Good-bye, Susan, Another Member of Our Support Group Departs

​I am sorry to pass along the word that another beloved member of our support group, Susan Wong, has died. Below is a note from her daughter, who was with her to the end. Susan was not a person to whom illness simply happened. She was never a bystander in her own care. She looked for ways to cope and was there to help others, even though they contended with less ferocious adversaries than she. More than one member of the support group mentioned to me that Susan was an inspiration and role model. I add my name to that list.

Dear friends –

Mom died this morning. Before we gently let go of her hand and watched her go, we provisioned her journey with our most profound love and gratitude. Enough, we hope, to sustain her for eternity (or at least until we meet again and can replenish her supplies).

 

These past months, we were given the gift of time together, during which we shared in deep conversations about love, life, and death. We read books, listened to good music, wrote, laughed, cried, reconnected and reminisced. We had the rare and frightening advantage of knowing that time was running out, and I am proud to say that we took advantage and did our best not to waste it.

Thank you for the letters, emails, texts that you've sent. I read as many of them as I could to Mom in her final days. In the coming days, I hope we can still share with one another even a few stories and pictures from her spectacular life. An overwhelming flood of which are already brimming in our own minds, as well as our inboxes. In one remembrance, an old friend wrote to me this week saying that it seemed she had lived many lives within this one lifetime. As I reflect, I agree that this indeed seems true, despite the fact that it was also cut painfully short. 

Right now, in this moment, I feel like I could fill volumes describing her life, her character, her dreams and accomplishments, her hardships, even her missteps and imperfections (maybe one day I will). But for now, I will just say that it has been an absolute honor and privilege to share in this life with her. She shaped for me a magical and inspired worldview and I will spend the rest of my life endeavoring to embody and to raise my child with the values she instilled. 

SLEEPING IN THE FOREST by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths, among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

With all of our love to each of you,

Shina