August 2002

What they don’t tell you about babies is that they leave. Right from the minute they’re born, they are leaving you. You’re ready, of course, because your toes are swollen, their knees are crowding your rib cage, and you say if only they would go ahead and come out. And then they do and you say, oh, I didn’t realize.

Didn’t realize that soon enough they’ll learn to walk without holding your hand, put on a shirt by themselves even if it’s the wrong color, draw out their ABCs in large blocks. Later they’ll learn algebra, which you could never do, and spell words like plethora, which you can. And while they’re learning all these things, they’re looking into your eyes, saying, “I will never leave you,” and they were lying. And you didn’t realize when you look back and say, “Don’t ever leave,” you’re lying, too.

Of course you want them to — grow up, that is — and do all those things you’ve been doing for them, so they’ll be independent, responsible, whatever. It says so much about you, really. But this is a bittersweet moment if there ever was one, wanting them to grow up, wishing they wouldn’t, knowing they will.

My daughter leaves this week for college. The guest room is filled with new towels and sheets, new laundry basket, a sewing kit she’ll likely never use, pencils and paper, laptop and printer, a lamp decorated to match her comforter, even some Neosporin, just in case. We’ve sorted through and shifted in the past few weeks, making room for this new place in her life. In both our lives. She can’t wait.

I know the feeling. In the weeks before I left for college, my mother and I combed the aisles at Towel Town for a laundry basket (that I still have) and yellow and green towels and sheets for me to take with me. What freedom, to have linens I didn’t have to share with anyone, a laundry basket filled only with my things.

The day I left, my mother stood at the kitchen sink with her back to me and cried. She is not a crier, but the next day would be my 18th birthday, and she couldn’t bake me a cake. I didn’t know then that her tears were for all the cakes to come. I wasn’t thinking about her, because for the first time in my life I was eager to leave, ready to make my own birthday cakes. If only I’d known how much I’d miss hers.

That night at the stroke of midnight, I swilled my first legal beer, surrounded by friends I’d met who would become lifelong. The band at Charlie Goodnight’s sang “Happy Birthday” to me. If this was college, I thought, I’d come to the right place.

I’ve never been very good at leaving, no matter what’s on the other side. My one stint at a two-week summer camp ended in three days. And when I was newly married and living far from home, I would sob for miles after every visit as we drove away, thinking I’d never see home again, the way it was. Those same feelings have hit me again and again these last few weeks. Sometimes there is little difference between leaving and being left.

It seems more than coincidental, Meredith points out, that when we part ways in her newly outfitted dorm room Saturday, it will be the day before my birthday, just as it was 27 years ago when my mother left me in mine.

Meredith won’t be thinking about me. She’ll be meeting new friends who will become lifelong, and I’m certain she’ll be headed for the band.

Maybe she’ll ask them to sing for my birthday. And maybe my mother will remember how I’m feeling and finally bake me that cake.

Note: This essay is one of occasional excerpts of In Mother Words, an essay collection I published in 2002. It first appeared in The News & Observer. If you’d like to order copies of the book, please reach out! $10 includes shipping.

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Editor’s note: In the early spring of 2013, my father lay dying of pneumonia in a hospital. My mother lay in the same hospital with a broken femur. They would go home a day apart from each other, him to die and her to recover. Somehow both events were beautiful.

The Short Goodbye

Daddy never went through the front door of our house.

Always through the back, by the carport and into the utility room, where he might scale a fish (much to my mother’s chagrin). Where the dog sat and scratched at the door during our supper, where he stitched up a rabbit my sister found injured in the yard.

One morning, when he was in his 40s, he collapsed into my mother, sobbing because his friend had died at home while reading the paper in his wing chair, and Daddy had to pronounce him dead.

The front door was reserved for prom dates and the rare trick-or-treater, for strangers stopping by.

But when Daddy came home last Friday — April 19, 2013 — they brought him through the front door.

The Decision

He came home the same way he left town back in February, in a giant transport filled with machines, a blue tulip-like flower emblazoned on the side. We had made the decision to bring him home two days before, my family and his hospital team crowded around his bed. He’d been asking to go home for more than a month, to leave behind the machines and tubes and take his rest in his own bed.

Our mother had broken her femur only weeks before, falling in his hospital room. She sat in her wheelchair, listening as Daddy’s PA carefully listed off the options for a man who could no longer breathe completely on his own: long-term care hospital, palliative care, hospice.

When I heard the word “home,” I looked to my mother, praying she would choose that option. Our of rehab herself, she would be going home the next day to 24-hour caregivers my sister would meet later in the day. My brother leaned into Mama, asking quietly, What do you want to do?

“Home,” she said. “Let’s take him home.”

The Arrival

The transport team pulled up in front of our house and drew him out into the crisp spring air. And I was waiting.

“You’re home, Daddy!” I shouted. His wish finally granted.

I stood watched—my family waiting just inside the front door—as he looked up at the sky. His last bright look, the fresh air. Then they wheeled him into our front hall, over the oriental rug, my mother’s favorite.

And down the hall he had walked so many times in the middle of the night in his pajamas toward the back door, and a patient waiting. Toward the linen closet my five-year-old self believed held a witch. Into his room, to a bed he had last slept in on February 5, the room he had shared with my mother for 50 years.

A long ride. Across the creaky floorboard that gave my brother’s Christmas morning sneak away. Past my childhood room. A mile, it seemed, as they shifted the gurney to make room for this six-foot-two man, squeezing him through the door into a room softened by carpet and soothing blue walls.

All the People

Daddy brought with him a host of people: the hospice doctor, nurses, respiratory therapist, his PA, a priest whose liberal views challenged Daddy’s conservative ones—but a dear friend. The team settled him, and my mother’s caregivers helped her into place beside him.

It was mid-afternoon.

I Scream for Ice Cream

Daddy now wore his familiar pajamas, sat propped against his favorite pillow. I took hold of his hand, and he said something I couldn’t grasp… What, Daddy?

“Your hands are COLD!” he said. He wanted chocolate milk, but we had only vanilla ice cream. I spooned it carefully into his mouth. He swallowed, not seeming to care that we could not grant his original wish

Before

The day before he came home, Daddy talked to all of his grandchildren on the phone. Somehow, after all these weeks of quiet, he had much to say. A miracle, really. I talked to him, too, as did my mother and sister, all of us overjoyed at hearing his voice again.

The day before was my mother’s first day home as well, after her fall. We fixed her crab cakes—the best meal she had ever eaten—and watched as she pulled herself up on her bed, straightening out that broken leg, beginning the first steps toward her recovery.

What’s the Plan?

When we gathered everybody around in the room, Daddy said, “We didn’t plan for all these people.” Each day I visited him in the hospital, he would ask: Plan? Toward the end, when we had no idea, I’d shrug my shoulders—one of his exercises—and say, “Who knows? That’s the plan.” Which seemed to satisfy him.

This time we had one. We all joined the priest for last rites from the good ol’ Book of Common Prayer. Daddy thanked everyone for coming. Thanked them, which is so like my father. Later on, he FaceTimed with my daughter and other grandchildren. Strange, this 84-year-old dying man saying, when asked by his granddaughters how he felt, said, “Pretty good.”

Siblings

I will tell you that it’s something, when your siblings gather around your dying father.

My brother, a physician, is good with the critically ill. I have watched him with my father all these weeks. He leans in, speaks softly, but loud enough to jostle Daddy awake when need be. This day was no different. How hard it is to be a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, son—he has been all these things since February, and again on this afternoon, our last Friday with Daddy.

My sister, dog lover like our mother, brought Ruby the dog in, put her on the bed with Daddy, knowing just how long he had waited to fiddle with her ears

Night Falls

We spent the afternoon and evening gathered around my parents, telling stories and praying and singing.

After supper, I sat with him and read him the story of his life, one I had written years before, at his first retirement.

My mother’s new caregiver, whom we had only just met, sang “The Old Rugged Cross,” his favorite hymn, in the most holy moment I’ve ever experienced.

We kissed him goodnight, leaving him and my mother alone in the room. She lay by his side with Ruby, waiting.

And then, footsteps in the hall, my sister running toward the room where I had tried to sleep a little. “Susan. He’s gone,” she said.

After

It was pouring rain outside. We surrounded his body, talking and crying, naming all the dogs he was now getting to see. Our grandparents. His friends. So many who have made this journey before him.

And then we left the room, all of us, to wait for the next step.

In the wee hours, as we sat up and waited for the hospice nurse and the funeral director to arrive in the still pouring rain, we listened as Mama told stories about their life together, their early years. Despite all the uncertainty and the trauma we’ve experienced these many weeks, what a treasure my father’s last hours were to all of us.

Dawn came, and we called all the children, made arrangements for them to join us in this new life without their Pop B. Not one of us has wanted to go there, but at least we will travel together, his legacy to us—that he was the magnet that drew us together— keeps drawing, even in his absence.

Then, the Stories Came

In the days since Daddy died, we have heard a hundred stories from his patients and friends, many reflecting his wry humor, others his humble, caring nature.

“He was quiet, but he was powerful,” the man—a patient who has kept up our lawn when Daddy no longer could—told me yesterday. Yes, he was. My father was a great man, so many have said to us in the past week.

But aren’t all our fathers that?

“So, with the sleight of his magician’s hand, he will end the show,” I wrote back in 1997. “And I don’t know who will miss him more—his patients, or the doctor himself…” Those very words caught in my throat as I read them to him one last time just a few hours before he died. Words appropriate for retirement so many years ago, and, it turns out, for his last Friday with us.

I can’t imagine now how much I’ll miss him. It still isn’t real to me yet. But I am not alone, because I have a full family and a whole town gathered around me, and we are all holding each other up.

Bye, Daddy. Guess it was finally your time to hit the road. Be careful. And have a safe and happy trip.

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June 13, 2016
Windows
I called my mother yesterday. It was her wedding anniversary, the third one since my father died, and I’d forgotten to send her a card or a flower. We get busy in our lives, I know, and as I thought about the note or the flower, I realized that the one thing she wanted I couldn’t give her. My voice would have to do.

How are you? I asked.

‘Tired,’ she said.

From what?

‘I washed the windows today.”

Windows?

My mother is eighty-eight. She lives in a beautiful little home filled with windows that let the morning sun in, and where the moon casts a soft glow over the living room rug at night. She does not like a dingy window — never has, and used to clean the windows of our house every year at least once. Sometimes twice.

‘I thought I’d start with the front bedroom window and just do along, one or two at a time,’ she told me. ‘But you know me.’

Don’t I. I have a lifetime of knowing the woman who would remake my bed if it didn’t suit her, whose linen closet I admired even as a child for its geometric structure. The same woman who scoured the whole house spring and fall with ammonia, so when we came home from school you could feel the sparkle. She ironed our clothes crisp, buffed the wood floors into mirrors, never allowed us to use a towel twice.

Un-Inherited Traits
My sister inherited her penchant for a spotless house, and I thought I had myself. For many years after the kids left for school each day, I’d start the mopping and vacuuming, (never the ironing part) though those times when I thought my mind would be idle with cleaning led to stories I needed to put to paper, so I abandoned the tasks my mother loves so. (Well, not entirely. A long time ago, somebody asked me where my stories came from, and I gleefully said, ‘When I’m cleaning the toilet!’ And it was true.)

Eighteen windows, she said. And she just kept ‘doing along’ until she had cleaned practically every window in the house, almost by accident. Her sunroom is literally filled with windows. (To be fair, one window is safely out of reach.)

Eighteen.

On a recent visit I scanned her fridge for the latest comic, since there has been one fastened there since my childhood. Tacked close to one featuring a character not being able to hear was an article suggesting that a clean house for the elderly has a direct correlation to their mental and physical stability. As if she needed proof that all her years of home keeping was finally paying off.

She used to say she never needed to exercise because she vacuumed every day, and that was plenty. And it was.

A Sparkling House
My mother’s house is ever-ready for company: flowers on the kitchen table, beds made up with soft sheets and hospital corners, pillows piled high and towels hung, waiting. Even my son says it’s the most comfortable house he’s ever slept in. I don’t know about you, but I will hope my imagined grandchildren will feel the same about mine.

