Rest Easy, Sweet Spirit

My very dear friend Sue died somewhat unexpectedly in early September.  She lived in Florida, and in the last couple of years I hadn't seen her much.  We did talk on the phone, but it had gotten more infrequent because I was busy and distracted, and she had been busy helping her mother quite a bit, until she finally put her foot down and told her mother she could not continue to be at her house all day, every day, that she just didn't have the strength or stamina for it.  Sue was quite a bit older than me, only 15 months younger than my mother.  We met in the early 1990s when we both worked at the same hospital on night shift.  She was a nurse in the cardiac Critical Care unit, and I worked in the laboratory as a Medical Technologist.  We didn't have a phlebotomist at night, so I had to go to the floors and collect blood samples myself.  That was how we first met, and we eventually got talking, and hit it off.  I don't know if I've ever had a best friend as an adult, but if I have, Sue was it.  Even though we had been in contact less frequently recently, we could always just pick up right where we left off, and it was always comfortable.  She was the one person I could always be completely myself with, and know that it was okay.  And she could do the same with me.

About a week before Sue died, I had started knitting this hat for my DH.  It's in a lovely bright turquoise.





Sue loved cool colors, and was especially fond of turquoise, teal-y greens, and purples.  So after I learned of Sue's death, I renamed my project of this hat "Sue would have loved this color."  Does that seem a bit macabre?  Well, she was friends with my DH too, though more my friend -- still, he feels her loss also.  He didn't mind me naming it that, so I did.  As I worked on the hat, after I knew of her death, I was thinking a lot about her and all she'd meant to me.  So it was a healing project, to some extent.  So many times in the last few weeks, there have been things I've wanted to tell Sue, and I'll catch myself saying "oh, I've gotta call and tell her..."  And then I remember.  And I miss her all the more.




~~~Susan Jane Becker, 9 January 1946 - 8 September 2012.  Rest Easy, Sweet Spirit.  You are loved and missed.~~~


Thanks for letting me share a little (mostly "non-crafty") piece of life.