Good-bye to a Good Friend

My friend and constant email pal, Susan Bardwell, passed away on Friday, November 11, at the age of 57. She had inoperable lung cancer, and after a course of radiation and two chemo sessions her body couldn’t go on.

By the time I knew Susan, she was retired from working the crime beat at the Houston Chronicle. She and her husband Micheal Boddy were doing an online paper called the Angleton Journal, for which she wrote a column that was often funny, touching, and thoughtful.

A few years ago David and Jane Shepherd told me I should look up Susan’s column and get in touch. They thought we’d like each other. They knew Susan because their daughter, Laurie Heath, who is one of the world’s best photographers, had known and worked with Susan for years.

So I did look Susan up, and read one of her columns and liked it very much and wrote to her to say so. She wrote back, "Let’s be friends." We ended up emailing each other almost every day for the last four or five years.

We had a lot in common: both of us had adult sons living at home, and had a grand child who lived with us or had lived with us. We were both writers, and smart asses. We both liked to knit.

She became a good artist in the last couple of years, working with acrylics mostly. I sent her pictures taken here on the island, and she sent me a painting of Tramp Harbor that is now on our kitchen wall.

I’m a singer, and hey wow, she really liked music. She even included a song I’d recorded in a Christmas mix she made for people last year - or maybe the year before. It kinda runs together.

We called each other FASTOBs, meaning: fat, average, sarcastic, tough old broads. We told each other our sorrows and our joys, we told stories of our lives, we discussed music - man, did she know music! What a memory she had for artists and lyrics.

We talked about our families, past and present. Her love for her family was so much a part of her. It was huge and awesome and solid. She understood my own soft-heartedness toward my own family.

What can I say? She was funny, and brilliant, and talented, and loving, and I’m going to miss her every day for the rest of my life. I haven’t really had a good cry about her passing yet. Knowing me that will come a few weeks down the road. Right now I’m still on auto pilot. I know my friend is gone, but it hasn’t sunk in, you know?

It’s odd when someone you love who is far away dies. All that has really changed about the relationship is that she’s gone to a different far away place - a better one, I believe, where she suffers no more of the pain and fear she went through the last few months. What will make her passing real for me is that I will get up in the morning and check my email and there won’t be an email from Susan. Every morning. From now on.

Her husband, Micheal, who is another one of the world’s greatest photographers, took this picture of Susan in a porch swing with her grand son Ian, last summer. I love this picture because it shows so well who she was, and what she meant to her family.

Spare a prayer or a thought for her husband Micheal (yes, Susan told me, that’s how his name is spelled because that’s how his mother spelled it when she named him), their sons Sean and Eric, and their grand sons Ian and William. They have to get up every morning and not have her there, and that is so hard. Please send them blessings and peace. Thank you.

Love and appreciate each other, now - you never know.

You can look up Susan’s obituary at the Houston Chronicle web site, under S. K. Bardwell.