People have consistently underestimated my age almost my entire life – sometimes by a decade or more. It has been the proverbial “blessing and a curse.” On one hand, people have consistently underestimated my maturity and my experience. On the other hand? While it frustrated me as a younger person, it has a definite appeal to the vanity now that I am not so young anymore.

And vanity was an animal that crept up behind me and pounced on me in my vulnerability as I passed the somewhat indefinable point where I could credibly be called “young.”

I never based my self-worth on my appearance. My grandmother was a catalogue model – tall and elegant with more than a passing resemblance to Lucille Ball in her youth. I… was not. Boyish, chubby, and awkward until well past puberty, I shot up in height and lost a good two stone over one summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. My younger brother was the “pretty one” in the family. I was the “smart one”. Never picked first for the dance and in the shadow of my far-more-attractive best friend, I was an approachable target for boys just as nerdy as I was. I actively distrusted anyone who complemented my appearance and I focused on using my nerdiness to my greatest advantage and excelling at all the predictably nerdy pursuits. If I was going to succeed, it wasn’t going to be due to my looks. I actually lived with nothing more than a hand mirror for years. I actively avoided trying on clothes in the harsh lighting of a department store and I avoided my own reflection in windows and glass doors. The “me” I saw in my head never matched the “me” I saw in the reflection and rather than resolving the discordance, I ignored it.

I recently had to move my aging mother and stepfather into a nursing home on a rather abrupt and unexpected time scale. In the mad rush to empty their home for sale, my brother and I spent one evening coming through the boxes of old family pictures. I was truly, hand-over-heart, astonished at the willowy, pale, and yes, beautiful, girl staring back at me with ice blue eyes and a very world-weary expression. I never, ever remembered that girl. I spent decades in willful ignorance of my own appearance and filled a lifetime with unnecessary angst and insecurity. I still can’t sort out the mixed emotions, the feeling of a lifetime wasted in the body shame of long-sleeved, shapeless clothing when I should have worn the damned bikini.

We are a society that demands physical perfection, particularly for women. No matter how much we fight it, it permeates our psyche. Even when we know it’s wrong and it’s trivial, we still get shocked when we run into a woman whom we haven’t seen in a long time and she has “let herself go”. The great, horrible irony of my life is that all of my youth I spent steadfastly ignoring my external self in favor of my internal self – and now that I am living the benefit of that dedication, those years of unrealized youthful prettiness are far behind.

The 40’s may be the new 30’s and the 50’s may be the new 40’s, but the idea of a woman over 50 still being a sexual and desirable being is still one that is a subject of ridicule in our society. While a man in his 50’s wouldn’t think twice about making an overture to a woman in her thirties, if the situation is reversed, the woman is characterized as delusional and desperate. Men with much younger girlfriends are envied. Men with much older girlfriends must have some version of “mommy syndrome” – like some sort of bizarre maternal fetish is the only conceivable thing that a young man could covet in an older woman. He couldn’t possible see her has beautiful or sexually desirable unless he were somehow broken. And the woman is ridiculous for not accepting her place in society as the venerable crone. We are expected to go to almost stupid lengths to retain our youth – but we should never, ever have the audacity to actually USE that effort on anyone but someone comfortably older than we are.

Well, fuck that shit.

There is a considerable age gap between my husband and I. I mean, were aren’t talking about a generational gap here, but it’s more than a few years. People love to point out that he doesn’t look younger than me. In some sort of weird way the fact that he doesn’t look obviously younger is supposed to make it more acceptable that I married a younger man. Well, I’ve got news for you, society. If (heaven forbid) something happened to my husband, in the unlikely event that I actually decided to go out and find a replacement, it would also be a younger man. Because in my experience, 90% of the men my age don’t have my interests and can’t keep up with my intense need for mental stimulation. They don’t like women who push their boundaries or move them out of their comfort zone. Come to think of it, most men a decade younger than me don’t keep up either, but a girl can dream.

An older friend once told me that the great tragedy of aging is that you only age on the outside. The person you see in the mirror becomes farther and farther away from the person that is trapped inside that transient body. Well, at least I have had practice at that.

When my son was in junior high, and of his own volition, he went through two years of Jr Cotillion.  It was a choice that would have made his late Mimi proud, Cotillion being the epitome of high Southern culture.  Now, at sixteen, he can navigate a place setting at a formal restaurant, dance the foxtrot, and maintains impeccable manners with women.

Little did I know that from the mother’s side, the experience can make your heart burst with joy, and break it all at once.