Do you know what day it is? I asked her before hanging up.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Washing the windows kept my mind busy.’

Busy with memory, surely, of the years she and my father sparkled— and there were almost sixty-one of those.

My mother no doubt slept hard last night, as we like to say where I come from, climbing between her own soft sheets, knowing her hands had touched every pane in that house and left them gleaming.

The Time Between
A lot has happened since my father has been gone. Grandchildren married. Great-grandchildren born and too many hoped-for great-grandbabies lost. We could have used his wisdom in the time since his death, which at times seems like years and others like just days. I’m sure it feels like that in every loss.

But my mother, as always, provides perspective.

There is still is a bit of sparkle left, even in my father’s absence. For one full day she polished her windows to a spit shine, no doubt remembering as she washed each pane, the life she spent with him, recalling their sparkle in the sheen.

I had no idea that I would later measure time in quite this way.

April 12, 2026
Life without Her
My mother has been dead now since mid-August of 2024, living alone for ten years after my father’s death, until she needed more care. Dying herself at ninety-six, still in her home.

Mama wanted me to have her chest-on-chest after she died, probably because the only drawer space I had of my own in our bedroom was a glorified TV cabinet. And so I brought it home, had it refinished, carefully placing my own lingerie, jewelry and scarves in the same drawers where she kept hers. I’m happy to say that the drawers are still somewhat orderly (please don’t look at the scarves) after a year of trying.

Not Quite Her

People say I favor my mother, and that may be true in appearance, but the resemblance ends there, I’m sorry to say. She was beautiful, glamorous, in a way I have never been able to carry off. I do struggle to keep her dresser drawers straight and my linen closet geometrically sound. I’m a decent cook, though over Easter weekend I tried to make her yellow layer cake, something I have made many times in years past, but it fell flat, and I had to resort to boxed mix for my Easter bunny cake.

My laundry basket stays filled, and at present contains last year’s summer clothes. I never got around to ironing them unless I needed something.

If Mama even owned a laundry basket when I was a child, I can’t recall it. Clothes went from hamper to washer to dryer to the ironing board, where she stood for hours crisping up the pillowcases and my dad’s worn boxers and pajamas, watching television with him. This was her love language, to be sure.

The Gift of Sparkle
Today, on her birthday, I’m thinking of all the ways she sparkled. Yes, she kept a clean house, but that was the tiniest speck of who she was.

She provided me the most excellent birthdays and a surprise every Christmas. A later-in-life convert to peonies, she grew magnificent ones, and one year she gave rhizomes to everybody at Christmas. (Yesterday I took a few of mine to place on her grave.)

She never encountered an animal she didn’t love. Expected a lot of her offspring, but no more than she expected from herself. She taught me to love the Book of Common Prayer, and though she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and I can’t either, she taught me to sing the Anglican hymns she loved so well.

Because of her, I can hem a skirt, press linens, arrange flowers, make a decent spaghetti sauce and a better than decent yeast roll. I can identify dozens of back yard birds and tell you their habits. I can’t, however often she tried to teach me, cut up a chicken. Nor do I love shad roe, which she used to scramble with her eggs on Sunday nights.

I hope I am loving my family in my own love language, however they see it. Though it will never be by ironing.

But I love every dog in our family like nobody’s business.

Shining, Still
My mother never truly lost her sheen, even in two years of illness. She welcomed visiting children and grands and great-grands, arms open, her deep blue eyes sparkling.

I wish I could call her right now. I’m sure she’d tell me that she’s polished all the halos in heaven to a spit-shine, and she’s really just gotten started.

—Isaiah 58: 11

Bluebirds flit outside my office window, landing on the dying dogwood tree to wait their turn at the feeder. At times, five or six of them of varying ages and genders, crowd around the feeder, pushing each other off as if there isn’t room at the table. Once they’ve had their fill of hot meats, the feeder edges fill with chickadees and snow birds, goldfinches and robins, downy woodpeckers, and the occasional golden flicker, feeding side-by-side despite their different feathers.

I marvel that in these parched days of midwinter, when the sun barely shows her head, when temperatures plunge so low I can’t safely walk the dog—and ice and snow permeate the prevailing weather forecast—that there is still so much life outside. Peonies break through the frozen ground, voles carve new tunnels through the zoysia, deer nibble at the acorns and Lenten Roses raise their hardy heads above the leaves.

Even so, as so much life surrounds me, I feel parched myself in this place, wondering why God seems so distant, as the peopled world rages.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve followed daily the Buddhist monks who have been walking from Texas to Washington, D.C., in an impressive Walk for Peace. Nineteen monks. Twenty-three-hundred miles and 250 days. Through heat and rain and snow and ice and icy wind. Felled by illness and accident of both monks and their dog “Aloka”, (one lost his leg in the process) they have been fed and warmed and nourished back to health along their way by people of every color, religion and political belief.

So much Hope.

Though I didn’t witness their walk through Raleigh in person, friends did, and I followed their steps online, listening to lead monk Bhikkhu Pannakara speak of being united in peace despite our differences to the hundreds gathered at the State Capitol. My sister, who lives in a Richmond suburb, waited for an hour on a frigid day by the side of the road to witness the phenomenon with her daughter and granddaughter, who left with a flower in her hand.

I’ve found that in watching the monks, my parch-ness has waned, at least for this brief moment in time. I thank God for showing me the power in their simple footsteps. Their mindfulness. And I find myself wishing they could walk through every town across this country, to calm the fevered crowds.

The Walk for Peace is now complete. The National Cathedral, among the monks’ final stops, drew several thousand. A wave of people walked behind them on Feb. 11, on their way to the Lincoln Memorial, including a hundred more saffron-robed monks joining the throng as they delivered their simple message of Peace Is Possible. Thousands more joined, as I did, on live streams and replays.

I have been buoyed by their hope, by their admonition to be mindful.

“The world will never be at peace,” Bhikkhu Pannakara said in his last speech of the walk. “Peace begins within, not without.”

I have not been mindful in a very long time. And I remain wary that I’ll ever be, even as I try to take the monks’ message into my self.

As with my backyard birds, the search for space at the table continues, where we can be mindful and nourished by God’s presence in the parched places of our souls, despite our differences, and despite the raging world that surrounds us

Copyright by Susan Byrum Rountree, 2026

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A Small Book, a Long Life?
More than twenty years ago, I self-published a small collection of essays titled In Mother Words. Many of the essays had been published in The News & Observer—the newspaper I grew up reading—while my kids were in elementary, middle and high school. I wrote a monthly column, off and on, from the 90s and 2000s, ending in 2019.

The earliest essays had been “published” in a pre-school newsletter I edited for about fifteen months when my children were very small. We had recently moved to a new town, and so I offered to help the overworked preschool director with the weekly newsletter she distributed to families.

One day that fall, my kids jumped into a pile leaves while I was raking, and I wrote a couple of paragraphs about it for the newsletter. I was surprised when mothers I didn’t know called me on the phone and asked for more.

Oiling My Rusty Skills
I’m all about more when it comes to writing, and I missed having readers. So I wrote something else, then something else, oiling rusty writing skills with stories about being a young mother who didn’t know much about the job she was tasked with.

So some years later, I created this little book with the help of Chapel Hill Press. It’s a lovely company, and they produced a beautiful little book for me, with an ISBN number and everything.

That year, 2004, I sold a few. I think the cover price was a ridiculous $16. The gift shop at my church carried copies for Mother’s Day, and for a few years thereafter, someone would contact me asking for a copy. Eventually, I donated a bunch of them, gave away others, my venture into self-publishing not to be. I still have a couple hundred sitting in boxes in my attic.

Can It Have a New Life?
A few weeks ago, someone reached out to me from literally across the world, having found an old volume on Thriftbooks. I had no idea it was there.

The woman who found it, turns out, re-markets old books. I said thanks, but no. Then last week, a friend reached out to me and wanted ten copies for her friends. Imagine. A book that is 22 years old. So shortly I’ll have ten new readers. Please forgive the typos!

Lessons from Theo of Golden
Writers find their audiences all sorts of places. Bookstores, word of mouth, book clubs, the airport. (That’s my goal, honestly.) The recent self-published success of THEO OF GOLDEN, a book I read with my book club and adore, is testament to that. The author, Allen Levi, wrote the mostly quiet story about a stranger who comes to a small Georgia town and changes everyone as an exercise actually writing a novel. In time, book clubs began picking it, and suddenly, 150,000 readers fell in love with it. (For context, many New York Times “best sellers” sell around 5,000 copies.) The Big Five took notice, and Levi has recently sold the book to Atria Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.

Fractured, but Craving Connection
America is so fractured by politics right now that we crave connection. Books can bring us together that in ways dinner tables can’t anymore. We can sink into the story of Theo, a Portuguese immigrant who buys a portrait in a coffeeshop and proceeds to find its subject and to learn their story in a simple gesture of kindness. At least that’s what we think.

A Young Mother, Lost in Translation
As a young mother, living in a giant city, I felt very alone. The one friend I had worked full time as a nurse, and my husband worked all the time. I lived far away from my parents and siblings, with no money to call home except maybe once a week.

I craved connection. My mother suggested I take a walk around the block and find a house with a stroller and knock on the door. I actually did this and found my first stay-at-home mom friend. I wasn’t writing much at all then— just pipe dreams— but later, after we moved to a smaller city, when I began to write for that little parish preschool newsletter, I found moms like me— and connection, while my toddlers swarmed around me.

So Happy in My Heart
On the way to preschool, we always listened to a tape from Sharon, Lois and Bram—a musical group for kids. And I remember one morning after I had dropped the kids off, I found myself still singing to “Oh, I feel so very happy in my heart,” all by myself, over and over, because I hadn’t felt really happy in a very long time. Until that moment.

In the many years since, I’ve cultivated deep friendships with women of all ages. From childhood and college. From neighborhood and church. From writing. From family. They are precious jewels to me, collected like bracelet charms over a lifetime of longing for connection.

Sharing an Old Story
So I’ve decided to trot out the old In Mother Words stories, in hopes of a new connection. Will my little essay collection of so many years ago find a new audience? Who knows? But I’m happy to offer. (I’m trying to fix the typos, but y’all, they are my trademark.)

I posted one entry a couple week ago and will post a few more short essays here, in case you know another young mom out there who is feeling overwhelmed and lonely, searching for connection in a very disconnected world.

I’d love your feedback. sbr

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From In Mother Words

And Now We Are Three
January 1990

Note: My grandson is three now. His antics remind me so much of his dad.

He is sleeping, his body a pretzel in his favorite chair. I don’t dare smooth the wrinkles for fear of waking him. It’s a rare midday break for me from a boy who now almost never naps, and I’m grateful for the quiet.

Worn out from yesterday’s birthday festivities, my sleeping three-year-old vaguely reminds me of the drowsy day-old newborn I nuzzled close in the hospital. That child was hard to wake, opening his eyes only to eat at first. Satisfied, he was off to sleep again, until his tummy called.

This child closes his eyes only when he has upturned every game, sofa cushion and puzzle piece within reach. Today alone he has camped out in his sleeping bag, brushed his teeth by the campfire, rescued a cowgirl (me), from laundry bandits with his new holster and guns, built and demolished log houses, constructed Tinker Toy trucks, eaten three meals. And it is barely noon.

They are one, the newborn and the toddler, though they seldom resemble each other except when Graham’s eyes are closed, and he is sleeping.

The months between the two are a blur of diaper sizes, drowsy feedings, tiny training wheels and Ghostbusters. And lots and lots of screaming.

Of course Year Two was the longest, most painful part of it, and the most memorable. We thought it would never end.

And now we are three.

I’m tired today, too, perhaps because I’m aware that, for the second time in this family, we’ve survived the twos with only a few scratches.

Last year we made peace with each other at the end of each day. Our nightly rocking mending fences broken by angry words and tears, fortified us so we didn’t break them down quite so far the next day.

Now when we rock, we rarely think of mending each other’s feelings. Though we still bat heads, my three-year-old throws one tantrum a day instead of a dozen, gives mounds of kisses when I’m most frustrated with him, and sings all day long the same three songs, so that even I wake up singing them.

