As most of you know, Sue passed away on October 31. I thought it might be fitting this year if I simply share some Sue passages from Bleatings Past as well as excerpts from my remarks at Sue's memorial celebration at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Traverse City on December 16.
2011 -This is brutal business, this ovarian cancer, this chemotherapy, this exhaustion, this diminishment of form. After the shock and gut ache from The News, a stranger intrudes and enters your lives, and while at first the stranger intimidates, you begin to step around, learn to step over, and finally, to step through the fears that once ruled the day. Sue is doing great. After five months of “phase one” of her clinical trial chemo, she is now working through “phase two” which is more of a maintenance regimen, and not nearly as debilitating. Her strength is returning and her hair has come back silky soft and gray as granite. All markers say positive things, but while we are never out of the woods, this is a pleasant forest we live in. The foundation of Sue’s recovery was built by the tremendous love and support of family and friends. And I could resound with a chorus of Sue superlatives, describing her heroic fight and so on. But she reads this too, and she wouldn’t like it, all this attention. So I will say this: her hair is very cute.
2013 - It's been a banner year, this two thousand thirteen. There was a wedding, world travel, a master's degree, new jobs, a reunion with long-lost cousins, good health, and tomatoes from the garden. Although Sue, I'm afraid, lapsed further into social deviance and depraved behavior: She is addicted to on-line fabric shopping, creates quilts and purses, has joined a book club, and, I'm sad to report, now subscribes to HGTV magazine. Yes, I know... worrisome.
2016 -This whole election thing has been hard on Sue. Our local prosecutor, who lost her election, refused to press charges against Sue for toilet papering a nearby yard. Our Trumpian neighbors had failed to remove their yard sign after their victory, and well, a certain someone in her own way tried to persuade them that maybe they should. After the election, she went upstairs to her non-stop quilting with MSNBC blaring at full volume. She has been camped up there ever since. Life might be getting back to "normal", although random and shrill cuss words still resound from above.
2017 - Thus en-flossed, I glanced across the room at Sue and saw that she, too, was sawing through her molars in her own flossing frenzy. We have become an inadvertent flossing duo, performing with our strings like two aligned violinists with their bows. This image, I proclaim, is what 40 years of marriage does to you. I do the yin, she does the yang. I floss with you, you floss with me. Yes, it was 40 years ago in October that Sue and I began our journey on the same dental plan. It’s the little things, like unplanned, synchronized flossing, that make marriage so darn sweet.
2018 - Every June, Sue holes up with beloved high school girlfriends at an undisclosed location. And every August, she holes up with beloved college roommates somewhere, I suppose, in the western hemisphere. She talks about how they laugh and go to garage sales and dress up in funny hats. There may be a sip of wine. But she always comes home happy and exhausted but with pupils dilated. I ask but I get no answers.
2020 - In June, Sue finished her participation in a year-long clinical trial that tested a new Alzheimer's drug. We don't know if she received the real thing or placebo but, no matter, it's good to contribute a sliver of data to research. You can never be ready when a cloaked stranger such as this invades your lives. But you adapt each and every day. There are times out of the blue when I take her hand and we dance that simple two-step, though no microwave hums nor music plays. Our simple, silent song in these moments is one of devotion, a universe apart from fading memory and confusion.
2021 - A few months ago, I attended an Alzheimer's workshop entitled, "Creating Confident Caregivers." At one point, as I was whining about having to hide the pie in the car and chain the refrigerator shut, the instructor butted in. “Hold it right there,” she said, a tad aggressively. "You have to have a sense of humor!" Okay, point taken. You have to laugh. As you discover that hats and gloves seem to have crept to very odd locations, you have to laugh. As you discover that the blueberry pie has seemed to walk off on its own, you have to laugh. Days are laced with dozens of tiny tempests in tiny teapots. They used to feel like thunderstorms - now they ping like inconsequential blips on the radar. No matter the bumps and slides of our outrageous fortune, Sue’s kindness will not be pried away.
2022 - Sue has not suffered at all since she lost awareness about two years ago that her mind was disappearing. She is comfortable and wonderfully cared for. Her Alzheimer's only afflicts those who love her. If this damn storm relents by Sunday, Sue will join Elizabeth and Andrew, Brendan, Jodi and Oliver for Christmas dinner and presents at my place. In Sue's heart of hearts, well beneath the hazards of mind, I know this is her only Christmas wish.