His first Cotillion ball was, not coincidentally his first brush with the casual cruelty of teen-aged girls.

Harry looked fine in his blue slub-knit silk suitcoat, his navy trousers, and his striped tie, clean scrubbed and smelling of his first men’s cologne.  He was proud of his his image in the mirror in his businessman’s clothes. In this uniform of upper middle-class conformity, I had a hard time picking him out when he melted into the sea of young men waiting mortified to be pinned with boutonnieres and photographed by hovering mothers who fussed over crooked ties.  I tried to cause as little embarrassment as possible, snapping my picture almost perfunctorily and leaving him to commiserate with his similarly suffering friends.

As I passed, I glanced to the other side of the ballroom. To the girls.

Much taller and willowy, and definitively young women, perfectly polished in tea dresses and the occasional ball gown, helping each other with wrist-corsages and lip gloss.  They side-eyed the mob of boys on the opposite side of the room with cocked heads and arms crossed critically.  So sophisticated and so-very-not-little girls.

My son was young for a seventh grader and small even for his twelve years.  The signs of puberty had barely brushed him, and his interests still lay squarely in the boy side of adolescence.  He still played with Legos and chatted online during hour-long Minecraft sessions.  Girls were fine as humans go, but they carry no special interest in his world.  And he, well, he was invisible to them.

The children do not choose their partners for the Jr Cotillion balls.  They are assigned partners – one for each half of the evening, an arrangement I had initially thought of as a small mercy.  It spared my son the agony and fear of rejection associated with asking a girl, something I gave a 50-50 shot of success or mortifying failure.

But even without that opportunity to dish out that flavor of humiliation, teenaged girls will find a way.

Harry’s first partner was a tiny blonde thing, of his own stature, obviously chosen by the instructor to spare him from looking at the girl’s chest for the entire duration of the dance.  She was perfumed, and she was perfect, and while I didn’t know what standard she had for a ball partner, Harry did not meet muster.  She stood as far away from him as arm’s length would allow, her entire posture screaming that she would rather be anywhere else than standing in any proximity to my son.  As she passed the other girls on the dance floor, she mouthed “Help me!” in facial expressions exaggerated enough that the intent was painfully clear to any casual sideline observer.  It was deliberate, it was transparent and my heart bled for my son.

But Harry didn’t react.  He didn’t even appear to notice.  If he was embarrassed in any way, he gave no sign.  He finished the dance, escorted the young lady back to her waiting parents, and joined the other boys to wait for the next dance.

My face burned with humiliation for my son, and I only hope that girl’s mother had the decency to be similarly mortified.  I will never know.

On the ride home in the car, I casually asked my son how he thought the dance went and who he danced with, trying to feel him out without embarrassing him if he truly hadn’t noticed.

“Okay.”

“Did you know the girls you were dancing with?”

“Only one of them.  I didn’t know the first one.  She wasn’t very nice.”

“Oh.  What happened?”

“She just wasn’t very nice.”

 And that was that.

Or so I thought.

 Fast forward a few years, and that diminutive “small-for-his-age” boy is now a 5′ 9″ man, with a dusting of a mustache, deep in the sturm-und-drang of adolescence, with all of the feelings of awkwardness, loneliness, and alienation that go along with being no longer a child and yet not quite an adult. He struggles even now to find his place in the rarified atmosphere that is the American high school.  And he is going through all of this during the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic where everyone is just making things up as we go along.  I try to sit and listen to him and commiserate as a fellow HS-outsider who didn’t find my tribe until well into college.  And deep into one of these tearful conversations, my son announces that he doesn’t like girls much.

“They are mean to me.”

And immediately I was back beside the dancefloor watching that tiny boy being openly mocked, and my heart was broken all over again by the casual cruelty of little girls.

I don’t know if all writers are the same, but I feel that I am most productive when I have a certain level of existential angst.

Since moving to KC, life has been full of many things, but lacking in that kind of internal strain that pushes me to my keyboard for my own version of talk therapy with a world of faceless strangers taking the place of a therapist.

After time, I stopped remembering this site’s existence until the annual renewal reminder popped into my inbox. And every time I briefly considered closing shop. But this writing was so intertwined into the fiber of my life for years after Katrina, that I could not bring myself to take it down. It was a feeling of permanent closure I wasn’t ready to make.

