For Marilyn “Lyn” Rose Caldwell: July 26, 1940-June 23, 2024.

Click on this image to watch my tribute to Mom

Mom was teaching yoga and aquafit in January, and was gone by June. I’ve been torn between grief and gratitude ever since, but writing this tribute helped me linger longer in gratitude. Some of you requested I post it, so here it is in video and printed form. I’ve heard that loss is more universal than love, so this is a communal offering – a tribute to all those who we miss terribly and who made us better people. 

Mom loved the ritual and the festivities surrounding Day of the Dead. My own home is more altar than house right now. If you came over for tea, you’d have to push aside bright orange marigold flowers, lit Guadalupe candles, and potted plants holding photos of Mom and other loved ones who have passed, just to find a place to set your cup down. I like the idea that the veil is thin between the living and the dead and that for one weekend a year, we invite spirits to come back and feast with their families. 

In Guadalajara, MX, it’s a public holiday full of parades, costumes, communal ofrendas (altars), music, folk and fire dancing. In Sumpango, Guatemala, neighborhoods build giant kites, sometimes the size of two-story buildings, and write powerful messages on them for the living and the dead to read. Mom and I traveled to these places and more, finding it odd that our own culture lacked ways to celebrate and remember those we’ve lost as well as the most fundamental fact of life: that we die. 

For this Day of the Dead, I’m going to make a margarita to toast Mom and everyone on the other side of that marigold bridge. Thank you. 

“They existed. They existed. Be and be better. For they existed.” -Maya Angelou.

Love,

Susie

***

Tribute for Lyn Caldwell, given at her Celebration of Life on July 26, 2024 (her birthday), at the Badminton & Racquet Club, Toronto, Canada

Since we’re at a tennis club, I’ll begin with a tennis story. 

For my sixteenth birthday, Mom took me to the French open tennis championships. We were living in France at the time while she taught at the Lycee Canadien, so it wasn’t crazy, but it was a huge, generous investment. Still-I’m pretty sure that of the two of us, she was the most excited. 

We watched Martina Navratilova play a young Steffi Graf. When Steffi won, Mom pushed me through a crowd of tennis fans to where Steffi was signing autographs.

“It’s her birthday!” Mom pointed at me.

“Happy Birthday!” Steffi said as she took my poster to sign, “What’s your name, little girl?” 

“LYN!” Mom shouted. 

*

Mom was one of a kind, a force of nature, a dazzling comet, a beautiful, wise, and funny woman. 

She was also independent and intrepid.

The first time we moved to France, it was to a tiny town quite literally at the end of the road. She was recently divorced, had three children under the age of 10, and knew only a little French. 

She did two things in that big leap: she gave us the gift of French language and culture. She also gave herself what she needed – what fed her boundless curiosity: a new language, a new hobby (knitting), and a sport she loved (skiing). As a family, we bonded tightly, learned to make mistakes, and make new friends. In this bold move, she role modeled for her children how to live life fully, and that may be the greatest thing a parent can do. 

Recently, a friend described grief as a Roulette wheel. Sometimes it stops on sadness, sometimes on gratitude or irritability. Sometimes grief stops on bad ideas like “get bangs!” 

Lately, it’s been landing on awe.

How did she do it? As a single mom, take us to live abroad? Make sure we got the best of everything: schools, camp, travel experiences, art education? Earn a Masters in Art History while working full time in the public school system, and ride her bike or TTC to work everyday? 

I imagine it was not easy for her independent nature to be weighed down by three messy, needy children, but she mothered us so well. I think her secret was that she focused on what mattered to her (and not what mattered to others). By doing what she loved, she transmitted that love of life to us. 

Apparently she transmitted that love of life to others, too, because our home at 43 Oriole Gardens became the center of the universe for neighborhood kids and later, a hangout for teenagers. 

There were times that I wished my mom were more like other moms– who at least didn’t just go meet an artist one day and then, the next, buy a painting in exchange for our family car. 

When my friends would say, “Your Mom is so cool. She isn’t uptight like other mothers. I would say, Great! But I don’t have a car. Can I get a ride?” 

Now that I am a mother, I am sure my children want me to be different, too. It comes with the territory. 

As I grew older, I didn’t wish for my mom to be like any other mom. In fact, I admired her strength and how she knew herself so well and leaned toward what brought her joy. To know oneself like that is rare, to act on it, even more rare. 

Mom understood herself, but she also understood me and my children in a way that no one else did or ever will. I really miss her perspective and her great advice, (even if it came in short text messages written in ALL CAPS.)

