When time is running out, by Loren Ghiglione

Suzie Jones passed away on December 1, 1979 in Santa Rosa, Calif
Sometimes world events seem very important — newspaper headlines flash the latest developments in Tehran and Washington, D.C. — and sometimes those events appear totally insignificant, totally meaningless. Sometimes the happenings of ordinary life — birth, marriage, death — are more important than anything else.
I went to elementary school in Claremont, a southern California college town of 10,000 people, with Suzy Jones, a cousin. Debbie Reynolds cute, Suzy was as All-American as her name. Sixth-grade boys dreamed of playing spin the bottle with her; later, at Whittier College, the students elected her homecoming queen. Over the years, Suzy and I kept in touch by mail. A postcard. A Christmas card. She married, taught elementary school, gave birth to two boys, Benjamin and Teddy, and then divorced. Nothing extraordinarily unusual in her life.

Three years ago, Suzy discovered she had cancer. A mastectomy followed. Then radiation and chemotherapy. "The cure is definitely worse than the disease," she wrote to me in March 1978, "as far as pain and discomfort. Actually, it's not so bad and will be worth it, if it works. It's much harder dealing with the fear of recurrence."

I made a point of visiting Suzy several months later. She looked fine. She lived alone in Forestville, a village north of San Francisco on the Russian River, not far from the redwoods and the Korbel vineyards. Her husband, who had remarried, and her children lived nearby. She was making a sampler quilt and sewing a long, Tibetan sleeveless coat from fabric she had woven. The coat would be purchased by a California pattern company "I would like to work for myself," she said. "Mid-life crisis is only a prelude to the crises to follow. Wait 'til you realize that time is running out and you haven't done everything you've wanted to."

Suzy, her brother, David, and I walked through the red-woods, listening to the whistling wind and then to the silence. We drove west to the Pacific Ocean and stood on the rocks above the beach until the wet, cold spray numbed us. Then we bought five pints of raspberries and returned to Suzy's small cottage to gorge ourselves. That evening, we spent two hours over a Mexican dinner, talking with Suzy's boyfriend, a blacksmith, about the artistry involved in making knives by hand.

The telephone call came last Sunday night from Suzy's mother. Suzy had died. She was 38 years old.

There had been round after round of radiation and chemo therapy. The homecoming queen had been left without any hair. The mastectomy had been followed by other operations, the final one — a chest tube insertion — designed to remove fluids from her lungs. For a moment, Suzy felt relief. She could breathe again. She told her mother, "I think I'm going to make it." But Suzy's lungs collapsed. "At the very last," her mother said, "every cell in her body was destroyed by the cancer." Suzy hadn't given up, but her body had. Peace overcame pain.

Before she died, Suzy had planned her own funeral service — communion at her ex-husband's home, her favorite poems and songs, her family close to her.

The way an "ordinary" person dies isn't news. Ask a reporter, he'll tell you such a death isn't significant. But isn't it important that some people learn how to die as well as how to live?