Then came 2016 and the political turmoil that permeated American public life for the next four years added to the constant background anxiety that was climate change. This dovetailed into a pandemic that changed our lives in ways that will last far beyond its end. Like Chicken Little, it was hard to shake the feeling that the sky was falling, and the life I had been living in comfortably was coming to some sort of ending. I used to divide my life into two parts – before Katrina and after Katrina. The Covid-19 pandemic has become another one of those defining markers of my life.

Many times during the last five years, I started writing with the thought to pick up the thread of this narrative that I dropped so long ago, but just as in the year immediately following Katrina, the emotion was too complex and too conflicting for me to adequately find the words to convey the inner turmoil. Even some of the more lighthearted vignettes of everyday absurdities that had allowed me to indulge in my own self-deprecating twisted sense of humor in the past fell flat when they left my head and became words on the page. My virtual wastebasket is a graveyard of metaphorical crumpled drafts.

But the angst remains, so I will just write.

I have no idea what will come next.

In the strange way that life has this tendency to bring you back to your jumping-off point, I am back where I started my journey as an adult.

One year ago on Labor Day I accepted a job with a former client, and I moved my family north, forward in our collective narrative but back into mine.  We are now living in the suburbs of Kansas City, the place I held my first job, bought my first car, rented my first apartment, and had my heart broken for the first time.

I must tell you that my memories of Kansas City are not altogether fond.

It is not really my kind of place.

I am a fundamentally a born Easterner, more comfortable with Eastern cities.  I am happiest in cities where things are repurposed, not rebuilt.  Cities whose old bones show through whatever new veneer is thrown up on top of them.  Cities where three generations live within five square miles of each other, and houses expand with the size of the family, instead of being traded up every seven years.

But if St. Louis is the westernmost Eastern city, Kansas City is the easternmost Western one.

Kansas City fairly pulses with change and growth.

It is a city that is constantly reinventing itself, constantly building, constantly expanding.  It is the picture of urban sprawl, as it reaches out greedily and gobbles up towns as it leaps from economy to economy. From my personal outsiders view, it struggles to maintain any other identity than prosperity.

However, in a second moment of naked honesty, perhaps sometimes Kansas City feels too much like a reflection of myself.

I am the poster child for upward mobility.

The oldest child of a working class family, I grew up shuffled between family farms and small post-war suburban tract homes.  Half my brothers and sisters are in union trades.  I went through college and graduate school on a combination of work, scholarships and the tolerance of my first husband.  I moved from city to city wherever the next opportunity took me, not really intending to go anywhere, as long as it was not backward.  I turned down jobs in academics to sell out to Big Pharma, a steady paycheck and a house in the white collar world of subdivisions and home owners associations, in an area of town where upscale retail establishments pop up like mushrooms.

I have at least SIX organic supermarkets within ten minutes of my house.

In truth, there are days when I wonder if it is the city I am uncomfortable in, or if it is my life.

I chose this world.  I worked for it.  I reached out for it with greedy arms and I embraced it.  The house I live in offers more than a thousand square feet for each human inhabitant.  There are days when I walk around it and it feels obscene. I am uncomfortable inviting my old friends into it because it feels like wearing a designer dress to a barbeque picnic – overdone and out of place.  But I guiltily admit that I love it, and I suddenly can no longer raise my eyebrows at the owners of gas-guzzling SUVs without smelling of hypocrisy.

It’s strange, this life.  The years and the miles stretch out behind and I can barely recognize the person I was when I struck out on my own as a newly minted adult, not 10 miles from where I am now.  I look back on the days of ramen-fueled idealism, the painful drama that comes with trying on each new self to see if it is the one that will finally fit, and belatedly realizing that the only answer to life is to occupy the person you are at that very moment.  Because if you lock yourself into one self, you will miss all the things that life has in store for you.  You will miss all the things you can become.

So in the end, this city and I, we are not so different.

We are both still getting there.

A bit of a minor crisis on the media front actually forced me to pay attention to the fact that I have a blog (Hello, blog! Long time, no see). The service provider that actually hosts the images I use on my blog has become a tad less reliable than they had been in the past – in fact in a rather alarming way. So I am going to be migrating the images over, one by one, to my paid server space. This is a bit of a job, so please have patience with the broken image links while I get things redirected.

While I am here, I guess I might as well try to actually SAY something. Since it’s pretty much starting over again, there’s a certain freedom in that, I suppose, but I think the overall theme is going to say the same as it was.

And it was… What?

The everyday is a pretty profound place, filled with wonder and majesty, if you walk through it with mindfulness. There’s no need to look at the grand epic of history or the immense sweep of the stars to find it. It’s all here – in something as simple as walking to the mailbox and watching the hiss and steam of rain on the warm pavement and smelling the must of wet earth and hearing the white noise of a hundred random raindrops on the metal of a car hood.

