Path: ncar!kiowa.scd.ucar.edu!ilana
From: ilana@kiowa.scd.ucar.edu (Ilana)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: remembering Susan
Date: 23 Jun 1994 15:48:10 GMT
Message-ID: <2ucarq$cbl@ncar.ucar.edu>

I passed her on the way to work today, a dumpy woman with hair that
exact shade of brassy bottled red, mottled arms extending from a shapeless
vest, and I thought, "My God, Susan!  What's she doing here?"   And
of course as I passed by and looked at her face, I could see that it 
wasn't Susan, and I remembered why it couldn't possibly be, after all.

Susan worked for my advisor, when I was in graduate school.  She was
Czech or Polish or Hungarian, her r's were liquid and her ch's were
hard;  she was clearly over 40 and under 60, but where exactly she
was in that murky territory was hard to say.  She had been an artist,
or perhaps an architect, I don't remember, at one time, when she was
young and pretty (obviously she had been pretty, once) but now she
was a "technical assistant", a not-quite-secretary, who prepared documents
and proofread numbers and calculated things deemed even too trivial to
pass on to me and Steve and Francis, the graduate students.

What else do I remember, now, after six years?  She smoked.  She 
had cats, lots of them, and hated them in a cordial way, like hating a
job (she hated her job) which keeps you from doing exciting, fun, things
but which nevertheless pays well, and at which you have nice co-workers,
and about which you really can't say anything concretely bad, except that
you hate it.  She had an ex-husband, "that shithead", whom she hated in an 
entirely different and not-nice way.  

One day, she didn't come to work.  The dark "truth" filtered down
to us from the main office;  she had been smoking in bed, fallen asleep,
there was a fire, they couldn't get her out, poor Susan.  Francis and Steve
and I exchanged glances;  we remembered her saying, "You know, I'd kill 
myself, but who would take care of the cats?"  We made serious faces
and said, "Oh, yes, what a shame, poor Susan", but we knew. 

Not long after that, Steve decided to leave grad school;  he'd gotten a
job offer from IBM, somewhere in upstate New York.  Francis decided he'd
had enough of the US and went back to Switzerland.  I moved out here to 
Colorado on a fellowship, but a year later, I quit as well.  It was hard
on my advisor's reputation;  he had a tough time attracting new students,
a tough time getting grants, and I hear he got kicked upstairs, crackpot
emeritus, old man in the attic.  

I don't think any of this was Susan's fault, particularly.  Maybe it's
like an atom, carefully balanced charges, knock one out of place and the
whole thing goes kablooie.  She didn't know she was holding us all together;
she didn't know that her troubles, her craziness, her shitty life was
a proxy for all of our potential troubled crazy shitty problems, and
we didn't know it either.  When she killed herself, we had to take her
burden on, spread it around.

I'm doing ok, now, though, so it seems this psychic residue has spread
itself out further, dissipated.  (Did you feel depressed, briefly, six
years ago?)  I don't hate my job, I don't have an ex-husband.  I do have 
cats.  I haven't thought about Susan in six years.  Rest in peace, Susan.