suzanne

Only thirty minutes ago, Dad emailed me and my brother to tell us that he and Mom had been with Suzanne when she passed away an hour earlier. What had I been doing while they were sitting by her hospital bed? Chatting with a friend on the Internet, then putting my laptop into a backpack and staring out the window of the bus I rode towards the Starbucks I was going to spend a few hours writing in. I’m still here, and wondering what I can do now.

Suzanne was an elegant lady who lived on her own in our hometown, Olympia. She was an extraordinarily classy individual, with an appropriate background: degree from the French Sorbonne, practically an aristocrat of family-established industry in the neighboring town of Aberdeen, better-versed in art history than most professors I knew. On top of it all, she was one of the most vibrantly warm and earnestly sincere people I’ve ever met. On one of last year’s occasions seeing her exiting from a checkup in my father’s office, she told me very excitedly about her planned trip to visit Iranian archeology digs with her curator friends. Her entire home was also like a museum of Chinese art. It had everything from vases and dishes to tapestries and furniture, and I will always remember the day she invited our family to look through it. She took a few pieces of pottery down from their shelves so we could look at them more closely, and she explained to me and Matthew about the rarity of the China blue pigment and how to use it to distinguish authentic relics of ancient history from imitation pottery.

She went on after that to ask my mother, in the flowing cursive of her hand-written letters, if she wouldn’t mind letting her “adopt” us as her adopted grandchildren. She had no other family, with her husband having passed away some years before we met her, so Suzanne had “adopted grandchildren” all over Olympia. We who were lucky enough to have her as an adopted godmother periodically received her letters asking us how we were getting on, in addition to big hugs and cheek-kisses whenever we saw her at home. Somehow Suzanne could make you feel, in one hug, that the entire town was welcoming you back, and her smile was always the whole town’s pride and love for their own smiling at you.

Without any family members of Suzanne’s to write condolences to, I still wanted to write, to say something, to convey my feelings about her somehow. Sitting around in this coffee shop and quietly contemplating the news like a grown-up, or going about what I was doing, didn’t seem to be the right thing to do. Then I remembered that Suzanne always read my blog. Between her and Dad, I think they accounted for most of this thing’s readership, and she would ask my parents whenever she saw them to pass along her well wishes to me in China and that she was eagerly looking forward to reading more about it. I got to thank her in a message I passed into Mom’s hands months ago in October, at least. But I think it would be better to make her a part of something of mine that she so kindly checked every day, to wrap her into this narrative of my life now as warmly as she embraced all of our lives.

I still remember Suzanne’s toast at Tom’s 60th birthday, a good-natured accomplishment in injecting some ceremony into Dr. Wu’s party following the gift of high-speed derby racetrack lesson vouchers (to scare the daylights out of him, my father had chuckled) and the mention of golden speculums (professionally related). Older people can be wild, I learned that night, but unlike us most of us twenty-somethings they can be classy at the same time. So I just can’t help but think that if Suzanne has passed on, then whatever comes next for all of us must be a lively and sophisticated engagement, just because she’s there now.