I try to find it – the wonder – and the hysterical irony – of the everyday. And I hope you’ll stick around to read about it.

It has been six months since my last post.  I have thought about coming here many times.  But procrastination is a downward spiral.  After a while, the guilt gets too overwhelming and it becomes easier and easier to lose yourself in the business of everyday life and let things fall further and further away from you.  There is always some new reason not to face the fear.

Because it is a fear.

I started this blog as a form of therapy after Katrina.  Drifting and disjointed, I needed a way to process the great enormity of having my entire life uprooted and plunked down in a place I had neither planned for nor wanted.  Then I kept it fueled on the pains of infertility and life as an older mother, and finally it nursed me through marital crisis and into career ambivalence.

And life took over from there.

Life – messy and busy and beautiful started happening without asking my opinion and I was moving too fast to keep up with it and write it down.  My thoughts on my own life became complicated and the same clear voice I heard in my head when I sat down to write with my baby son in my lap is now muddled and hard to pin down now that he’s a walking talking reading and full fledged boy.

This is no mystery to me.  My life has also become muddled and hard to pin down.  Like most of my life, I straddle two worlds, one foot in each, but never wholly in both.  I am a professional with a busy career.  One that takes me away from home frequently and requires me to work independently and manage a staff of people.  But, truth be told, I am not the hard-driven executive type.  I bank most of my earnings.  I buy most of my business clothes at J C Penney.  I don’t have a single pair of shoes worth over $100.  I don’t vacation in Europe, or even the Bahamas.  I refuse to take my work home if I can AT ALL help it, and I don’t spend every off moment of my time engaged in career enrichment activity.  My cars are old, but paid off.  I have a small house in a modest neighborhood – also almost paid off.  I don’t have a maid and my carpet is in dire need of replacing.

But when I sit down with the mothers of my son’s peers, I am the odd out.  I am not a classroom mom.  I don’t volunteer at the school much, because I commute to work everyday and I am often on the road.  I am not up-to-date on the neighborhood gossip.  I spend my days immersed either in regulatory guidance or pharmaceutical toxicology and I have no opinions on any controversial child raising topic.  Not one.  I have no commercial television, so I have no common cultural references.  I don’t follow any sports teams.  My understanding of intelligent or even polite conversation is skewed to the point where I know I must come off as faintly autistic to a normal person in casual conversation.

I am younger than many of my business colleagues, but I am older than most of the other moms, and some days I feel it. I am lucky to get dinner on the table, homework done, and the dishes washed and clothes cleaned every night, let alone spend one second of time on anything approaching interior decoration.  Some of the mothers see my son more at school than I do.   My house is, generously put, lived in.  Clean, but worn; happy but a wee bit disheveled.

I had a beautiful house once, I really did.  Straight out of Better Homes.  Then I had a kid.  And a storm.   And my priorities were completely and utterly upended.

So here I am. An over-educated underachieving intellectual.  Living in a working class neighborhood and jetting to Washington to discuss public policy every few months.  Neither here nor there, but stuck somewhere in the great in-between.

And trying desperately to find a new voice.

And desperately afraid that I won’t.

Science doesn’t have to be boring. It doesn’t really even have to be hard. We are all prewired to be scientists – every single one of us from the time we are infants.  It is, in fact, our evolutionary heritage, one of our most advanced survival traits, and easily the one that has allowed us to practically overpopulate ourselves. We observe.  We hypothesize.  We test.  We revise.  We test again.  And the beat goes on. It is how we learned to talk and walk and what hurts and what doesn’t.  We have an implicit understanding of cause and effect (even though we often confuse correlation with causation, but, hey, it’s a complicated world). We do this every single day of our lives, like breathing.  The only difference between me as a scientist, and people in every other line of work is that I am actually conscious of doing it, and I expand it beyond the things that affect my everyday life directly.  My survival trait has become my passion. But we all DO  it.  We are all amateur scientists.

I know this both implicitly and by watching my son.  He is at the age where is entire vocabulary is an endless string of “what ifs?”.    I will admit there are times when I collapse in frustration and resort to the refuge of “well, that’s never going to happen, so let’s not worry about it, eh?”, but for the most part I try not to discourage the convolutions of his imagination.  The foundation of science is built on “what ifs”.  Einstein was a horrible mathematician, but he possessed a highly honed ability to visualize.  My son, who wanders in a vivid world of his own creation, shares this gift.  I want him to travel the universes of his “what ifs”.  I want him to follow them to their logical conclusions.  I want him to tweak and rethink.  I want him to observe and see if his “what ifs” fit the world outside his head, and if not, to try and figure out why.  Because reality, my friends, is a wondrous thing.