I can only wonder what tomorrow will bring. Today I’ll enjoy him sleeping. When he wakes, we’ll likely share a couple of dozen games of baseball with his new glove while singing B-I-N-G-O at the top of our lungs.

But I’m grateful, since there is always room in my life for a little more music.

— From In Mother Words, Chapel Hill Press, 2004

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I was going to write something else today, but as I wait to celebrate my son’s 39th birthday later today over hibachi chicken and shrimp with his family, I can’t help but think of the Pretti family who are grieving a son who will never make it to 38.

To say that we are are living through unprecedented times seems like an unsatisfactory description of watching American citizens gunned down in the streets of their own neighborhoods, by people who are supposed to have a sworn duty to protect the law. And it is. But this is where we are.

I didn’t know Alex Pretti, didn’t know his parents, don’t know anyone personally who lives in Minnesota. But I feel like I know what kind of young man he was. I look at my son.

Alex was a Boy Scout, as was my son. (I suppose you could say my son is a Boy Scout, and Eagle, because I think you are always one when you earn that rank. Be Prepared isn’t just a saying. It’s who they are.

Alex was an outdoorsman, something he likely learned in Boy Scouts, because through camping and hiking wilderness trails and earning merit badges, the Scout program creates leaders like Alex. Maybe he earned his First Aid merit badge in Scouts, and the itch to help people medically caught him. Maybe. Depending on how long he stayed in Scouts, he could have earned Hiking and Forestry, Backpacking and Cooking, Public Health and Emergency Preparedness, Crime Prevention and Citizenship. All things that as I read about Alex were part of his character.

It’s joke that Scouts are taught to always help the little old ladies crossing the street. Alex must have been a good Scout, because his last act was to check on the woman next to him, who had been beaten and tossed to the ground like a rag doll. By “law enforcement.”

His last words? “Are you okay?”

This man was no domestic terrorist, as officials with the DHS have labeled him. He was in fact, a nurse for veterans, many of whom may have felt forgotten in this world. Since his death, I’ve read stories out about the veterans he nursed literally back to good health.

No, he was no terrorist. No more so than Renee Good. Both of them trying to be good neighbors in their communities. Isn’t that what we are all called to be?

Look for the helpers, Mister Rogers said. And I have been looking, hard for them in the middle of this debacle of an administration. Alex was one, and I thank God for hisl life and for the “The Woman in the Pink Coat,” who stood on the snowy sidewalk and filmed the murder of Alex Pretti in real time, so we can all know what actually happened.

Her plan was to document his movements on video in case he was taken in to custody. She didn’t know him. They never spoke. But her instinct may be the spark we need to turn this divided nation around.

She’s just a lady, one among many neighbors who are blowing whistles and carrying phones, a good citizen herself who sees it as her job to show those terrified by the tactics being used in Minneapolis that they are seen. That they are supported. I wonder, would I do the same thing if the DHS came to my neighborhood? I honestly don’t know.

Change your corner, I was always telling my kids. No matter how small your corner is, you can always have a good impact. Be kind to others. Treat them fairly. Pray. Give the old lady a hand while she walks across the street.

What happens to boys, to young men, to men, who miss that message, or misinterpret it, who believe that instead of helping the lady cross the street, you terrorize her and spew pepper spray into to her face, kick her and throw her against the curb. Just because some boss somewhere said you wouldn’t be punished if you did. Oh, they’ve changed their corner all right. It will never be the same. Except we don’t know who they are.

I will never understand any of this. How you an find kindness and evil on the same corner, how one person’s first instinct is to check on the lady who has been tossed aside, when another person’s first instinct is to draw a gun and shoot the helper multiple times, when he is already lifeless in the street.

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In an hour or so, I’ll sit at the Hibachi station and watch a chef’s spatula-acrobatics with my grandchildren, celebrating my son’s birthday. I’ll watch his children’s faces, their joy at what seems like magic, and I’ll watch my son watching them. It will be my own particular joy to be witness to this ordinary day, to know that he has changed his own corner of the world just by being who he is.

I’ll think, too, about Alex Pretti’s mother —whose name is Susan— who raised her boy to be a helper, just like I did. She will never have this moment that I am having with my son and his family, because he was busy changing his corner.

My heart breaks for Susan Pretti.

It breaks for every corner of this world.

sbr

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I watched from my window this morning as my 75-year-old neighbor and friend dropped her sled on the slick ice across the street from my house and adjusted her snow goggles. She wobbled a bit as she arranged herself in the plastic sled, then in seconds, she flew on the ice, down the hills and around her neighbor’s house in a spectacular run. I’ve seen her do this many times in our thirty-five plus years in the hood, and she always collects a crowd.

Today is no different.

Within minutes, it seems, news spread that Libby was on the hill, for a gaggle of kids soon surrounded her, taking their own runs in turn.

Today’s icy landscape reminded me that once upon a time, I made my own runs down that hill with my children, their icy snowsuits and boots dripping on the kitchen floor as they sipped hot chocolate and ate snow cream. And that once, a snow day threatened to turn into eleven of them. I thought they’d never go back to school.

That essay, first published in the News & Observer, is included in an old essay collection called In Mother Words. I share it now, as I’ll will some of the others from time to time. Enjoy!

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From In Mother Words
January 1996

Blame it on wishful thinking. Maybe this year, I told the kids, just maybe we’ll get a little snow. A weekend dusting would be nice, enough to pull out the sled, throw a day’s worth of snowballs, build a fort. Just enough to cover the ground and be melted in time for school on Monday.

No matter than my children had never seen more than a couple of inches of snow at one time. I can remember when things were different, when the white stuff provided days of sledding and snow cream and no school, and I was hopeful. It was bound to happen again.

Well, let’s just say we’ve made this memory and it’s time to move on. We’ve been sledding, so much now that the runners on our plastic sleds have worn through and now double as snow scoopers when sliding down icy cul-de-sacs. We’ve made chili, hot chocolate and corn bread, stoked fires, played blackjack, watched Apollo 13 at least thirteen times, caught flakes on our eyelids, bundled and re-bundled ourselves until we are really very weary of it all.

And there has not been an hour in the last six days when the dryer wasn’t running.

Funny, I don’t ever remember tiring of snow before, but I wasn’t the mother then. All I cared about was waxing my sled’s runners and having to share it too often with my sister. Now there’s a constant puddle at the back door, gloves soaked and lined up by the fire, and I really, really want to mop the kitchen floor.

As I write this, rumor has it that the weather may turn again, and if that happens, my son says, we’ll have spent an 11-day weekend together, thanks to a planned two-day school holiday next week.

I suppose that’s what it seems like to him, a perpetual weekend. Sleeping late, pancakes for breakfast, cartoons and homemade hot chocolate, movies in the late afternoon, no homework, no having to put on the good shoes for church.

And it’s not just the kids. Dear Dad, who was supposed to fly to the Northeast this week, has enjoyed getting to know Regis Philbin over his coffee in the morning. By afternoon, he’s taking to the slopes, exhibiting sledding prowess unmatched by those half his age.

But ‘we’ have had to make the coffee and clean up all those chocolate-soaked mugs and the leftover popcorn kernels, the same we who fills (and empties) the dryer and folds the clothes and builds the fire and slides to the store for more milk to make more hot chocolate, because you wouldn’t want to run out. I mean it’s cold outside.

Right now, as seven days at home begin to melt into eight, the prospect of another four with my adorable, loving family is almost too much to contemplate. Don’t get me wrong. It was a great holiday, with music and lights and yeast rolls and good company, but that was way back in December and now it’s January. Time to get back to normal.

But a winter thaw won’t bring enough heat to melt my family back into their appointed corners of the world soon enough. I’m feeling desperate, unable to find space in my house where someone isn’t watching something or piling something wet in the middle of the floor or asking what’s for the next meal. No, we need real heat, the scorching mid-July kind complete with gnats and mosquitoes, to light a fire under my crew.

I can see it now, so hot they’ll want to sleep late, and if they do venture outside, they’ll pour back in, dripping their wet bathing suits and sweaty t-shirts onto the floor. They’ll need something cool to drink, to take a shower, I mean it’ll be so hot outside. And after they leave their wet bath towels on the floor, they’re bound to go searching for that copy of “Apollo 13”.

Hmm…..

More snow you say? Bring it on: We have our escape all planned. We’ll hit the slopes, capture flakes on our noses, build a fort if we feel like it. And since they tired of it all during the first half of our 11-day weekend, my family should have plenty of time to have the chocolate piping hot, the dryer going, when I (I mean we) are ready to come in from the cold.

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A Book, A Tide & Twenty-Five years

Twenty-five years ago this year, my first book was published. It’s called Nags Headers, and is the story of a community on North Carolina’s storied Outer Banks, first set down on the edge of the ocean before the Civil War. It’s the generational story of families who still gather in some of those same houses to watch the tides and the waves. To tell stories of the people who came before them, and to share their memories of this special place.

How the Story Found Me
I grew up going to the Outer Banks, staying in rental cottages up and down the coast from Southern Shores and Kitty Hawk to South Nags Head. Back then, a wide expanse of dunes separated Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills from Nags Head proper, and when we’d ride down the empty Beach Road, the hold cedar shake houses would rise out of the dunes as if by magic. Years later and frustrated by the crowds while I was standing in line at K-Mart of all places, I found a story about a house tour of these majestic shacks. I knew I had found my next story.

The book grew from that story, about one family summering in their historic house that first appeared in the News & Observer on Sunday, August 23, 1996. After the piece ran, I was asked to write a book about the history because there had not been a definitive one written.

As I began researching, subjects seemed to cross my path serendipitously. A friend had recently remarried, and her husband’s family owned own house where FDR came to visit on the 400th anniversary of Virginia Dare’s birth. Another woman met my husband in a bookshop in Edenton, and a few weeks later I interviewed her 100 year-old mother who had weathered the Hurricane of 1933. The niece and nephew of the man who had built many of the old houses had worked with him and kept his tools.

Stories held within each encounter.

As I began to write, I thought a lot about how to organize the oral and narrative histories I was recording. What were the constants shaping the area for generations? Water, sand, storms, wind. Tides. A morning spent in my Wake County public library lead to the T volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I had my answer. The different tides seemed to be the right metaphor to how the earliest vacationers, the first Nags Headers, came from the sound side and over the dunes to the ocean where their ancestors fight the tides today.

Nags Headers sold well —close to 10,000 copies— but has been out of print for years. I found out recently that the publisher wants to put out a second edition, so this week I begin the task of envisioning an update to a story that has been ruled by the tides and changing times on the Outer Banks. A non-profit now, among their missions is to preserve North Carolina’s rich coastal history, and my book, even at 25, fits that mission.

Tides Roll Again
Though I’ve not been to Nags Head itself in some years, I’m excited about this new opportunity to revisit some of the people I interviewed then (though most, sadly, have passed away.) To find out what a new generation of families vacationing in the historic shacks on the dunes are doing to save their way of life and their houses, which continue to be threatened by wind and waves and fire and flood.

I’ll take a new look at the tides to frame this new chapter.

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From the Archive: July 2001
The story below first appeared in the News & Observer in July 2001, the week Nags Headers was published. At the time, I was writing a monthly column called “Our Lives”, and when I told the editor that the story of my book would be the subject of that month’s column, she balked. I was not to self-promote anything, she said.

So I argued the point. My assignment for the column was to write about my life, I said. And other than when my children were born, this was the singular most important event in my life to that point. And I was sure I could do it without self-promotion.

You can be the judge of that. But I’m proud of the book and am excited for this new chapter. I doubt my children will even blink when this new book comes out. It’s not what they expected, and they are busy with their own lives and and children and dreams. Just how I raised them to be.

No, it’s not the novel news I had hoped to share. Yet. My prayer continues that it, too, will come to fruition eventually.

But this is a new story.

And story sustains me.

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July 2001— The News & Observer

Author Mom

There are days when my son wishes I had a normal job, say that of an SBI agent. It’s not fair, he says, that because writing chose me when I was 12, his teachers expect him to write well, too.

