years of friendship, we always found reasons to laugh.
Susie was an extraordinary gift giver, the kind of person who noticed what you loved and remembered it. She was one of the best problem solvers I have ever known. I could bring Susie anything… a disappointment, a decision, a fear, even the things I was afraid to say out loud.
She knew the inner rooms of my life.
There were seasons when we were closer and seasons when life created more distance between us. But we always found our way back.
She showed up for my children as if they were her own. And I love her daughters with that same mother-heart. And when she married her high school sweetheart here at our home, I had the honor of officiating their wedding.
She was woven into my life.
When I had breast cancer, Susie showed up for me in the most tangible, loving ways. She came and did my laundry. She sat at my bedside. She was there in the frightening hours, offering the kind of care that does not need to be announced because it is simply present.
During the final week of her life, I sat beside her and said everything I needed her to hear. I told her I would help hold the people she loved. I told her she could release. I told her she could trust.
Leaving her was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I kissed her, stroked her forehead one last time, and told her I loved her. Then I walked out the door, knowing I might never see her again.
Susie lived for several more days. I wrestled with where I was supposed to be. Her daughters were there. Her parents were coming to sit with her. I did not want my love to take up space that belonged to them. And I had made a commitment to travel to Arizona, where I would offer a healing retreat for people who were suffering and give a speech about agency and resilience.
The question underneath all of it was the same question I had traveled there to speak about:
What is mine to do right now?
On Sunday morning, September 20, I woke abruptly at six after a restless night.
I got out of bed and walked into my friend’s backyard in Scottsdale. The Sonoran Desert was beginning to fill with light. Dust softened the ground beneath my feet, and everywhere around me, the arms of the saguaros reached toward the sky.
Toward the heavens.
I had seen the desert before, but something had changed. I felt a profound sense of beauty and awe there that morning. I did not yet know Susie had died at six, at about the time I had awakened.
I learned later, when I was already on the road to the airport.
In the long, slow TSA line, I looked down. At my feet was a white feather.
White feathers have long felt like calling cards from the people I love who have passed on. I did not need to explain this one away or prove what it meant. I simply received it.
These past two weeks, I have been thinking about what friendship means: the accumulated kindnesses, the soul-deep knowing, the easy laughter, the person who remembers who you were, understands who you have become and accepts who you are still becoming.
I had all of that in Susie.
And I will miss her so much.
I am beginning to understand grief as love trying to find where it can go now… where it can land when the person who received it is no longer here in the same way.
In the days after Susie died, I cried harder and longer that I had expected. Her death seemed to open a door to older grief I had carried for years. I cried for her, and for losses I hadn’t fully let myself feel. At some point, I thanked her for that opening. I am still crying, but lately there have been moments of lightness, too.
Yesterday, in the shower, I realized I have been talking to her every day. I still tell her things. I still reach for her. Our relationship has changed, but it has not ended. I trust that she can hear me.
Maybe that is one place love goes. It becomes a conversation we keep having.
That same weekend in Arizona, I stood before a room and spoke about agency: the choices still available to us when so much is beyond our control. I said that we practice our way toward presence through all the smaller moments of our lives, and that resilience becomes the byproduct.
I see now that agency does not always look like action. Sometimes what is ours to do is to sit beside someone. To say the words. To make a promise. To step back and make room. To keep a commitment. To notice the desert. To receive the feather. To let the tears come.
We do not get to decide how long the people we love will stay.
But we can love them while they are here. We can tell the truth while there is time. And when they go, we can let that love keep reaching… toward memory, toward one another, toward the heavens.
This is where my love for Susie is going now.
It is still reaching.