If you walked into Mom’s tiny condo apartment, you could tell what was important to her and what wasn’t. 

What wasn’t important to her: cooking or food, dishes, (she once famously left me a note after I had just given birth: “Sorry about the dishes in the sink. I don’t do dishes. Never have. Never will.”) She also didn’t own much makeup, a hairdryer or high heels – she preferred to be no-nonsense and low-maintenance.

You could also tell from looking through her apartment what was important to her: her paintings, her bicycle, her Nova Scotian roots, books, homemade ice cream, the newspaper, opera, and fresh flowers from St. Lawrence Market. Most of all, her relationships. Mom’s bathroom had framed collages of photos from floor to ceiling. She loved thinking about and looking at her friends, her children, most of all, her grandchildren. 

She loved games: backgammon, tennis, bridge–the Olympic games (which begin today, fittingly). When she was younger, she played every sport imaginable and then fell in love with sports commentators. She would go around giving her opinion to everyone as if she were being paid to do so. 

Mom had style. She didn’t like stuff, had no interest in things, really, but if you looked in her closet, you would know that she appreciated a great dress (especially if it had pockets and ¾ sleeves). I never knew how she could pull out such amazing outfits from such a tiny backpack. 

She always traveled light. To go to Mexico for 6 months, she took a carry-on bag. Somehow she made room for gifts & picture books that she carried to the children in Mexico. 

Mom didn’t just travel light, she lived light. She didn’t let inconsequential things bother her. She did not dwell or ruminate on much; Mom just kept moving forwards.

She lived simply, she never complained. I imagine that she was not feeling well for a long time before she finally allowed us in on her discomfort. She was a Mom–first and foremost –and she never wanted to burden or bother us. 

I wish she had called earlier. I wish she had asked for help or allowed herself to lean on others a bit more – because she came to adore her caregivers and because it was not a burden; it was a gift and a privilege to have been there for her in the end -to hold her hand and rub her favorite cream onto them, to moisten her lips with lip balm, to have a cup of tea and listen to her stories. 

In the end, Mom was ready to pass. It was heartbreaking that she refused visitors, but she told us that she wanted to slip quietly away. Which is exactly what she did.If we could all be so lucky. 

When that Roulette wheel of grief lands on sorrow, what lifts me is this: She was an A+ Mom. She gave me my bravery, compassion, literary sensibility, athleticism and a knack for teaching – a windfall that I am grateful for each day.

Also this: she gave us a map on how to face the inevitable, our mortality. We keep it light. We learn to know ourselves well and live with an unapologetic joie de vivre. We have style. We have compassion and an eye for all things beautiful, especially the faces of our friends and family. We walk to the market and buy fresh flowers and cake.

Kurt reminded me of a great Nana story to close. Mom came to visit us right after Cole was born. We were living in rural Vermont at the time. She took the train to Montreal, then rented a car and drove across the border. She watched the baby, picked blueberries, and wrecked one of our pots trying to reheat soup. 

When it was time to go, she took off going the wrong way on a dirt road. There was no stopping her. Eventually she realized that she was lost. So she stopped her car in the middle of the road and flagged down a truck. The truck driver said, “If you want to go to Montreal, you have to turn around.” To which she simply replied, “Oh I never turn around.” 

And I’m pretty sure that right now she’s saying, “Wrap it up, Susie! Go live your life! Onwards!”

***

with thanks to Kelly Corrigan, whose tribute to her mom helped me frame this speech.

Hello from Nebraska! For Spring Break, some go to Florida or Mexico, but this year we take our college-age children to North Platte, Nebraska to see the Sandhill Crane migration. Isn’t that every teenager’s Spring Break fantasy? 

I’m just happy to have everyone in the car together. With Hazel graduating from High School in May, and Cole already in college, we will be empty nesters soon. I don’t know yet what that means for me; I feel both sad and excited about this new stage of life. What will my life be like? What will our marriage be like? What if our idea of romance is to fall asleep on the couch after watching TV?

All I know is that I want to savor each moment with our kids, even when all four of us, plus the dog, are packed into a small car. We drive 4.5 hours northeast, dodging tumbleweed and holding our noses past cattle feedlots. 

Our daughter, who wants to study music, sings constantly at home and now here, in the backseat. She doesn’t seem to notice that she is doing it. Usually I’m the one who asks her to keep it down. But not today. Knowing she will be gone next year means that I’m happy to let her sing as often and as loud as she wants.

