by Marcia Christine Sherman, Ph.D.
I met Suzanne Atwater when I first came to Santa Barbara and was living on the porch in Genevieve Sinclair's trailer in Rancho Santa Barbara trailer park. I had moved here from Portland, Oregon because I was very ill with something and decided living in a more sunny environment might help.
I drove a truck down with all my possessions and my car dragging along behind. I had two job offers playing my harp on a professional basis; one for a new hotel recently built in Beverly Hills where I had been living and the other for a recording company here in Montecito. Both offers looked promising but it turned out the sixteen builders of the hotel wanted to make a loss for a tax write-off and we were making a profit, so they fired us all; and the young man in Montecito got bored and quit after I had written and recorded Cycles.
Suzanne had come over to Genevieve's to give her a massage. Genevieve was in her seventies and had kindly offered to take me in as I had also lost my job playing five nights a week plus the brunch at the El Escorial hotel because I asked for one week-end off to go to my daughter's high school graduation in Eugene, Oregon.
Suzanne loved to work and live in the art world and we became very good friends. She and I met very often during the course of our time here in Santa Barbara, we discussed at length the difficulties of survival being both divorced and artistic and the various moves both she and I made trying to survive while trying to earn a living.
Over the next fifteen years, I got a Ph. D. in Transpersonal Psychology and Suzanne, who was about ten years younger than I, got cancer.
As the disease progressed and finally went into her spine, her life became critical and her former husband, a retired Psychiatrist, rented a house in Summerland where he and her adult daughter brought Suzanne to support her. I visited her there many times for about two years until she ended up at Cottage hospital in critical condition.
I was well aware that Suzanne did not want to be in the hospital as both of us were heavily into alternative medicine, so I decided to visit her there and find out exactly what was going on.
When I arrived, Suzanne was lying in her bed in agony, a box fixed to her chest which she could push to pump more morphine into her body, which she was pushing continuously. There was already a steady drip of morphine going into her arm and the pain was palpable. A childhood friend from Palmdale moved here temporarily to stay with her and was constantly touching her, trying to soothe the torture. The situation was critical. Suzanne needed to die.
I had never before been around death, only the birth of my three children, but I instinctively knew what to do.
When the friend left for a few moments, I asked Suzanne whether she wanted to die. She instantly said, yes. I told her to tell her body to help her let go easily and fast and to tell herself that she would be safe and in a state of grace.
The friend returned quickly, afraid that something worse was going to happen. She began touching Suzanne all over with great compassion and concern, wanting desperately to help. I didn't want to hurt this loving care, but I had to interfere. I asked her as kindly as I could manage, to please not touch Suzanne because she needed to leave her body; I explained that every time she touched her, it kept bringing her back.
The friend was quite resentful, but did as I asked. I then left the hospital; but before I did, Suzanne asked me to repeat my words and thanked me for my help.
This was the month of May, and Suzanne was taken home from the hospital soon after I left and died at home where she wanted to be.
In August, they had a memorial service for Suzanne at Rocky Nook Park. There were about sixty people, we stood in a huge circle and everyone had something nice to say about Suzanne, including a few brief words from myself regarding how much good she must have done to have so many friends.
I went home and took a brief nap. I had a dream where Suzanne and I were holding hands, happily walking barefoot on Summerland beach as two little Sunbonnet girls in our little girl dresses, swinging our little pails of sand. As we walked along, our swinging the buckets sprinkled sand all over the beach. I turned around and saw that the whole beach was full of beautiful pastel colored sand paintings that came from our buckets as we swung them. It was a lovely dream.
I woke up and thought very long and hard as to whether I should call Eric, her former husband, about this beautiful dream since, being a psychiatrist, he could easily laugh at my foolishness; but I decided to call him anyway and tell him my dream. When I was finished, there was a very, very long silence on the other end of the phone and I expected the worst. I had not gone to the funeral and it's so long ago I can't remember the reason, but I did know she had been cremated.
Eric finally said, "Do you know what we did with her ashes?"
"No", I said.
"We threw them all over the sands at Summerland Beach!"
© - 2010 – Dr. Marcia Christine Sherman
