I’m sitting in a coffee shop. Exeter, New Hampshire. It’s unreasonably warm out there, but still chilly, November cold. It’s December and I’m listening to "Famous Blue Raincoat." It pulls at my heart in a way that isn’t difficult right now. All the threads are out. You could see them if you were here - in the public tears, the spontaneous weeping.
I don’t mind it. I don’t mind when it gets unraveled like that - a puddle at my feet, untied shoelaces.
And I keep tripping over the strings and it hurts so good. Because I need some proof that she’s gone. That she was here. That she entered the house with that beautiful scratchy voice, “Dahlin! How ah ya my dahlin?” She would open her arms, stretching the Red Sox emblem forever emblazoned across the chest of every sweatshirt she wore. She smelled good, familiar good…good like your favorite aunt’s house, and the wood fire welcoming you in after a long play in the snow, and the secret place where you used to hide - behind the big rock and underneath the scrawny maple just your size, and…
“How is Calarado Dahlin? You doin’ good out theah?”
“Oh Dahlin’ I’m fine. Did you hea about Boab Schmitt? I know, it’s so sad. If ya gonna go though, he died doin’ what he loved. How’s yah friend, the one who helps with the festival?”
Her hair sticks out of her cap like an unruly cottonball. Eyes nestled into her face, twinkling always. She is Santa Clause, she is a fairy tale. You didn’t know anyone like her. You couldn’t.
I can’t figure out what tense to use. Because her light is so full of color, so vivid, I can’t let her be dead. She is Sue, fresh baked bread, warm pub on a rainy day, your favorite mittens, crotcheted with heart strings long before you were born.
How can those things die?
She was good, every salty inch of her. She coached little league for a million years. She wrote letters to the soldiers fighting in every war she was alive for. She took care of us - you even - even though you didn’t know her, she took care of all of us, believing in the goodness of people.
She cleaned our house for 20 years and loved us still, amidst the grime and mess we hid (with her help) from the world. She loved the stink and trash out of us. A strong love, reliable.
When I hear a car come up the driveway it won’t be her. It won’t be her. It won’t be Sue Russell, baseball zealot, coach, community organizer, fisherwoman, pot-smokin’ beer drinkin’ lover of the great outdoors, giver of everything she could…
But she isn’t gone. Even her death can’t kill her. Sue Russell - a Sunday afternoon, hot diner coffee, your grandmother’s worn quilt. She had the wildness of a deer, loyalty of a dog, mouth of a sailor.
I am so lucky to have her with me. I’m sad mostly because I wish you, all of you, had known her. She brought such goodness to the world…and still does, I suppose, but it has to come through those of us who were graced with her proximity. The goodness comes through her story and the way we can all giggle and rest inside it.
…the comfy recliner, the cloud you can sit in. Sue Russell, that wonderful, wonderful human.