Excerpts from my memorial service tribute...
In 1976, a large group of us gathered at the Sleeping Bear Lounge in Honor. I made a glimpse at Sue and she eyed me back, with, you know, that lingering eye. That’s all it took, one thing led to another, and within a month I moved in with her at her parents’ cottage on the north shore of Crystal Lake.
We soon drove down to East Lansing so my parents and Sue could meet each other. As we were getting up from the dinner table, my father quickly took me aside, and with a kind of bug-eyed look whispered, “She’s steady, man!” We got married on October 8, 1977, in Beulah and had the absolute best reception I’ve ever attended at Crystal Mountain. Julie led the conga line and I even sang some rock n roll.
As I look back to those years of the late 70s and early 80s, I am struck at how extraordinary it was. Sue and I were immersed in a social world with a spectacular cast of characters: Paul, Shelly, Ruth, Jeff, Tad, Margie, Craig, Carol, Mary, Gary, Bill, Linda, Fred, Cleone, Dick, Jan, Nancy, John, Joni! Oh, how we would par-tay! One time, square dancing spontaneously broke out in our living room. We enriched the taverns in Beulah, Honor, and Frankfort. We loved each other and still love each other.
But then something cataclysmic started happening. Babies. People started having babies. Babies always ruin everything. Come to think of it, Sue and I picked up a couple of those pesky babies ourselves. People say their moms are the best moms. Well, I’m here to report, based on objective and researched analysis, that Brendan and Elizabeth had one of the two very best moms ever, ranking right up there with my own mom. Okay, our children weren’t perfect. It’s not Sue’s fault that Brendan, Elizabeth and their cousins would sneak out of our house in the wee hours of morning and walk over to the Crystal Lake golf course... to go golf cart joyriding! Down the midnight fairways they would race, over hill, over dale, until one fateful night they nosedived their carts into a darkened ditch.
I remember a July night in 1980 during our belated honeymoon to Forillon National Park in Quebec at the outer tip of the Gaspe Peninsula. As we sat atop a picnic table next to our pup tent, campfire fading, the sky gradually came under assault by a flashing, psychedelic light performance that still gives me flashbacks. The aurora borealis reached full, silent crescendo that night. There we were, Sue and I, holding hands as one, awestruck witnesses as one, to gaze stunned and drool-drenched at this celebratory gift from the universe. "This here's for the two of you," said the Universe.
In my hand I hold a simple key chain that she sewed together, probably one of a hundred that she gave away. I’m sure many of you own a quilt or a table runner or a key chain or a different piece of fabric art that Sue gave you. Her quilts blanket the world. Before and especially after she retired, Sue spent hundreds of hours upstairs in her sewing studio, laboring at her sewing machine and piecing fabrics together. Hundreds of hours. Behind that energy - that steady, calculated, highly disciplined, creative energy - was but one driving goal: to give with love. I once half-jokingly said to her, “My God, woman, you could make thousands of dollars!” Her sweetly dismissive look said it all, a look that said, “Don’t you have something else you need to be doing.” Her greatest joy in life was giving to others.
Sue is well known for her love of whales and, I'm here to tell you, there ARE spirit animals. I leave you with one last image. During a July week in the early 1980s, Sue and I vacationed with my sister Terry and her family at a cottage on Cape Cod. We embarked on a whale watching excursion out of Provincetown with 25 others and sailed miles out into Cape Cod Bay. Suddenly, we struck it rich. We closely encountered a pod of humpbacks, about 10 of them, and the captain called them all by name. One whale enjoyed cruising back and forth under the boat, and we could see that he had O-shaped scars on his tail. The captain announced that’s how he came to be called Othello. We lingered among the humpbacks for a long time before the captain said it was getting late, that we needed to head back to port. We motored back eastward and we all returned to the front to take our seats. But where was Sue? I turned around and saw that she stayed behind and stood alone at the stern railing facing back. The sun was getting low and a pink glow began to signal dusk. There she stood, alone, silhouetted against sky and sea. And far off over her shoulder, I saw it: a whale tail rose, it could have been Othello’s, and slowly descended again, a sweet farewell to its biggest fan. Sue lingered many seconds longer, then turned and floated like a cloud back to me.
Farewell, sweet and gentle spirit. I love you.