But don’t believe me.  I am going to recommend a few books that will convince you that the world you live in is possibly more incredible than your imagination ever dreamed.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

One of my most highly recommended science-for-the-layman books was written by a layman, Bill Bryson.  Despite his lack of scientific training, he wrote one of the most cogent books on science for popular consumption that I ever had the great joy to read.  To be sure, the first few chapters, where he, by a series of comparisons, drives home what a miniscule portion of the known universe our world is a bit of a slog.  Trust me, if you push through that first grind, the remainder of the book is well worth the time.  We forget that science is pursued by people, and it is truly amazing what it owes to the quirky personalities that have influenced it.

Phantoms in the Brain

Written by a neurologist who is an acknowledged expert in the treatment of phantom limb syndrome, this book is an amazing journey into the very heart of what it is to “occupy” our own bodies.  This exploration on how the mind manufactures the sensation of being the “self” and the intricacies of how our minds distinguish it from the “other”, and even from the divine, will completely change your view on what constitutes reality.  This is one of those books I could not put down, and had a profound and long lasting impact on how I saw myself, and my world.

Science of Fear

Our instinct is to trust our common sense, right?  But what happens when that sense is manipulated by fear? This books explores when real risk and our perception of risk are at odds, and how we make poor choices by relying on our “common sense” and instant instinct.  Instinct is a function of self-preservation, but that innate gut-feeling of imminent danger can deceive us into making poor choices.  Furthermore, this gut instinct can be manipulated to feed social and political agenda.  Learn when to stop and assess when our fear is well-grounded, and when it’s just our inner ape talking.

Bully for Brontosaurus

The Mismeasure of Man

As a life scientist, trained in molecular and population genetics, I can tell you that there is no scientific theory that has been more misunderstood, maligned,  and misused than Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.   Beautiful in both its simplicity and in its intricacies, it is the story of life from its earliest molecules to that incredible, intertwined ecosystem that we call our home today.  There are few better tellers of the evolutionary tale than Stephen Jay Gould.  Not only is he a master at walking the layman through the theory of evolution, the real theory and not the popular misunderstanding of “survival of the fittest”, but he is one of the most eloquent whistle-blowers on how Darwin’s theory had been used to justify the most criminal human abuses of man to his fellow man.  I recommend two books by Gould – “Bully for Brontosaurus” is his most accessible, but “The Mismeasure of Man” is a must-read to understand the social impact of Darwinism on modern history.

Happy reading, and prepare to be amazed!

Otherwise titled “How parenting strategy backfired and turned my son into a vegetarian.”

Eating is a giant interruption in my son’s day.  To my observation, he derives little pleasure from eating, rarely comments on his food except when he decidedly does NOT like what is offered, and has an expressed preference for lunches his mother packs over what is served in the cafeteria (okay, a certain amount of motherly pride, there).

And he will not eat meat.

Which is, most likely and entirely, my fault.

While I do not require him to finish his plate (a childhood requirement that almost certainly is largely responsible for my own struggles with weight), and I do not use food as a comfort device (no cookies at the end of a bad day), I do require him to at least taste a bite of each offering, and I do NOT like profligate waste.  I hate ANY waste – particularly of food.  I consider it shameful to throw away food as long as there are people going hungry.  It’s disrespectful and disrespect is a big sin in our house.

It’s not only disrespectful to those who do not have enough food, but when the slaughter of animals is involved, it’s horribly disrespectful to throw away something that an animal gave its life for.  I am not fundamentally against the eating of meat, but it has always sat uncomfortably with me.  I consider it a luxury, indulged in at the expense of a life, and should not be taken for granted.  I can certainly survive on plants alone, but I LIKE meat.  Genoa salami alone will prevent me from ever really considering vegetarianism.  Aaaaah pigs.  If you only weren’t so darned tasty.

But I only can justify my carnivorous tendencies by endeavoring to respect the sacrifice.  By buying parsimoniously and by NOT WASTING.

I explained this philosophy to my son when I picked up his untouched plate of roast chicken.  “A chicken gave his life so that we can have this food, and doesn’t it seem disrespectful to simply throw it in the garbage?”

As I said, disrespect is a major sin in my house.  The giving of respect is the root of all ethical behavior.  All of the commandments and sins can be explained in that one word.

