Remembering Susan: A Story of Love, Time, and Healing

There are some losses that do not arrive with language. They arrive as sensation — a quiet ache in the chest, a restlessness in the body, a sense of something missing before we even know what it is. I was very young when my mother died. Her name was Susan. I did not yet have the words for grief, or the space to understand what had happened. What I had instead was time — long stretches of it — and a body that remembered before my mind could make sense of anything at all.

Susan.

Susan died suddenly. One evening she was there, and then she wasn’t. The world kept moving, but something essential stopped. I remember the night not as a clear story, but as fragments — thoughts, images, a sense of being awake when I should have been sleeping.

Years later, I would learn that my body still remembered the exact hour her life left this world. Even now, decades later, anniversaries have a way of stirring something ancient and precise.

For a long time, grief lived quietly inside me. It didn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes it looked like independence. Sometimes like hyper‑vigilance. Sometimes like the need to keep going, to hold myself together without ever really being held. I grew up learning how to survive without fully understanding what I had lost. I carried on, as so many children of loss do, without a map.

What I did not understand then — but see clearly now — is that love does not end when a life does. It changes shape. It moves inward. It waits.

My middle name is Susan. I carry her name.

For years, I didn’t think much about that fact. It was simply something written on a birth certificate, something said quickly in formal moments and rarely spoken aloud. But over time, that name revealed itself to be more than a label. It was a thread. A quiet inheritance. A way love found a place to stay.

Healing did not arrive all at once. It came slowly, in layers, through practices that taught me how to inhabit my body again. Yoga taught me how to breathe when I wanted to brace. Ayurveda taught me how to listen to my body instead of overriding it. Reiki taught me that being held does not always require hands. None of these practices were about fixing my grief. They were about making space for it — and eventually, space beyond it.

Somewhere along the way, grief softened. Not because it disappeared, but because it was no longer alone. It was met with compassion, curiosity, and time. What once felt like an open wound became a quiet knowing. What once felt like abandonment began to feel like presence — subtle, steady, and deeply personal.

Last night, on the eve of the anniversary of Susan’s death, something shifted again. I woke in the early hours of the morning, around the time she died, and felt memories move through me — not violently, not overwhelming, just honestly. I placed one hand on my heart and the other on my belly and offered myself Reiki. It felt natural. Instinctive. Comforting.

And in that stillness, it felt like being hugged.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that needed interpretation. Just a simple, embodied sense of love — familiar and steady — reminding me that I was not alone then, and I am not alone now.

This is what healing looks like, I think. Not forgetting. Not moving on. But remembering through love instead of pain. Allowing the body to release what it has been holding once it knows it is safe to do so. Letting time do the quiet work it does so well when we stop rushing it.

Susan is no longer a story of loss in my body. She is a presence. A warmth. A name I carry. A love that lives on, not behind me, but within me.

And maybe that is how love survives everything — not by demanding to be remembered, but by becoming part of who we are.

And now, love continues forward.

My granddaughter’s middle name is Suzanne. Different spelling, same echo. She is called Maddie Sue — a name spoken with ease and joy, the way my mother was known. Three generations carrying the same thread, not through loss, but through love. Susan did not disappear. She found her way forward.

— Jennifer Susan