Our destination is the Ramada Inn in North Platte, just off I-80, next to a gas station, a Burger King, and the largest rail yard in the world with over 10,000 train cars moving through it each day. I’m excited to have everyone under one roof, even if it is the Ramada’s.

We book 3 birding tours with Dusty Trails, which is the owner’s name, not just a description of the landscape. The first tour is at dawn to visit the ceremonial dancing grounds of the Prairie Chicken. We save the cranes for Day 2. Can’t have all the fun at once!

We wake at 4 am to pile into a yellow school bus with other tourists from across the country. It is dark and freezing out. There is also a biting wind that makes the subzero temperatures feel even colder. The bus is driven by Dusty himself. 

Dusty raises horses and cattle, organizes bird tours and, in his free time, takes care of the local cemetery. He grew up south of Sutherland, Nebraska. “Behind that power plant is where we used to play and look for ducks.” His mom delighted in preparing breakfast for his clients, but as she aged, she quit making eggs and now makes origami cranes for each of us. “She hasn’t learned how to make an origami prairie chicken yet,” Dusty apologizes.

Prairie Chickens, also known as Boomers, are seventeen inches long and weigh about 2 pounds. They are chubby birds with short legs and a short tail. Every spring, male Boomers gather at dawn on a lek, a ceremonial dancing ground, which is a little bare knob of grassland. It is absolutely unremarkable except at sunrise come springtime. 

Dusty parks the bus, and turns off the engine. It is pitch black outside. We open the windows, pull our hats on tighter, and bury ourselves in sleeping bags to stay warm. Then we wait. The minute the sun rises, ten male Prairie Chickens gather in the lek for a dance-off. I watch my sleepy teens’ eyes open and their faces break into wide smiles. The male Prairie Chickens compete for the females attention by stamping their feet in a frenzy with their pinnate feathers flipped up to look like horns and their bright orange throat sac making a sound like blowing across a pop bottle. 

Meanwhile, the females walk nonchalantly by the males, looking unimpressed. Ultimately, females choose to mate with the bird that is not the biggest or the brightest, but the best dancer. It’s a page right out of Patrick Swayze’s playbook. Two hours pass while we watch, mesmerized by this funny ritual. But now the birds are lying down, exhausted. It’s time to go. 

On our way back, we notice that someone has placed work boots on the tops of fence posts for miles. Dusty explains, “We do that around here because if you’re ever caught in a snowstorm, the toes point your way home.” 

Our second tour is to see the Sandhill Cranes at dusk on the North Platte river.

Sandhill Cranes winter in Mexico. Then every March, around 500,000 birds land in Nebraska to feed and gain energy for the rest of their journey. When they take off again in April, they fly over 400 miles a day until they reach their breeding grounds in Alaska or Siberia. 

We watch the cranes from a blind. To get a sense of their size, imagine a bird with a 6-foot wingspan, and the fact that juveniles are called colts. But because the birds wait for darkness to return to the river to roost each night, we hear them better than we see them. They sound like hundreds of thousands of frogs singing. When they fly first above us, then next to us, then all around us, it feels like the air itself is making music. 

On our third tour, we wake again at 4 am to look at the cranes at sunrise from a blind. The kids rise out of bed faster than I expect. In the cold, dark air, we wait and listen. Kurt suggests that maybe next year, just the two of us could go to North Dakota to see the Sharp-Tailed grouse mating dances. I’ve never heard anything so romantic.

In a breathtaking moment, the cranes lift off the river and take to the air. It’s a deafening chorus of wingbeats and crane song. 

But once the cranes leave the river, the show is over. Everything is quiet. Dusty’s assistant is excited to show us a Great Blue Heron rookery on the way out, but the giant nests are empty. I’m suddenly sad that the cranes and herons are gone, that this trip will be over soon, and that our kids will migrate away from us too soon as well. 

While I know that everything’s meant to move or fly, I’ve been imagining our kids’ absence and struggling a bit. The thing about these birds is their sound, a kind of music. When our daughter leaves, it might feel like someone has turned off the music. I’m not looking forward to that. 

Here in Nebraska, I try to remember that migration is the natural order. The birds, the trains, the children we raise; they are all meant to move on and away. In a gift shop, a sign gives advice from the Sandhill Cranes, “Spread your wings. Have a good sense of direction. Keep your head high. Go the distance.” 

Yet maybe I’ll start placing boots on fence posts, so our kids can look and see how the toes point their way home.