Respect the feelings of others.

Respect their possessions.

Respect their personal space.

Respect your parents and your teachers.

Respect exclusive relationships.

Respect your Partner.

Above all, respect Life, and its right to exist.  Take no life unnecessarily.  Hurt no being if it can be avoided.

You can strip away all the trappings of our legal and moral systems, and they come right down to teaching us to Respect One Another.  Fail in teaching that, and you have failed in teaching morality.

The next time chicken came to the table on the plate, Harry took one look at it, and declared “I won’t eat anything that hurts an animal.” Apparently Harry decided he didn’t want to take the moral responsibility for the sacrifice – it simply wasn’t WORTH it to him to eat something that he was indifferent toward.  It wasn’t, in his mind, a necessary hurt.

I have had other parents tell me that the point would be moot in their house.  That the child would simply eat what was placed in front of him.  But the thought of making him eat something that he has declared he is morally opposed to seems akin to committing religious blasphemy.  I would no longer make him eat a ham sandwich than serve a Jewish friend a pork chop.

But more than that, the entire point of moral teaching is to give our kids the internal compass and fortitude of character to make their own decisions.  It is to instill, not a set of rules of right and wrong, good and bad, but to give them the tools to make correct choices.  And if I don’t allow Harry to do that, if I supersede him because he actually takes a HIGHER moral path than I do – what message is that sending?

Our lives would be easier if our little vegetarian actually liked vegetables, but we have managed.  He has had momentary lapses where a chicken nugget or his mother’s mouth-watering pork roast has caught his momentary fancy (I pride myself on the ability to produce tasty pig), but in our nightly exercise to find things we are grateful for, Harry recently thanked God for making soy chicken nuggets so that he didn’t have to kill chickens.

I am still not a vegetarian.  But I will admit that my son has instilled a bit of mild discomfort with his purely innocent and instinctive grasp of the sanctity of life, and the need not to waste it.  His decision was simple and immediate.  There was no equivocation (except over the beloved chicken nuggets), and only the occasional rationalization.  In this, I feel more like his student than his teacher.

Harry may not remain a vegetarian.  He has become more intrepid in his eating habits in the last few years, and it is possible that animal flesh may again have a place on his regular menu.  I am not sure if this eventuality will make me a little bit sad or a little bit relieved.  And relieved not because that I will no longer have to make two meals at dinnertime,  but because I won’t have that disquieting feeling that he has in some way passed me by.

On February 6, 2012, Dr. Susan Niebur passed from this life.  She leaves a beloved husband and two young sons behind her.

We have all lost an eloquent voice and a tireless advocate on behalf of mothers living with cancer.

And the heavens have gained another bright eternal star.

“All that survives after our death are publications and people. So look carefully after the words you write, the thoughts and publications you create, and how you love others. For these are the only things that will remain.” Susan Niebur

Susan, author of Toddler Planet, and I started blogging at about the same time.  There was a natural affinity – we were both new mothers, both career scientists – and we communicated through our blogs and emails.  She was a font of encouragement to me in my early days of blogging, and I have dedicated more than one post to her over the years.

Ultimately, she continued on blogging, advocating, exploring, while I have foundered.  She found inspiration in her diagnosis, and reached down into a wellspring of courage to reach out and to do what is as natural to her as breathing.  To educate, to comfort and to love.

She is facing the end of her journey here.

Susan is “just” a human.  She has struggled with deep fear and the unfairness of life.  She has had days where she has questioned her ability to cope.  And she has shared it all with us, in black and white and breathtaking prose, so that we know that it is okay.  It is okay to doubt, to feel fear and to feel alone in the face of something so big it takes your breath away.  Her ability to express the journey of being human at our most vulnerable has given comfort to so many in need of a hand in the dark.

So I grope out with my hand, here in the dark, to hold hers.  To give back the gifts she has given us – to live in the moment, to love fully, to follow your passion, to squeeze everything you can out of the time given us.

And she knows, as a scientist and as a writer of artistic eloquence, the vast beauty of the universe.  We are indeed the stuff of stars, a momentary collision of matter that takes form and breathes and lives.  We will live on through the imprint we make on everything around us, but that form, that fallible form, will disperse and remix and become another thing of infinite beauty in timeline stretching out from the moment of creation.

To Susan – I wish you peace and comfort and great love in your journey.  I pray for your family around you, holding you close in their love.   And know that part of you that will live on, that will always live on, is a thing of aching loveliness.