It’s bad enough for your mom tell the neighbors all your children’s shortcomings. But I’ve shared their foibles in the newspaper, for even strangers to see. (They really aren’t as bad as I’ve made them out to be.)

And now I had to go and write a book.

It’s a real book that cracks when you open it, the pages smooth and white and filled with thousands of words strung together like jewels. Or at least that’s how it looks to me.

But they don’t share my fascination. They’re still recovering from the creation of it. It took up residence in our house almost three years ago, and like a whining toddler, required way too much of my attention.

I’ll probably have to pay them to read it, because it’s history and that’s too much like school. They won’t even wear the t-shirt I bought them, the back filled with the names of authors and their books (mine included,) because the front says “Can’t Live Without Books,” and right now they think they so easily think they can.

At least it’s not about them.

I actually thought the timing was good, having two teenagers who could do laundry if asked, make a grilled cheese, scramble an egg. But they had other needs.

Mom can you? Mom have you seen? Mom can I? I met their questions with a stare: No, Mom hasn’t. No Mom can’t right now. Mom’s writing a book, remember?

Oh, that.

But just wait until it’s done, and I’ll make a really nice dinner, do the laundry again, clean the house. Go back to Momming.

When did I leave?

In the last year especially, they’ve seen me typing, always typing, on the phone too much, crying when my computer crashed. What kind of fun job is that? They probably didn’t believe I was creating, trying to fashion myself into the author I’d dreamed of being when they were still a twinkle in God’s eye. Did Hemingway stop in the middle of The Old Man and the Sea to run to Harris Teeter before making dinner?

They couldn’t feel, as I could, when it all came together, felt like a book.

“I’ll be glad when you’re finished,” my daughter said, about a month before it was actually done. “Then you can be a normal mom again.”

Surely they know by now that I will never really be that.

I didn’t always write. They’ve forgotten when they were small, when together we painted with watercolors, when their easel, not my computer, was a permanent fixture. Or when homemade cookies weren’t Slice ’n Bake. And all those days we sat, reading books that weren’t mine. They couldn’t see then that I was dreaming.

When I did start to write again they were part of it. They entangled themselves in the phone cord once while I was on an interview, and cut me off. (Scheduling interviews during Sesame Street, I thought I was safe.) I wrote about them and their wonderful entanglement in my life.

In the last year, they’ve celebrated the joys with me, high-five-ing me when the acceptance letter came, taking my picture when the completed manuscript finally left the house.

When the box of books arrived two weeks ago, my daughter carefully thumbed through the pages with me, commenting on this and that. Later, she took my picture again. I could tell she was pleased and maybe understood some of what it took to get to this very big moment, huge in my life, though not even close to the winter days she and her brother were born.

I hope, now that it’s done, that they understand the importance of finding that something that moves them, apart from family and friends, and of dreaming and stretching themselves until it changes their world, if only for a little while.

They’re coming around. Just yesterday they decided on making their own t-shirt that says, ‘My mom wrote a book about the beach.’ With luck the Cliff Notes will be out before someone asks them what it’s all about.

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“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways.” Isaiah 2:3

“…and a little child shall lead them.” Isaiah 11:6

Of Granddaughters and Fairy Houses
We’re building a fairy house, Audie and me, on this warm autumn afternoon. It was her idea to gather acorns and bark, giant yellow fig leaves and sticks. She’s careful in her arrangement of the detritus from my yard.

“Let’s make a fairy house,” she’d said, and I’d looked around, picking up a swatch of bark, topping it with two of the millions of acorns that crunch beneath my shoes this time of year.

“THAT’S not a fairy house!” She giggled at the audacity of my simple creation. Her house will be different.

The Art of Building
She sets to work, her deep brown eyes scouring the driveway like a detective looking for the last missing clue. I wish I could see what she sees, but I only see fallen leaves, more acorns. In no time she has the bricks and mortar that will form her fairy house, and the location: my side garden, near the dahlias — perfect locale for such a house where fairies flutter.

First the walls: four slightly bent twigs, stacked. I contribute the last nasturtium, a crimson maple leaf, three clusters of acorn tops. She places each gift — a table, chairs, florals —ready for their winged occupants to arrive.

I snap a picture.

When I was Audie’s age, a friend told me the tooth fairy lived in a house in the woods between our houses. I pictured a structure built of discarded, gleaming teeth, fairies fluttering around. She took me on fruitless hunts to find it.

There have been days of late when I have felt God is as elusive as that tooth fairy house. But on days like this with Audie, I can see God is with us both.

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A Flight through Time
A few weeks later, we visit Sylvan Heights Bird Park, my parents’ beloved attraction in my home town. I point out the house I grew up in as we pass it, then look for the family headstone in the cemetery up on the hill. My house, and the cemetery where I used to play, such familiar landmarks of my life and yet so foreign to me now.

Audie sees the stone from the road and remembers when we last visited—at my mother’s burial more than a year ago. Her little brother, then 2, does not recall when the family gathered and we talked about ashes and souls.

“She’s in a box with those orange peanuts,” Audie explains to Gray, now 3.5. “Do you think the peanuts are still there?”

If I’m certain of only one thing in this life, it’s that the Circus Peanuts are still at the bottom of her grave. Will be forever.

“Are we going to see B and Pop B?” she adds. (The names the grands and greats called my parents.)

“On the way back,” I say. Oh, how I wish.

A Legit Fairy House
Walking down the wooded paths at Sylvan Heights, I spy not only rare and beautiful birds, but a real fairy house—a tree whose roots form an upside-down U large enough for Audie and Gray to curl up in. I point it out.

“That’s a legit fairy house,” says Audie, 6. Legit?

We try to feed the parakeets in the Landing Zone, urging them to land on our hands. Some do. I think about how much my parents loved and supported the mission of the place — saving endangered birds — long before this meandering park bloomed on the north edge of town. They called it the Bird Farm and we still do.

After, we stop at the cemetery, sweeping the pine needles from my parents’ stones.

“Where are they?” Gray asks, looking around for people he knows only in pictures. “Are they coming?”

How to explain to a 3-year-old that the remnants of their old bodies are under the stones, but their souls have gone to heaven to be with God?

“They’ve gone to live in a different house,” Audie says, sitting astride the BYRUM headstone. “In heaven.”

God’s house.

Wish I’d thought of this wisdom. Gray seems satisfied.

I think about the verse we often read at funerals: In my father’s house there are many mansions . . .” You know it.

And, then, of a dream I had as a child.

God’s Billowing Love
I’m wandering through all of God’s endless rooms, curtained in crimson and gold and purple, the walls billowing as I pass through them.

Audie’s certainty of where her great-grandparents are has led me, once again, to a state of true belief.

They are indeed in a different house now, surrounded by God’s billowing love.

— Susan Byrum Rountree

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Note: November 30, 2025
It’s been five years since I wrote this post about my final treatment for three kinds of breast cancer in 2020. A lot has changed in the world since then — too much sometimes to contemplate— but one thing has not changed. I am still cancer free. I’m so thankful for my doctors and nurses, my family and friends, readers who sent me the best of wishes throughout my treatment and who donated in my honor toward breast cancer research. Thank you all. Each year I face my diagnostic mammogram with trepidation. It may recur. But so far, the treatment continues to keep those awful cells at bay, and recently, a new blood test called the Breast Cancer Index, confirmed that there is no benefit to continuing my endocrine therapy, which I had been on for five years.

I’m still afraid of another occurrence, but this new indicator does give me some peace of mind.

This will be my last post, I hope and pray, about my breast cancer.

November 12, 2019

Rescued!
Well, my mother wasn’t able to drive the station wagon to pick me up, but there was a moment when an Explorer the same color as my father’s old one did pause for a few seconds when Anne Boone, my friend since 8th grade, and I were sharing lunch at Snoopy’s. Hot dogs and fries, both of us having earned it in all these weeks of praying and worrying and trusting. Though I felt for sure Daddy was sharing a chili dog with me somewhere.

And a Thank You
Today was the first of a series of small lasts, but this actually was a big one. The LAST CHEMO. I still have treatment to go and have much to say but no energy to say it, just now, so I’ll just post this picture.

Thank you to God and to all of of those who soldiered through this same trauma before me to make sure, through research, that I made it to THIS DAY. And thank you to all who have been part of my captivity, cheering me on and sending cards and gifts and praying and making meals and all the things that we all know how to do when someone is in need. All will be well, and soon.

More to come, with what I hope will be good news.

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Not So Fast: Give It To Me One More Time
Note: This first appeared on susanbyrumrountree.com in November, 2020

November 25, 2020
The Good News Is You
I have been thinking about y’all a lot lately. Who, you say? Y’all. All y’all, as we love saying in my Neck of the woods. Do you see that stack of cards there? (more than 250 of them) The flowers? The little gifts? These things have filled my soul these past eighteen months as I found myself captured in Chemo Camp.

I have been thinking about all y’all who got me through my kidnapping. Re-reading your notes and seeing your faces as I did, thinking of the emails, too, and your visits (way back when those where allowed), the food (Lord, have mercy, the FOOD!) the walks and the phone calls and the quiet moments when we sat in silence and you let me cry as I tried to take it all in.

Your laughter. Your donations to Susan G. Komen and the Walk for the Cure. Your telling me I looked beautiful without my hair (though we all know I didn’t) — and now when you tell me you like my new “look”. Every single one of these things that you did for me has made my life so rich while I waited for camp to be over.

Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda
I didn’t save any letters my parents had time to write when I went to camp when I was 9. In three days, I doubt they had time to write any. There were no doubt dozens of letters I wrote to my mother in those short days, though I’m sure they went straight to the trash. I’m sure if I had saved any letters from home during that time, they would have been much like yours: We love you, you can do this, think of all the friends you’ll make and how much fun you’ll have (well, maybe not that last idea for chemo camp.)

In a great sense of irony, in the mid-stages of my cancer treatment and on one of my last outings with friends, I ran into a camper I’d met years before at my first and only camp experience. He was bald like me and would lose his life to cancer a few months later.

When I thought I was going home from camp last November and then found out a week later that my mother was not, in fact, coming to pick me up, and that I would be staying for a whole ’nother YEAR — you stayed right there with me, sending cards, calling, walking, assuring me that I could stay as long as was necessary, and then I could go home, though someone would have to wash my underwear. I felt girded with such sustenance, soldiering on through more camp activities because of you.

Target Practice
My daughter loved camp, especially target practice during her week-long sleep away camp. She could easily hit the mark, so much so that when she CHOSE to become a camp counselor while in college—she must have gotten that DNA somewhere else—the camp assigned her this post. My daughter and I have never been the kind of twinsy mother/daughter team some people dream of. I spent years teaching her how not to be like me, so I consider this choice as making me, finally, a champion.

And then I became the target shooter, with only one goal in mind: shoot right through the heart of this damn disease.

And guess what I did? I GOT RID OF IT, with the guiding lights of my doctors and the nurses at the Rex Cancer Center, who finally LET ME GO HOME last Tuesday. All by myself.

Though my parking pal Tim and my nurse Hope (who hugged me, despite all the rules) wished me well, I drove away, with only the shadow of a tear in my eye.

“She’s grown,” I could hear my mother say. “You have handled yourself admirably,” my brother actually texted.

That part, “admirably,” he quoted what my father might have said, if he were to have lived long enough to reluctantly shoved me off to cancer camp. He is right, Daddy would have said that, but I honestly don’t quite understand what “admirably” means. I did what was asked of me. Nothing more.

Cancer Can’t Wait
A friend of mine who had cancer just before me has said often “cancer can’t wait.” (It’s a tagline for a local organization raising money to cure every kind of cancer affecting women, not just breast.) And this is so very true. Sorting through all my cards the other day, I found an email I wrote to my Bible study on May 15, 2019, the day I got the news. I was to lead it the next day, and I told them, so naively, that a cancer diagnosis would not disrupt the dozens of plans I had for my life in the year to come.

How wrong I was. A cancer diagnosis does NOT wait. Within minutes of learning you have it, you turn you life over to those caring for you and though you ask a thousand and more questions, not one of them is “when?” because the answer is always: “right now.”

