My high school girlfriends and I have gathered each month, sometimes more, to have dinner and laugh for 3 years now. It has been so much fun, and the relationships are warm,caring and full of eyes that have traveled different roads. We easily recapture our youth and laugh at how wise we thought we were and how in retrospect how little we actually knew; how eager we are now to learn and experience more. It has been so much fun. At the center of it all, was Susan with her special brand of humor and a laugh that would bring us all into girlish stages of giggles.
Every gathering she would have another question during the middle of the evening, you know after you have warmed up and opened up a bit. Questions like, "ok ladies, where do you really buy your jeans, you know the kind that don't make us look frumpy?" We would look at one another, stand up and check out our bums and say, "gee, does mine look frumpy?" and the giggles would start again. Girl stuff, older woman stuff, great stuff,stupid stuff....just stuff. I can hear her now , "and what do you use on your face? Because, this lady tried to sell me product and you should have seen the horror on her face when she asked me what I used, and I said, ( only as dry and confident as Susan is capable of delivering the line), well, I use Dove. The woman looked at me in sheer horror!" and the giggles would burst out again, and another glass of wine would be poured. We soon discovered that everytime we got together if one of us was missing we felt the disruption of the rythmn, we missed the comic relief, the sober one, the realist, the zany one, the traditionalist, and the "mom". We all bring something to the table and we get one another and love each other as sisters.
Susan was the mom, the comedy relief and could be quite somber too. She questioned us and pushed us to get our annual mamagrams because of her own battle, what a nag :) What she didn't do was tell us that she had had a reoccurrance, she kept it quite and began to slowly withdraw, but then began to call us individually.
Susan lost her third battle with cancer, 2 weeks ago. The girlfriends gathered at Shelley's house and drove together to the services, passed tissue, giggled as stories were told and cried as her daughters stood and told their stories about their mom. Emily had a laundry list of the things she would miss ad things she would never forget:
Home room Mom , yep, every year
sugar cookies
talking on the phone and realizing 3 hours had passed and all was right in my world again
laughing
singing out loud our favorite songs while we drove
shopping
coffee breaks
presents, for no real reason
There wasn't a dry eye, Susan was courageous, beautiful, intelligent, and she loved God. I met her the first time when I was 11 years old in Sunday School, as a new member, and reconnected in 8th grade as the new kid in school, and we walked home together in high school. She was smart about her time, she chose carefully how and with whom she would spend it. She loved her children, one boy and 2 girls. I remember when I was expecting my second daughter that I had taken my 3 year old on a walk through the our Mall to look at the gold fish and window shop. I bumped into Susan that day in June and we were laughing at the fact that we were both pregnant and expecting in September. We sat on the benches near center court and she asked what names I had thought of and I told her I was having a redheaded little girl, ( mom's instincts) and was going to name her Megan. She loved the name immediately, and in September we both got our Megan.
On our last dinner together,before she had disclosed her recurrence, she proudly presented each of us with a coffee mug and a Starbucks card. We laughed we hugged and we said our usual good-byes and made plans soon, but not with Susan. I use my coffee mug every morning and I think of her. We miss her....alot.
