One of the words that I think of when I think of Sue is ‘strength’. Sue was not a physically intimidating person, and she certainly couldn’t lift her body weight over her head, but one of the things that defined her was a core of inner and outer strength. She practiced Tai Chi for years, introducing me to the practice (although it didn’t stick, but not for lack of encouragement from Sue), and of course we went on many, many hikes throughout the years. It’s one thing to do a 10 mile hike when you’re healthy; it’s another thing to do a 10 mile hike when you’re dealing with an aggressive cancer, and Sue did the long hikes even though she was terribly sick. She took up bicycling after she got cancer; I think she was determined not to let the illness prevent her from being the person she wanted to be, and doing the things she wanted to do.
And for so many years, and for so many things, Sue never gave up. She didn’t give up when she was in constant pain because of the damage a dentist had done to her jaw - she found ways to deal with the pain, and finally, a body worker who could actually get rid of it. She didn’t give up on her career when she got screwed over, and she didn’t give up on finding a treatment for her cancer. When she was first diagnosed, I really wondered if she’d made the right choice. It was a stage 4 abdominal cancer that couldn’t quite make up its mind about what type of cell it came from, so a really really bad prognosis. But she knuckled down and scanned the literature and insisted on the tests to understand the particular mutations her cancer had, and then reached out to advocates at Cancer Commons, and got herself on trials that, again and again, worked. She used to say that having cancer is like swimming in the middle of the ocean, and if you’re lucky and you can swim far enough, eventually you’ll find an island where you can stay for a little while, at least until the food and water run out, and you have to go back to swimming for that next island. Eventually, as she’d predicted, the islands ran out, but oh Sue, that was an amazing swim.
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