Dive In and Get It Done
One of the few things I remember about real camp is the swimming test. Everybody had to take it, no matter what. I remember looking at the murky river water with the tadpoles swimming in it and asking, “when?” and they said pretty much: “Now”. And I had only two choices: dive in and get it over with, or wade in and swim from one point to the next, as best I could. No bravery. Just truth.

The same is true for Chemo Camp.

On the first round, I dove, head first, not knowing much about what it would do to me —though they did tell me as honestly as they could. The second time, I waded in, testing the waters a bit, though I knew I’d eventually I’d have to make that dive. And I did.

But despite what some have written to and about me, I am no hero.

Heroes Abound
My doctor is a hero. She has done the hard work of puzzle master, her fine mind taking my own curious circumstances — three kinds of breast cancer — to task, until she found the exact cocktail combination to cure me. Did you get that? CURE ME. Which she did. And she does that for every patient.

My nurses are heroes. They greeted me and all the other cancer patients as if we were the only one in the room, day after day, caring for us when some get our walking papers, and when some don’t ever. They are gracious and loving and champions for all.

And then my heroes took me out of the cage, and I took flight. Tuesday a week ago. Just like that.

I was a puddle. Honestly. After a quiet day in the chemo room, I was looking for the marching band. A raised pom pom or two? But when those did not arrive, I looked to Hope, who had nursed me on my darkest day, probably, when I was the most homesick I had ever been in my adult world.

“I wish I could hug you,” I told her. “I will never forget your kindness to me.”

“You are gettin’ it!” she said, breaking all the rules of COVID and giving me a hug I had not had from anyone except my husband in too many months. It was tight. And we sobbed. And I felt healed.

In the Pink
Back at home, family had filled my kitchen with pink. Two dozen roses, one dozen from my birth family and mother, and the other from my family by my daughter’s marriage. “Welcome home from camp,” their card read. Tickled me pink.

When you have cancer and endure the treatment, you pick your ‘cancerversary’ as a way to remember it. Could be the day you are diagnosed or the day you felt healed or the day, through surgery, when cancer took leave of your body. That day, the day cancer took leave of me, was one year ago today.

So I take today to celebrate. And on this day before Thanksgiving, to be thankful to God for all of you. And your role in my cure.

To All Who’ve Been Kidnapped Before
I also want to honor all those who have gone before me in this camp. Who carved their initials on the scaffolding and in the bathrooms and on the sheetrock that holds so many of these camps in place. I don’t know your names, but all ya’ll have come before me, and I thank you for your service and your commitment to allowing doctors to study the disease in you, so that I might live. I honor hundreds of thousands of you, many of whom aren’t here any more, but so many of us are here and leaving our cancer days behind because of you.

I will not forget your sacrifice.

Now back to the pile sitting in the picture at the beginning of this post.

Thank you all for your letters and your love and for not letting go of me when I was taking the swim test at camp. I survived because of you, too, and I’m forever grateful that you cheered me on as I made it, finally, to the other side.

Much love,
Sooze

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Note: This was first posted on Susanbyrumrountree.com August 25, 2020. I know it’s no longer October, but I still have a few kidnapping stories to share.

August 25, 2020
Tears for Fears
Sixty three. That’s how old I am today.

A year ago, I wasn’t sure the shape I’d be in when I got to today. I look at a picture of myself holding my newborn granddaughter, Audie, and though I’m not as bald as I would become, I’m getting there. And there is weariness in my eyes. Those 62-year-old’s eyes, well, you can barely see them — eyelashes gone, the sparkle of them, even in the presence of dear Audie, is invisible.

Maybe it’s because I’d spent much of that day crying.

My sister and sister-in-law had sent me a birthday gift, and when I opened it, I found dozens of charms threaded on a silver chain, charms sent to them from friends and family from all points of my life.

If you’ve read much that I’ve written, you know that I’m all about charms. I have two full charm bracelets and now the necklace, and when I first pulled it out of the box, I was fairly certain my sister was thinking I was dying. And she wanted me to know how much people around me cared about me.

Certainly there were times in the first few months of chemotherapy that felt like dying. And some tears easily fell, remembering those very dark days, with more to come, I knew. But I laughed, too, through that puddle, knowing maybe even then that this thing would not kill me. At least not yet.

Dozens of Little Stories
The necklace weighs several heavy ounces, and it’s filled with charms that represent pieces of my life.

Buttered toast and an Outlander book, a hot pink dress and a yellow submarine, typewriters and clouds, a crown and a tea cup, a pencil (and its sharpener), dogs and the Empire State Building, sand dollars and a hamburger, an artichoke and a bird, a Bible and a peony — just to name a few.

I’m not sure what this odd collection actually says about me, but every single one of them comes with a story all its own.

Small Scale Armor
From the time I received it, I wore the necklace every time I had chemo until it was over (except it wasn’t.) On those days last summer and fall, I felt as if I was taking with me a small scale of armor to fight this thing — with the help of all those who had charmed me. And in the hours when I sat in the chair, I fingered each gift, remembering the people and the stories.

That buttered toast. My childhood friend Malone and I sat at her kitchen table as pre-teens, eating buttered toast after school and talking about boys.

Yellow submarine. My brother—Beatlemaniac that he is—sat close to the stage at last year’s Paul McCartney concert in Raleigh on his own birthday. Clouds—my adult niece, whose 2-year-old question: Do Clouds Sleep? had me pondering until it was a book I’m still pondering forty-plus years later.

Peony: My mother. It’s the only plant she ever gave me that I seem to be able to grow.

The crown looks like the one that sat on Queen Elizabeth’s head during her coronation, the charm’s original owner the mother of my dear ABSU, who bought it when the two of us saw the crown jewels as seniors in high school.

The dog from my college suite mate turned neighbor, Grace, as a reminder of all the dogs we’ve walked together and loved in thirty years of neighboring. The cardinal: my sister’s reminder that our father is never far away.

I could, as they say, go on. Bible. Turtle. Sand dollar. And a date: 6.19.19, of my first chemo.

The Weight of It All
After I finished what I thought was my last chemotherapy, I learned I had another year of it because pathology after surgery proved I had a third kind of cancer. (It’s a charm!)

There would be no writing about my extended treatment last year. Most days after my new diagnosis, when I looked at the necklace, I cried just thinking about all the people represented on the chain. Somehow I felt I’d let them down, which of course is a totally unreasonable thing to think about cancer.

I cried for the reason behind the necklace and for the fact of it. I cried because the sheer weight of the necklace felt a lot like the weight I was carrying.

Putting the Present Away
I’m embarrassed now to say that when I learned I’d have to continue treatments for another year, I put the necklace away for awhile. I can’t say why, really, but anger at the state of things likely had something to do with it. Eventually I brought it out again, to keep me company during the now monthly treatments that were not as harsh as the earlier ones. I remembered every story held in the charms, until finally, exhaustively, my treatments ended. I prayed many thanksgivings for the friends who had taken the time. For me.

Today I’m feeling better. I’m working, though not yet back in the office (no one is because of COVID), and the challenges presented by communicating church during a pandemic have fueled my creative soul.

Still Charmed
I have hair again, though it looks as though it belongs to someone else — the salt and pepper and curls in no way resembling the (mostly) straight blonde sprigs I had before my kidnapping. And no, my hairdresser wasn’t hiding my gray all this time!

My sister can’t get over the color when we FaceTime. Nobody in our family ever had this color, she says.

Let me say now that despite my cancer kidnapping, and despite the agonizing treatment, I live one charming life. I have the necklace to prove it.

To think that so many people throughout my life took the time to think about what I meant to them and then, to find the perfect charm to characterize that meaning—and mail them to the women in my family — is overwhelming and humbling and tear-inducing.

Now, I think I’ll go and have me a piece of buttered toast.

And ponder my most charming life. sbr

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May 2020
If the Shoe Fits
One year ago today I found myself in room far across town talking to a doctor about my favorite shoes. They are straw, with florets across the toe in greens and blues and deep peach, and I’ve had them for years. They are perhaps my most uncomfortable shoes, but because I have a narrow foot and they were expensive, I wear them anyway, and through the years I have worn them down until they are almost bearable.

The doctor wore a functional pair of clogs with a pretty swirl design as I recall. And as we admired each other’s choices, both of us knew what the real story was, and it had nothing to do with shoes.

Her work that day was to find out if I had breast cancer.

“If it turns out to be something, I can get you in pretty quickly,” she said… or something of that sort. I am no doctor but was raised by one so I knew that she was telling me without the words that yes, you do have cancer. (She said as much during the ‘official’ phone call a few days later. ) No, the story was not going to be about anybody’s shoes.

Infusion Confusion
Yesterday I looked around the infusion room at the cancer center where I’ve spent much of the past year. These days everyone, not only the nurses, wear masks. A woman next to me kept asking her nurse how much longer she had to sit there.

A long time, it turns out, because she chose a treatment that will let her keep her hair — she wears something akin to an ice helmet that she has to keep on for hours, and I want to say to her, Honey, that is so not worth it. Though I really miss the hair I had before cancer, the trauma is enough without one more hour in the infusion chair. But one thing I have learned in my year of living with cancer treatments is that everyone has to choose their own course.

Colton, one of my favorite nurses, looked like he was genuinely glad to see me when I walked into the room. He was my nurse three weeks ago, too, and in March he and his wife welcomed their new baby. They hope she’ll share the same day care with my sweet Audie if our grandchild is ever allowed back there. It’s usually for hospital employees, and Audie got a rare spot way back in December, though now it’s open only for the kids of essential workers. Because of COVID, she is home with her parents every day. And we can’t see her.

But I digress.

Boomerang
I have not written anything in a long time. Not since what I thought would be my last chemo treatment, in November of last year. I should have been long done with the infusion room by now, should have left my nurses — did, in fact — tell them goodbye with great flourish.

I was gone for just about three weeks before I was back like a boomerang with a new diagnosis and a new treatment plan — for a cancer they had missed the first time around. It was there all along, but because of the luck of where the biopsy needle landed, they missed it, finding it only when I had a lumpectomy Thanksgiving week. The pathologist did post-surgery tests because they knew my oncologist would want to see them. Had she had a hunch?

Not everybody gets that careful examination of the tissue they already treated. My oncologist told me this back on December 6, when I went for what I thought would be my ’see ya in six months’ checkup.

Radiation was set to start in a couple of weeks. I was about the catch yet another plane to NYC, this time to help my daughter, heavily laden with Baby 2, get ready.

“You’re probably not prepared for what I have to tell you,” my doc said.

Understatement of the year, that one.

Instead of two kinds of cancer, I had three.

Third’s a Charm, Right? Wrong
The new one, Her2Neu+, requires a full year of treatment with a targeted drug. And though it had responded to the five months of chemo I had, I don’t get credit for that.

While everybody keeps keep saying I’m cancer-free, this new round of infusions will take me through December—a full ’nother year of treatment— to make sure no rogue cells have escaped to other places in my body.

It’s hard for me to believe anything right now.

Another full year.

Ever the Trendsetter
It took weeks for me to stop crying.

In addition to the now new and unexpected monthly chemo regimen, I endured six weeks of radiation despite my denial. Angry and sad, confused and as shocked as my doctor said she was — it was hard to keep the tears at bay as the menacing radiation machine wrapped its in un-wrenchable —yes, my made-up word — arms around me, beginning its own pillaging of my weary body.

At the time, I was one of only five patients with three kinds of breast cancer at once at our cancer center. There have been more since my new diagnosis, because more post-op pathology is being done. I like to think I started a trend.

Joy in the Middle of the Muddle
And then in the middle of it all, early on a Friday morning midway through radiation, my third grandchild made her debut. I woke up to a text from my son-in-law: “Baby is here!” though she wasn’t due for a couple of weeks. By the time I walked into the radiation room for one of their first appointments, I had my plane ticket to New York to meet her. Baby Hazel knew I needed her to arrive on a Friday, and within hours I was holding her in the hospital, wondering if she would be at all like my grandmother, for whom she is named. (So far she smiles a lot more.)

