Eulogy for Susan
Many years ago, when Susan returned from her brother’s funeral, no sooner had I seen her car pull into the driveway than she came through my door and dropped onto the couch. “The priest,” she began. “I just wanted to shout at him, ‘Turn around!’”
I was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner. I remember wondering if I was on the cusp of another one of Susan’s proclamations — like the time a couple of decades earlier, before I knew her well, when she knocked on my door, thrust the newspaper in front of my nose as soon as I opened it, pointed to a real estate ad announcing Improved Lots, and scoffed, “Improved lots! You can no more improve land than you can improve a whale!”
Sometimes her proclamations were humorous and pithy, like that one. Other times they were more serious and elaborate. Once, she convinced me to accompany her nearly a half mile up the steepest section of Pinecone Ravine, bushwhacking to a saddle on the mountain flank. There, the land levelled out and the water puddled up, leaving the forest soil deep and moist. She had buried a stick there the year before, and she had a story to tell about decomposition. We had barely arrived before she launched in. “It is so easy to get caught up in the grandeur of these huge trees,” she spurted out, still catching her breath. “We don’t even realise that there’s this intricate choreography underfoot between life and death.”
Her proclamations, either pithy or elaborate, were like the tips of icebergs, ideas I’d end up puzzling over sometimes for days. Little did I realise how long the insight she would share with me that night would stay with me.
Susan said, “Maybe the priest has officiated too many funerals. That’s a tough job, no doubt. He was trying to provide comfort, but it didn’t offer much consolation. Of course, he spoke about Fred being with God now. That’s what you’d expect a priest to say, and that’s fine. But then he made a point of emphasising how much more important Fred’s love of God was than everything else in his life — his kids, his friends. Even Kate! They were married for fifty years. She’s devastated by his death. I wish the priest had said something affirming, like how exemplary, how beautiful their love had been.
“Instead, he pressed his point. He told us to imagine a line that starts the day you’re born, growing a foot longer for every year you live. ‘Fred’s line was seventy-five feet long when he died,’ he said, pausing like he was about to reveal some profound truth. ‘But if you go to live with God, that line keeps growing. Before long, the eternal part will dwarf the short stretch you built here on Earth. That’s why devotion to God is so important.’
“So, Fred and Kate’s love? Second class. Fred’s life? A brief line segment. I feel sorry for the priest if the lives we live feel that insignificant to him.”
I didn’t understand what she was so worked up about. “Wasn’t the priest’s line just a rhetorical device? Maybe it wasn’t the best choice, but it was just a metaphor to help him explain the eternal, right?”
Susan considered this, “Yeah, the priest was using the line as a way to get us to have a more expansive view of our lives. Fair enough. Trying to pull us out of our day-to-day existence, that’s a worthy effort. But solely looking forward, saying that, in effect, the afterlife is all that matters because it is infinite, consigns the life we live here on Earth to a mere means to an end. And that’s a shame. I wish I could’ve said to him, ‘Turn around! That line that you’re talking about? Life doesn’t just magically appear out of nothing. My brother’s line is connected to the long arc of life.’”
Susan got up and walked over to the window, looking out onto Klinger Ridge. Daylight was fading into night, and the mountain was silhouetted against an ultramarine sky pierced with points of light from the first evening stars. Her signature upturned eyebrows and large, round-lensed glasses gave her a permanent air of wonder, an expression that suited her in moments like these. “Before telescopes, many people thought the sky was like a large, spherical room circulating around the Earth. The stars were affixed to its perimeter. Everything in the sky — stars, planets, the sun, and the moon — orbited Earth. But then Galileo trained his telescope on Jupiter and saw four moons orbiting it, and the sky started to become much more interesting. Now we know it to be impossibly enormous with all sorts of fascinating celestial objects.
“The universe, that was quite a frontier. But when science began to unveil the living world around us…that has turned out to be a revelation without comparison. Our living world is a most amazing, entirely unique, ongoing masterwork, all crowded onto a tiny planet in a tiny corner of the universe. Each one of us emerged from this 3.8 billion-year-old continuum…from this fountain of ancient, learned wisdom. It, more than anything, deserves our reverence, and we should remember this during poignant moments like when we’re celebrating someone’s life when they die. So, I agree with the priest that we need to expand our view, but by turning around and looking back at the history of life that preceded us and delivered us to this moment. Looking back is revelatory. It reveals how we connect to all life. I find it profoundly moving to belong to this story, rather than standing apart from it.”
