A chapter closes

[aadler]

Yesterday, Susan and I attended the funeral of her cousin.

The two were born barely a month apart, and were given very similar names: Susan, Susanna. Both were only children; while Susan was growing up in Detroit, her mother sent her every summer to stay with Susanna and her parents. The girls weren’t sisters, and didn’t think of each other as sisters … but, if Susan had had a sister, the relationship would probably have been very much like what she had with Susanna.

They weren’t precisely close growing up, and their dealings with one another were changeable and occasionally strained over the years. Still, Susanna was Susan’s maid of honor at our wedding, and her second child had the same birthday as our second child, Kevin. (And her grandson was born exactly a month before our granddaughter.) The last few years, Susanna for some reason started reaching out, and she and Susan would have phone conversations that lasted hours.

The last such had been some time ago, maybe as much as a month; Susanna had said she didn’t feel up to talking, and Susan told her to call when she felt better, and waited for contact. We had no idea how ill she was; our first real inkling was when Susanna’s daughter contacted Susan to say her mother was in the hospital in a coma, with septicemia and pneumonia, and wasn’t expected to survive the night. As it happened, the woman didn’t even make it till sundown.

Because of the timing of her death, the family couldn’t hold the funeral till after the Christmas holidays. Susan and I traveled from Mississippi to Texas to be there.

Susan was grief-stricken not just that her so-close-cousin was gone, but that she hadn’t got to say goodbye, and that it had come with no real warning. As she put it to me — and said to some extent at the service — in all the various stories the families shared, the two of them had been there for the events described, and now that was over. Their parents are gone, and their growing-up history is now something only Susan remembers directly. She’s the only one left.

In tonight’s Rosary, my prayer was for Susan’s peace of mind. She cares so much, and has lost one of those dearest to her.

I have no idea what more to say about that. Her sorrow matters to me, but she’s the one bereft.