Kidnapped Again
Because radiation is daily, it would be another month before I would be able to visit her again. By then, my body was purely beaten and burned — though some had said radiation would be a walk in Central Park on a spring day compared to chemo, I found it the opposite.

Dehumanizing, for one thing, as the techs drew with orange and blue Sharpies all over my upper body to guide the machine to the hot spots. Painful for another, as I covered my breast and back with soothing lotions to ease the burns. (Yes, radiation’s rays have to exit somewhere, so the back is literally their back door. Who knew such thing?)

Day by day I lay on the table, watching the machine pause over me, the tiny plates behind the machine’s glass window reshaping themselves over and over so at last they formed an image that looked for all the world to me like a map of the State of North Carolina.

But I was not at home here.

A few days after radiation ended in early February, I caught another flight to New York, armed with a packet full of antibacterial wipes. (This was to protect me from germs but I’d not even heard of Covid at this point. ) I boarded the plane and wiped down every surface I could find — did the same thing in the cab — though I would learn later that it takes five full minutes after wiping for surfaces to be clear of germs.

Five months of chemo and six weeks under the radiation radar had left me with weeping wounds that would take months to heal, and feet so wracked with neuropathy that I can hardly feel them. These are just two of the realities of breast cancer’s cure. (My nurse practitioner keeps telling me that if it’s going to happen to someone, it’s going to be me.)

The Cure of Family Medicine
My medicine, I have always said, is my family. Reading stories to my grandson Henry, bouncing Audie on my lap, getting to know Hazel, smelling my daughter’s hair —all have seemed like the best ways to relieve my cancer funk. So I flew north that day, searching for recovery.

Now that I’ve been sequestered at home (for the second time in the past 12 months) I don’t like to think about how I walked through the Upper West Side of NYC through grocery stores, the pediatrician’s office, or simply down Broadway without a mask. I washed my hands often but not the groceries themselves like I do now. Who knew then that COVID-19 lurked everywhere, even on those cold days in February? And that within six weeks, my daughter and her husband would leave New York for the safety of North Carolina, not knowing when they’d be able to return to their home.

Back into the Throes of My Captors
On treatment days I don my homemade mask and walk up to the Cancer Center doors, (there is no valet service anymore) where I have to take it off, sanitize my hands and gingerly life a mask they provide from a small brown bag on the table. They take my temperature and ask me questions about travel, testing, coughing. Only if all my answers are ‘no’ am I allowed in.

The waiting room sits mostly empty, as it’s reserved only for patients in active treatment. No family or friends can come with you. I think of the days my sister sat next to me, my husband, my friend, and how some patients brought three or four people to their corner chair in the infusion room. No more.

I will be honest: I don’t want to be here. I wish my plan had been the one I started with last May — chemo, surgery, radiation and done. If that had happened, I would be well on the way to finally feeling like myself again.

They tell me my new chemo regimen is not as hard on my body as before. I can tell it’s not, because I’m not always as tired as I once was. But the reality is that in the past five months, I’ve felt almost normal for exactly one full day, and it was glorious.

One Day of Normal
It was the Saturday after Christmas, and I woke up early and without pain, walked the dog then started cleaning out my refrigerator practically down to its frame — something I hadn’t done, I’m embarrassed to say, in months. Though I did put my feet up for a bit, that night I attended a birthday party for friends, making up my hairless face and lash-less eyes, changing from my pearl earrings to large hand-painted dangles — went out on a date with my husband. And we danced! I so wish that dream had lasted longer.

How Had I Done It?
A few weeks ago, I pulled open the notebook I’ve kept filled with paperwork from my illness. I don’t know what I was looking for — perhaps some evidence that despite it all, I had made it through the worst of it. Buried in the hundreds of pages was a paper filled with sketches of my options from my first visit with the surgeon, way back a year ago. On that day, she suggested that a lumpectomy would likely be all I had to do, but a biopsy would show for sure what I was facing. Within days, my options weren’t really options anymore, but necessary treatments to keep me alive.

I sorted through the pages and felt my throat tighten until I was weeping. How had I done all this — the surgeries, the infusions, the days when I could barely hold my head up, the baldness, the loneliness and the abject fear?

What a mystery it all is to me now. God, surely has been central to it.

Starbursts Yet To See
Today I reached into my chaotic closet (no, I have not used this time of home-bounding to straighten my life) and found my shoes. I’ve not worn them in months, but I put them on today, just to see, as my mother has always said about most anything when shopping.

Just to see. But what was I shopping for?

The shoes fit poorly, just like they have always, just like this whole cancer thing has fit on me. Most who look at these shoes will likely see straw, finely woven. Pretty shoes. But what I saw was not a pair of straw shoes with a few rosettes, but starbursts that I had always known were there but had never truly noticed.

As hard as it is, what is ahead of me is not impossible. There are starbursts, yet to see.

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Note: In case you missed it, read Part One of How I Found My Literary here.

Gathering the Courage
I’d written the book. I’d revised, revised and revised some more. Was I ready to pitch?

Though I knew there was little point in all the work I’d done without putting myself out there to agents, the thought was scary. It’s personal. I felt vulnerable. And the pitching phase is fraught with rejection.

Did I want to go through that again? No, I did not.

I’d begun a slow purge old writing files, finding letters I had written to editors at women’s magazines years ago, trying to place my essays. Reading the letters I realized that, though it had taken me years, I had accomplished that goal. I had become the writer I longed to be.

My essays had been published in newspapers and magazines. Readers liked my work. I had written two books (one a self-published collection of essays, but that’s another story) and garnered solid feature credits. I’d even made a little money. If I never published another thing, I would be happy, right?

Well... I still had one dream to go.

The Pitch and the Shit
Earlier this year, my critique partners encouraged me to attend the Writing Day Workshop in Raleigh. Writers sign up to pitch agents (many of whom are local—surprise!), and attend seminars on various forms of writing. At least five people had read my manuscript and liked it. I’d created a good pitch letter and synopsis, had honed the first chapter.

Ready or not. It was time.

I asked a longtime writer friend and Beta reader, whom I’d known since my first writing group, to join me. We polished our pitches and chose the agents we wanted to meet, understanding we’d have five to ten minutes to chat with each agent before moving on.

I felt like I was back in that creative writing class years ago at Emory as I sat down at the table with the first agent. Sweaty palms, heart pumping through my sweater, as I read my pitch.

“Probably not for me,” she said.

Disappointment rose in my throat. An expected “no”, but still.

“But send me the full anyway.”

The full?

A second agent referred me to a colleague—one of my dream agents who co-hosts the brilliant writing podcast, “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing.” I’ve listened since 2020. The agent said to use her name in the referral. What?

(I’ve since learned from that very podcast that I shouldn’t have mentioned the other agent in my query. She left the agency within a few weeks of my meeting her, and my dream agent wondered why agents who refer writers to colleagues don’t pitch the idea to the colleagues themselves. Lesson learned.)

Sounds Like Fun
With that first request, I felt more confident as I continued to pitch. When I sat down with the third agent, she laughed, saying: This sounds like a lot of fun! Then asked for the first three chapters.

Three for three.

In between sessions, I paced the hallways of the center, unable to perch. Finally, I found a quiet corner and texted my critique partners. I wanted them to know their challenging me seemed to have worked. At least at this stage of the game.

The last agent was older, local. She owned her own agency, was the age of my reader demographic.

“It’s the story of five women,” I said, watching her eyebrows rise.

“That’s a lot of protagonists.”

“Trust me,” I said, holding my hand up for her to wait. Trust me?

So I continued, not reading this time but laying out CHURCH LADIES from the heart, showing my love for them. I ended with my author’s credentials, and the fact that I’m a lifelong Church Lady and “know all their secrets.”

“Your pitch is very polished,” she said. “Send me the full. Oh, and a graf about what the next book would look like. A lot of publishers like two-book deals.”

The next book?

If three agents had asked for the full, I was ready to pitch to others. Back at home, I wrote each of them, thanking them for their time and sent along the requests. Then I crafted letters to other agents I had identified as having potential.

The Perks of Not Being a Wallflower
One of the perks of taking courses with Curtis Brown Creative in London, where I’d revised my novel to completion, is they help you choose the agent in their company best suited for your work and make sure your pitch package, including your full manuscript, reaches them—no slush pile. That’s an incredible advantage. So I sent my manuscript to them.

I had a short list of other agents to query, including a woman I’d pitched to many years before at a NC Writer’s Network conference when I first started the novel. Back then, I was among Donald Maas’ 100,000 pitches for novels that aren’t ready. Now I had written an entirely different book.

My novel includes a good bit of sex, and I often asked a sex therapist friend to read pages, and she has loved it in all of its iterations. I reached out to her to tell her of the interest, and she offered to approach her agent on my behalf.

Her agent has been quite successful placing non-fiction titles for the past three years or so, but I saw no fiction titles on her list.

“Send it anyway,” my friend said. So, I sent the letter and the first chapter, mentioning my friend.

With each email, chapter or full manuscript I sent out, I prayed my little story would find the right champion, a person who understood the challenges of middle-aged women, their histories and their secrets—someone who would respect my work and fall in love with my ladies like I had.

Then I let it go… to the in-boxes of seven strangers. I also prayed for patience, a prayer that would not be answered!

A Little or a Lot?
Pitching to seven agents doesn’t seem like a lot, and it’s not. Many writers pitch to seven times that, even more. But my critique partners, who had also gone to pitch events, and I had discussed our strategies and decided to start small, limiting to those who asked to read at least a few chapters, or agents we had identified as looking for our particular genre. If that didn’t work, we’d move to those next on our lists.

The goal: to garner feedback. Maybe someone would like it enough to offer suggestions on revising the pitch or manuscript, even if it wasn’t right for them.

I sent those first pitches out the third week of March, followed by the one to my friend’s agent the following Monday.

The Wait
Most pitching writers advise jumping right into the next project, and I did, but it wasn’t a writing project. My mother, the book’s idea instigator all those years ago, died at 96 the previous August, and my siblings and I dismantled her house, making room for her treasures in our own homes as we dealt with our grief. There was time with grandchildren. A new beach property.

I tried to put the whole novel thing out of my mind.

A few days after I’d sent the letter to the non-fiction agent, she wrote back. She’d get back to me as soon as she could. Three minutes later, she asked if I had more to send.

First 50? Half? Full manuscript? I asked.

“Send the full,” she said. And I did.

Charming Rejections, and Then…
The next week, my first rejection. The agent called it “charming”.

The fact that one agent felt the charm of my book made me believe others might, too.

Another rejection. And another.

“Not for me.”
“I didn’t connect with the characters as much as I liked.”
“It was fun, but I’m going to pass.”

My church lady friends meet on Thursday mornings on Zoom during the school year for Bible study and check-in. In the past year, some of us had been dealing with traumatic family issues: the loss of an infant grandchild to cancer, a husband with Alzheimer’s, a critically ill sister, my dying mom. So instead of the Bible, we were studying each other, offering prayers and support.

That morning, April 24, they asked me about the book. I wondered privately if I would hear from any other agent. It had been five weeks, and most of them had said ‘five to six’ when acknowledging my package.

As I signed off, I saw a yellow notification below the Zoom screen. A new message.

My heart pounded to my fingertips as clicked on the email. Would it be another rejection?

“Thank you so much for your patience,” my friend’s agent wrote. “I had time to read your book yesterday and I just tore through it. It was so fun, and I love your writing so much! I also shared your book with my team and they too fell in love with it.”

Fell in love.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

“I don’t always represent fiction,” she continued, “but I’d love to take you on and work to find a publisher for you—if you’re interested in working with me!”

She wanted to represent me. Take me on as a client. I couldn’t believe it.
I got up from my desk and paced the house. Maybe I told my husband, I’m not sure. I texted my friend and my critique partners. Could this really be happening?

Finding the Words
Later that day, when I could string together a lucid sentence, I responded to the agent, who sent me her calendar link so we could schedule a call. I contacted the other agents who still had the full manuscript and let them know of my offer. That meant more waiting, as they all made time to hurriedly read it.