Susan’s words that evening altered how the two of us experienced the world around us. We were the types who liked to pause for the plants, animals, and fungi we encountered. After that night, we began to linger differently — to ask also where they came from.
In spring, we still marked the return of the Swainson’s thrush with a hike to Barclay Lake, listening for its plaintive, whistle-like call echoing off the flank of Mount Baring. But winter became a season of looking back. We read about wings and migration, about how the bones of a bird’s wing and the bones of a human hand evolved from a shared ancestry that was already so perfectly adaptable that hundreds of millions of years later, their genes and their embryonic development are strikingly similar. We learned how the routes thrushes follow each year are shaped by ancient shifts in climate and by continents slowly rearranging themselves. To encounter even a single species this way, to recognise how much time and invention are folded into its presence, was humbling.
So, it is with deep gratitude to Susan that I say, yes, turn around. That long, improbable story of life is rich and illuminating. I find it far more meaningful to seek to understand our living heritage than to peer blindly into the ether. That’s how Susan and I came to travel through the years we shared, the better part of two decades looking backwards. At first, that shared attention simply drew us together. Over time, it drew us closer: from neighbours, to friends, and eventually to something deeper. I only wish it had happened sooner.
Susan and I found each other when I was in a rough patch. Stuck in a rut, you might say. Recently divorced with an empty bank account and an even emptier sense of my own worth. I found the only house I could afford within an hour of my job. It happened to be next to Susan. All I could see ahead of me at the time was bleakness.
We were neighbours, but we didn’t meet until heavy snow knocked the power out. I didn’t care enough to have a backup generator, and my house sat in darkness as the daytime turned to evening. Susan noticed.
“Your house is dark,” she said after I answered her knock on my door.
“Yes, no power.”
“No generator?” she asked. And then, not waiting for the obvious answer, she said, “Come over. I have dinner.”
I tried to refuse, but she said, “I wasn’t asking a question. I’ll see you shortly.”
I can’t recall what we ate or what we talked about. What I remember are the books. They were everywhere: on the bookshelves, on the coffee table, on the end tables, on the couch. Later that evening, I returned to my cold house with one of those books in hand, a heavily dog-eared and annotated copy of On Trails by Robert Moor. I would come to find the personal notes she had made as interesting to read as the author’s words. I would eventually add my own.
I am sure some people found Susan to be eccentric. True, some of her ideas were out there. Maybe even a lot of them. Yet I, for one, loved her way of taking you on a journey. And we took many journeys together, both in the real world and in our conversations. Oftentimes, those journeys were to look backwards, to discover the nuance in life.
Susan helped me to see the gift of life. She helped me by basically not allowing me time or space for self-pity. There simply was too much of the living world to witness, consider. She said that the living world is the ultimate source of inspiration. Once you learn to listen to it, it shares its insight with you, naturally.
She had one final thought that night that she returned from her brother’s service, “Embrace life. That’s what I’d want the message of my eulogy to be.” But then she added that she really didn’t expect or want one. She was delighted to walk this Earth. She said she’d be fine when it was her time to leave it.
She may have been at peace with her passing. Me, not so much.
I will miss Susan. I already do. I can’t quite see things the same way without her. It’s been that way for two years now, ever since she first entered memory care. Our conversations changed. She couldn’t remember the places we had visited, the grand ideas we had struck upon. During one of my visits early on, when she still had lucid moments, she said to me, “You shouldn’t come. I’m not me anymore. Go out there. Go for a hike. That’s where I am. That’s where you’ll find me.” Susan would be disappointed to know I haven’t been able to find her without her. She was my guide. She animated the living world for me. And now? I don’t see it quite the same way.
With that, the neighbour folded the sheet of paper entitled Eulogy for Susan in half, then half again, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt. He lifted his eyes and stared out the dark window towards where he knew the flank of Klinger Ridge would be, hoping to feel close to his lost friend, hoping for one last gift of insight.