Love,

Susie

 

A winter storm came through Colorado last week. Four feet of snow fell in 48 hours in the little town of Nederland, just thirty miles from where I live. Many rushed away from the mountains, trying to get to low ground before they closed roads and lost power. We rushed toward the storm. Kurt and I thought that if we went to the mountains, we could be some of the first people at Eldora Ski Resort, carving fresh tracks in historic levels of powder. 

What happened instead was that we got snowed in. We slept at our friends’ home, but when we woke up to 36” of snow, we were unable to get to the ski resort. We couldn’t even get out of the driveway. The snow overwhelmed the plow trucks, landing one of them in the ditch. They closed the ski resort and most roads remained impassable. So instead of an epic day of skiing, we spent two days helping our friends shovel their driveway, decks, and roof. 

When the snow kept falling, fast and deep, we slowed down and absorbed the silence. I caught myself staring out the window for a long time, in awe of the natural design of a pine tree, how its branches bend without breaking. Then I thought about the bears hibernating in this same silence, how their heartbeats slow from about 50 beats per minute to 12 beats per minute all winter. I curled up under a blanket and imagined slowing down to bear speed. 

Last month, because I wrote a blog about Willie Nelson, a friend told me about a podcast called “One by Willie” in which famous people talk about a single Willie song that impacted them. In one episode, Brené Brown, sociologist and storyteller, spoke about Willie’s version of “Amazing Grace.” The way he sang it made her realize that she had misheard the song her whole life. She thought the lyrics were, “It was grace that taught me how to feel.” But when Willie sang, she heard the true lyrics which are, “It was grace that taught me how to fear.” How could that be? 

After that podcast, I listened to “Amazing Grace” on repeat. I, too, misunderstood the song for years. And now it deeply resonated. I don’t need to be afraid of fear or its cousin, anxiety. 

I’ve been through enough sh** that I know how to fear. 

I can drive toward the storm because I’ve been through storms before, and I know they are not permanent. It’s tough to remember that when I wake in the night in a cold sweat, anxious about my scan results, my family’s health, money woes, or bloodshed and violence in the world. But now Willie and the famous hymn remind me that “Grace taught me how to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”

But what exactly is grace? Kindness, forgiveness, trust, undeserved, unconditional love? All of it, I’m guessing. It is also moving with elegance and fluidity, something fear prevents us from doing. So we have to learn how to fear better. 

The goal is not to banish fear, but to learn how to be afraid, and move through it. 

And we do that by accepting the fear, not denying it, and paying attention to what we can trust. Can we trust that eventually our load will be lifted, the sun will come out again, and life will continue?

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, two brilliant sisters, wrote Burnout  pre-pandemic about unlocking the stress cycle. The brain research they describe is that when we push stress down or away, we never process it properly and we end up storing it in our bodies until we burnout. I believe that something similar happens with fear. 

We have a new goal: to learn how to complete the fear cycle. 

When fear rises, don’t try to make it go away. Instead, ride the emotion, move your body, cry, scream, breathe, and feel all the feels. Then get up and do something creative. Creativity is a powerful antidote to spinning out because of fear. And for reasons I don’t quite understand, it is the final step in completing the fear cycle. 

My go-to creative act is writing, for Kurt it is playing guitar, for Hazel it is singing, dancing, or watercoloring, for Cole it is repairing an old car engine. What is it for you? How can you learn how to fear better? 

Whatever your routine is to complete the fear cycle, do it. Don’t let it get stuck in your body. Write down those go-to things that help you to complete the fear cycle on a sticky note and put it on the bathroom mirror. Then remember that fear is something we learn how to manage, not something we run and hide from. We can learn how to fear better with practice.  

For the skiers out there who are curious, the sun came out and they opened the ski mountain. But by then, Kurt had caught a ride home. I stayed because the peace of the storm was good for my nervous system. And because our friends were kind enough to let me stay. So when they opened the resort, I was one of the first people on the hill. Only the temperatures had warmed; It was not the light, fluffy powder I expected, but more like heavy cement. 

I looked down from the chairlift to see five people on one of the steepest slopes. No one was moving. They were at a complete standstill, unable to make it through the deep snow. When it was my turn, I hugged the shady edge, pointed my skis downhill, leaned way back, and let them run. “I know how to fear!” I screamed as I sped past the stuck skiers. I laughed at my own ridiculousness and eventually fell into four feet of forgiving snow. Then I hopped on the chair to go back up and do it again.

It reminded me of what I learned by staring at those pine trees. They bend but don’t break, and when the sun comes out, they let go of everything they are carrying. That’s a pretty good way to make it through a storm. 

Love,

Susie