In the meantime, I perused the offering agent’s list closer to see how my novel might fit with her non-fiction titles. And I saw something remarkable: She had sold a book a month for three years and was getting good deals for her authors, and the titles she represented focused on religion, sexuality, family, friendships, trauma—all the same themes I write about in my novel.

And wait for it: Her name was Trinity.

As in Holy Trinity. As in Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Was it a sign?
Before our 30-minute Zoom happened, my critique partners helped me with questions. As Trinity answered them, I liked her, and our half-hour turned into almost an hour of easy conversation.

As we ended the call, I said: “It’s interesting that your non-fiction titles explore all the themes of my novel.”

“Funny how that works out that way,” she said. And then this: “I love your novel. Even if you don’t decide to choose me as your agent, I’ll buy it, and I’ll tell all my friends to buy it!”

Wow. I could have said yes right then, but I had to wait.

The One Yes
The slogan for The Shit podcast is: “It only takes one yes.” I had the one, but I was hopeful there might be others, even though I liked Trinity so much from the start.

It would take three weeks to hear from the other agents. My dream? Being ‘courted’ by all of them, having a bidding war of sorts.

The reality? One agent referred me to a colleague. The Curtis Brown, London agent said I needed an American agent and referred me to three colleagues in their parent company, all of whom rep Southern authors.

More waiting.

Finally I had heard back everyone. All passed but with flattering rejections, one of them saying: “There is no flaw here.” Wow.

With Trinity, I had my answer. My one yes.

I accepted Trinity’s offer, signed the boilerplate contract for debut authors with trembling hands and received a “New Client Packet” from her agency.

Whoohoo! An unbelievable moment for this seasoned writer.

Tick Tock
There is a very real possibility that my ladies won’t make it further in this round. I’m trying to brace myself for that. Lots of books never make it past submission stage. Publishing is so subjective, we writers hear over and over.

But to think I’ve made it this far in the process? Astonishing to this little girl who so loved her Nancy Drew.

Following Through
One piece of advice I hadn’t wanted to follow myself: If you know writers who offer to refer you to their agents, do it! And be open to learning and critique at every step of the process. My end product, if it is indeed published, will be richer and deeper and just as funny as what I’ve created—first on own my own, then with the help of my writing village.

Now I’m revisiting the old novel I couldn’t finish years ago. It’s the story of two young girls—one white, one Black— who meet as their community grapples with intregration. At the same time, eleven million starlings and grackles choose the town to make their roost. (This actually happened in my home town in the late 1960s.-early70s.) It’s not a funny story like CHURCH LADIES, but it seems topical now in our very divided world.

I’m hopeful one day my ladies will find their audience.

And I thank my mother for teaching me how important it is to finish what you start.

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In celebration of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’m sharing my cancer story, one post at a time. This essay was first published in 2019 on susanbyrumrountree.com

August, 2019
Flower Power
My friends have been filling my house with flowers these past weeks. Bright zinnias and black-eye Susans from their gardens, pink roses and white hydrangeas for the hall table. As they fade I remove the dying and combine the living, creating new arrangements for new places in the house.

I love bringing the outside in on these hot days of late summer, when very little grows in my yard at all. My mother did this all of my childhood (and all her life) cutting flowers from her garden patch and setting them on the kitchen table, in the family room, beside the bed when we would visit.

Not My Mother’s Thumb
At 91, she still keeps a small garden in the back of her patio home, filled with plants she moved when she moved from our childhood home after my father died. Large pink peonies grace her kitchen table in the spring, and in summer, shasta daisies crop up on the kitchen counter. She can throw a Gerbera daisy from the grocery store into a corner of the garden, and it will bloom all summer.

She tried to give me mint she’d dug up from the back yard at home, but it died in my care. Iris bulbs? The same. But her little corner garden bursts with color as she ages, and it’s her joy.

I love fresh cut flowers, too, but in recent years I’ve had very little luck in growing them. The peonies that pop up in spring in my back yard my mother gave me as tubers. They took years to bloom yet have somehow survived — and thrived — on my own benign neglect. My husband and I have over the years tried to fill our borders with perennials that require little care, but the voles and rabbits keep feasting on them.

We plant, they feast and we replace.

Just after my diagnosis, I found some zinnia seeds I’d bought, maybe last year— I can’t remember. The kids and I used to plant a cutting garden along the side of the house each spring that actually grew into something, but that project fell by the wayside over the years. Each year I’d buy seeds and daffodil bulbs in bulk but the best I could do, it seems, was to plant a tomato plant or two and fill my porch pots with caladiums.

Seeds of Hope
But I found these seeds. Looking at them and thinking what lay ahead of me, I wanted desperately to put something in the ground that would soon pop up its head and grow into something tall and beautiful. I can’t explain it, really, but despite the fact that it was pretty late in the planting season, I handed them over to my newly-retired resident gardener, and he didn’t look at me like I was crazy.

Chemo brain and all that.

Instead, he set to work, scattering the seeds between the tomato plants I’d not quite successfully plugged in the ground and the leaves of my spent peonies.

Over the weeks, he watered and mulched, weeded and trimmed, even going way into the back yard to the abandoned compost pile he’d forgotten years before. I’d come home from work, and he’d be out there shoveling and watering (our water bill was more than $200 last month) working with this tiny plot.

Within a week, he’d coaxed the seeds to bloom, and so, in time, I picked a few and brought them into the house, bringing new life into this place where my own is being zapped out of me, bit by bit.

Then came my birthday, and let me tell you, it was a literal florist in my house. Thanks to my friends. I must have had a half dozen arrangements scattered around — from the Farmer’s Market, from gardens around, a couple from the florist and one from the church altar. It was glorious, all the summer color splattered everywhere.

And then I went for my chemo treatment.

Not the Kind of Growth You Want
My white count was low, they said, so they gave me a week off. I didn’t want that, mind you. Chemotherapy is not something you look forward to until you can’t have it. One week off is another added on to the end. And I had a new grandbaby coming and a schedule to keep—I would be done with this mess, DONE by January. I simply could not miss a treatment.

Nothing doing, said my kidnappers. We keep the schedule.

So they began to question the why of my white count. As they looked at my diet and my resting and my working and everything else you have to consider when you are in the middle of treatment, one of the nurses asked, as an aside: Do you have any live plants in the house? Any flowers?

It had been my birthday, I told her. And though I usually don’t get flowers even from the husband on the birthday, yes, I did have, well, a few.

Get Them Out
Get them out, she said.

Why? I asked.

The spores, she said. They cause infection. Which can land somebody like me in the hospital, she said. Which would be bad. Very bad.

All that beauty. All the love people had showered me with in bringing life into my house. Just a few flowers, really, but something growing and beautiful and hopeful right at the very moment when I needed it. That hope.
I handed the vases to my husband, one by one, and told him to toss them. And I hated it.

Zinnias are my favorite summer flower. The hydrangeas have rusted, the bachelor’s buttons have long-since dried up and roses, well, I’ve never been able to grow them. But zinnias? You toss the seeds and almost from nothing they pop their heads up, and the more you cut them, the more they come back.

In the early mornings since, I walk outside to my zinnia bed, eyeing it with love and trepidation. I don’t think I’ll look at fresh cut flowers the same way, ever again.

She’ll Be Back
Each morning my husband tends our small spray of flowers as if it were an acre, snipping and mulching and musing over them like he did the children when they lived under our roof. She’ll be back, I can imagine him telling them, a reminder for himself, too, on those days lately, when neither of us wants to spend time with me.

Yes, I will be back, but it will be awhile yet. Christmas, they tell me now, before all is well and good again. The zinnias — and all my garden flowers — will be long gone.

But here’s the thing about flowers. Some, if left to themselves, will dry and reseed without my having to do anything to help them.

I’m counting on that. For my tiny zinnia garden and for myself. New growth, come spring, for all of us.

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In celebration of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’m sharing my cancer story, one post at a time. This essay was first published in 2019 on susanbyrumrountree.com

November 2019
A Daily Greeting
I turn into the parking lot and park my car at the curb.

‘What’s a phone number?” Tim asks. “And a last name?

Tim has been greeting me almost daily for the past few months, taking my keys and parking my car, while I join all the other souls in the waiting room. He wears a black scally cap and a perpetual smile.

I remember the day I met him, way back in May, on my first day as a new cancer patient. I was unaware that the cancer center offered free valet parking for those of us in their care.

“I’m new,” I remember saying as I stepped out of the car, feeling quite brave as I recall. “I can walk from the parking lot, really.” He took my keys anyway, smiling, happy in this job that keeps him at the front door in 100 degree heat, in tropical storm rains and crisp fall days. A nurse later told me that once I was well into treatment, walking to my car would become a chore.

Well, after 18 weeks, here we are.

New Keepers in My Kidnapping
Tim is among a team of people I didn’t know existed before early June but who have become particular players in the middle of my kidnapping. There’s Jean, the receptionist who checks me in at the door and knows my name now. Andra, who must know my birthday by heart — and who places heart and smile stickers on my arm band.

Rose Marie, whose name I memorized by thinking of the Dick Van Dyke Show — she’s helped me juggle my schedule so I can have a small semblance of regular life. Marlene, one of the nurses who accesses my port each week (with a truly tender touch), and Colton and Kendra and Ana and Jana, nurses assigned to me who cheered me on when I came back to chemo after a two-week absence. Jamie, my nurse practitioner, high fives me when my counts are good and doesn’t judge while I cry and swear. You’ve read about Hope, before.

I’ve been getting shots three days a week lately in addition to chemo — an unexpected regimen that keeps my bone marrow strong. Which also means I spend more time at the cancer center than I do anywhere else, other than home. Though I have not gotten to know any patients, these people who are in charge of my daily well being have become a little bit like family. They are pumping me with drugs and good will so I’ll outgrow my need for them, we all hope, in a matter of weeks.

In Front of the Line
When I do, I’ll have a whole new team of kidnappers waiting in the next phase of this ‘ridding your body of cancer’ camp activity. Radiation. Kind of like going from high ropes to low. Or from target practice to sailing (though I hear it won’t be smooth.) Tim will still be there to greet me, but my nurses will have moved on to other patients. I’ll miss them.

When we discovered the cancer, I wondered what to tell my children, though I don’t remember what rehearsed it in my mind. I did tell them through my tears that we would fit this around our already busy summer and not the other way around. Silly me.

But the reality of cancer and its treatment is that in the mind of those treating you, there is no more important life event than your recovery. Not grandbabies being born or 91-year-old mothers who need hip surgery, not sisters who fall and break both feet at once, not husbands who find themselves scattered along the edges, waiting for signals. No grandsons you wish you could hold tight but can only visit by FaceTime. No Friday night suppers with friends. No church. Work, when you can do it, has to be from home. The big C breaks in front of the line on all you thought you had planned.

You must simply pull up to the curb and hand over your keys.

I’m not sure what I expected that first day when I gave my keys to Tim. Like most things, I’ve learned that there is theory and then experience. I would lose my hair, they said. And I did, though in theory I had no idea what it would feel like staring at my bald head every morning. And I didn’t expect when I tried to use mascara on my eye lashes recently and there would be a day when I couldn’t find them. (My eyebrows are gone, too.)

I was so naive as to think I could fit cancer around my life and not the other way around. Missing out on the things that matter to me so much, I know, is a minor inconvenience — momentary realities that when viewed in the long game will seem like a blip. Hair grows back. Eyelashes, too, Google tells me. But the other thing I’m learning about cancer is that it is sometimes hard to see the end of that long game.

Writing It All In Pencil
Just when you look at your calendar and see “last day of chemo!” written (in pencil) and start thinking about who you’ll miss in the windowless room with the warm blankets and comfortable chairs, your kidnappers (the doctors) throw in another 9—9! — weeks, between chemo and surgery, surgery and radiation, before THE END. Weeks more until they will finally hand the keys back to you and you drive away. You hope forever.

Don’t misunderstand me. I want to be present for the long game, I do. To witness my grandson ride a bicycle and cut himself shaving (there is nothing to shave right now), to be present when the new grand baby walks and dances and drives away in her first car. It’s the space in between all that and right now that has gotten to me.

What Calendar?
“I don’t remember what I was planning to over summer,” I told Andra, the receptionist, when I checked in for my shot a couple of weeks ago. We laughed, but it was only so I could keep from crying. I really don’t remember what I had planned, though “cancer” didn’t appear once on my calendar, even in pencil.

Was it trips to New York to walk to school and read books and visit the park with my grandson Henry? Or hours of time with two-month old granddaughter Audie, rather than brisk snatches in between treatments to hold her? I know those would have been on my calendar a lot had there been any room at all.

I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. I know there is no more important work for me now Fighting cancer. Getting well. But I wish they would leave a little room on the cure calendar for LIFE.

A memory: the wee hours of an early spring New York City morning less than two years ago, when I held tiny Henry in my arms and thought: There is no more important work for me to do in this world. I have missed similar moments with Audie, and I grieve them. And so much more.

Life, Family, Love
I tell my doctors that sometimes complete healing doesn’t come in a pill or a vial attached to tubes. Life and family and love heal, too. I have those things, surely, but at a distance that doesn’t feel like part of the cure.

My father, a doctor, believed that medicine wasn’t always the answer to what ails you. Though in this instance, I know he’d tell me what I have to do right now. He would also say that the distance between my reality and my hope will narrow soon enough. I just have to hang on a bit longer.

One day in the next few months, Tim will hand me back my keys, and I’ll drive off. Seeing him won’t be on the calendar anymore. I hope he won’t take it personally when I don’t look back.

+++

October 2025: My visits to the new Rex Cancer Center now are twice a year. Tim is still there, sporting his cap and his smile, and I smile back as I walk by, watching him greet other cancer patients as he opens their car doors.

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In celebration of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’m sharing my cancer story, one post at a time. This essay was first published in June 2019 on susanbyrumrountree.com

The Bad Hair Years
My mother raised me on bobby-pin curls done up on Saturday nights for Sunday church. I knew nothing of curlers. Maybe I was cute when I was four (not a lot of pictures exist, so there is no telling), but when I was five, the daughter of my mother’s hairdresser—in beauty school at the time—practiced her perming skills on me.

My otherwise short, tow-headed sleek ‘do’ was now a nest of curls more suitable for a bluebird than me.

When I did choose my own style—despite every reason to the contrary—I chose a long Patty Duke flipped-up style that drew my chin down to my chest and widened the gap in my teeth. This was the same year I got acne and breasts and everything about me seemed to grow so awkwardly that I wanted to keep myself hidden in my room until the ugly duckling gave way to the promised beautiful swan.

Only that part didn’t happen either. Oh, I grew out of the Patty Duke and cut my hair shorter and managed to be if not a beautiful swan, then an ok looking duck.

But my hair.

My sister had long locks in high school (she was always dubbed the pretty one and I the baby). She must have had some instruction, because she rolled her hair with giant curlers, had it frosted just so, and it came out looking beautiful, draping across her shoulders like a soft blanket.

But some hair just isn’t gonna go there, and when mine tried, the ends split and frayed.

The Geometry of Hair
My hair and I finally came to an understanding when I was in high school, when I finally got the nerve to ask that same daughter of the hairdresser—who by now was doing my hair regularly—to give me a new short shag, popular in the mid-70s.

My mother said then, and often, “You always look better with your hair on the short side.”

That shag, though, took me through until Dorothy Hamill came along and showed us how to think about hair as geometry. Her hair molded to her every move, forming exact angles no matter how many “Hamill camels” she performed.

This, somehow, was a language I thought my hair might understand. I wanted it to move like that, to twirl like that. I still remember the day I sat bravely in a new stylist’s chair at the mall far from my hometown hairdresser’s home-based salon and asked for it.

From that day forward, my hair and I began a new relationship, though I would later abandon the Hamill from time to time, depending on Princess Diana’s chosen style.

Then my mother began saying I had the best hair in the family. She’d had beautiful, thick gray locks most of my life, and she was complimenting me?

When Hair Meant Everything
Then came the 80s, and talk about geometric hair! I got another perm—all the rage!— and my new curls formed the perfect triangle. (Every time I see “Sleepless in Seattle” I’m reminded of this.) But now I had not only my head to care for but my daughter’s, so the hair, eventually, had to go. (Hers was so much prettier and thicker than mine.)

So I cut mine short, where it stayed, and for the next thirty years.

The Breakup
After staying with the same stylist for too many years, I finally left him. It was truly like a divorce, leaving the man who’d given me head and neck massages for at least ten years, who’d styled my hair for my children’s weddings—letting go of that, and of our friendship, was hard. But he wasn’t listening, and my hair wasn’t either.

From the first time in her chair, I knew Carla would reconcile my hair to me again.

And she did, painting it the color my sister said I was born with. And using her own geometric skills to shape my locks so no matter how many weeks passed, the shape stayed the same and in place. I loved my hair for the first time in years.

And then, well, chemo happened.

When I entered the Rex Cancer Center doors for my first appointment, a beautiful, tan and bald woman passed by me, her colorful skirts swaying as she walked. Her head, shiny as a bowling ball, glowed. No way could I sport that look. My scalp, though fully hidden by hair at the time, was covered not in shine beneath my hair, but eczema. Not a good look on its surface, I could well imagine.

We met with my chemo educator, and she looked at my hair and said: “You’ve got a really cute cut.” As in: Too bad! And she then went on the explain that if I kept my hair, I’d be the first chemo patient in history. The drugs I’m taking target all the healthy, growing cells in my body as well as the bad, so the healthy, growing hair follicles are the first—at least the most noticeable—to go.

The Buzz
When I shared my diagnosis with Carla, we both cried. Then she trimmed my hair and said she’d be taking care of me for the next nine months, whether I had hair or not.

A few days after my second treatment, my husband, who had never met any of the stylists who’ve cared for my hair in our almost 38 years of marriage, drove me to Carla’s, sitting on her bench as she gave me a buzz. (She’d cut it in a perky pixie only a week before, to prepare me. At the same time, she styled the wig I’d bought so well my husband couldn’t tell I was wearing it for twenty minutes.

Carla took her time, sliding her shears over my scalp until, as she says, she saw in my eyes that she should stop. I’d not seen my head so bald in my life, and to say it was alarming doesn’t cover it.

When the Hair Goes, What’s Left?
A friend who had breast cancer years ago had given me colorful bandanas to hide my head. I tied one in a cute bow and went to supper with friends. The next day, we packed up for a week at the beach, and all seemed right.

Until the next day, when in the shower, my hair came out in sheets.

Long gone were the shag and the Hamill and the wedge and all the other “dos” I’d sported in all these years of having the best hair in the family. But there it was.

My sister came over, wanting, she said, to see my wig. I warned her about what my balding head would look like as I changed from the bandana to the wig. She held me and cried with me, hard.

She’s is not a cryer. That’s usually my job. But this was the first of many kindnesses she’d give me during that horrible time.

No, I’d never had long, luxurious locks, but they were my locks, no matter how often I’d felt bad about them. Ever the crybaby, I deserved a moment or two to grieve them. And she made space for that.

I hated for my children to see me this way. I prayed that my 15-month-old grandson would know me by my eyes and not my hair. The next morning, I was up early, as I am every day during this “kidnapping,” and he greeted me with bright eyes and a smile. And all was right.

I’m getting used to it. My husband says he can see my eyes, brighter than they were before. I honestly don’t know why. Because I am tired, and sometimes sad, though showering is quick and getting dressed for the day is far easier than it was a month ago.

Redefining Heroine
As for the Nora Ephron quote at the top of this story: I’m not the victim in my story, nor am I the heroine. (Those are my docs, and God.) I am, in fact, myself, and I just happened to have been taken aside from my life for a little while, while my “kidnappers”—my care team—whom I am growing to love as hostages do, make me well. The victim, we all hope and pray, is actually the cancer, and that with each, sometimes grueling treatment, it is fading, so that in a year’s time, it will be the dimmest memory for us all. Most especially for the tips of my hair.

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For Those about to Lose Their Hair
If you have had a cancer diagnosis and treatment promises hair loss, think about these tips:

• Take pictures of your hair as you love it.

• Shop for a wig while you still have hair, so those fitting you can see how you wear it and find a color that matches your own. When you’re done with the wig, share it with someone who needs one.

• Wigs can be expensive and are not necessarily covered by insurance. Some cancer centers offer cancer patients a free wig, hat or hair covering. Take advantage of that.

• Have your own stylist trim the wig to suit you (make sure they are trained in cutting wigs, as of course the wig hair will not grow back)

• Your scalp will signal you when it’s time to lose your hair. It will become sensitive, even a bit painful, as your hair is about to go.

• Allow yourself to grieve. You’ve had your hair a long time.

• Don’t shield your family from the reality of what you’ll look like for the next almost year. There will come a point when you embrace this deeper part of who you are. Your baldness shows you’re doing everything you can to remain part of their lives.

• Consider your beauty. It’s way more than hair deep.

The Plot
My mother was full of advice: make your bed every day. Put a little melted butter and cornstarch in scrambled eggs and they’ll taste better. Finish what you start—be it homework or piano practice or folding the laundry. Treat everybody kindly.

Her advice was sound, rooted in experience and pretty much always right. I recall only once when she offered such crazy advice that I jumped on it without thinking, and I have her to thank for what happened in the end.

A few months ago, I reached every writer’s dream: I landed a literary agent! I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I read The Secret of the Old Clock Nancy Drew Mystery in third grade. To be able to string everyday words together into story seemed the ultimate career, though I had no idea how it might be done. Or how difficult.

No Easy Dream
Finding a literary agent is no snap, but my mother, an avid reader who nothing about the writing world, gets every credit. Agent dynamo Donald Maas recently said the ratio of queries to representation is about 1,000 to one. But hidden in those odds are the huge number of writers who pitch before their manuscript is ready, before they’ve worked on their craft long enough to present a polished product.

I’ve written professionally since 1979. It took 25 of them to write the novel that earned an agent’s interest. As I recently turned 68, I felt like I was running out of time, but I kept at it, because Mama said so. A lesson for all would-be novelists.

And just in case you think signing an agent contract means you’ve reached your dream, the hard truth is that it’s only the first phase of the story toward becoming a published novelist. Now it’s up to my agent to find a publisher, and if they do, it takes two years from purchase to bookstore shelves.

So why do it? Most writers I know would say they don’t have a choice.

An Early Spark
I wrote a play when I was six or seven about a lonely princess. In junior high I wrote my first short story about girls and boys and middle school crushes A high school short story about heaven won an honorable mention in a Sunday School magazine contest. I wrote it in all in green ink and have it, still.

My father told me then that he thought I could write but I should go to college to learn how to do it well. And from my first college English class, writing courses opened something up in me that I didn’t expect. I found poems at the base of trees, created characters from thin air, gave voice, finally, to my secret writing dream. After doing well for two years at a women’s college where I became editor of the school’s literary magazine, I went on to journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill, where the only “A” I ever got was in feature writing.

Becoming a Working Writer?
Building a writing career after college was hard. My first newspaper job was as a photographer of all things, for a daily newspaper 30 miles from home. But a year later I found a real writing job with a bona fide editor, who taught me how to find the soul of a story, how to apply what I’d learned in creative writing classes to journalism, writing beyond the who, what, when, where, why I’d been taught.

She assigned me stories that spoke to love and heartache: an 80-year-old midwife who had birthed hundreds of children but had none herself; women working at Planned Parenthood so younger women would have options they hadn’t had themselves. I loved the work, and through the years would use what my first editor taught me to later become a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines

I married a reporter. The week of our wedding, he took a job at another paper in another Georgia city, so with nepotism rules rampant in 1981, I was left without work. I had a baby, kept a journal about my dream. One day. Maybe.

A Novel Beginning
In college I’d started a novel, and as a new mother suddenly homebound, I pulled it out, taking a summertime night course in creative writing at Emory University, just down the street from our house. In the course, I crafted an autobiographical story about a young girl growing up in the segregated South when millions of grackles and starlings invade her town just as integration is taking place.

Those classes fueled my energy, and I’d return home, staying up late into the night to work on a new scene, before mothering duties took over in the morning. I wrote during my daughter’s nap time on my old college Olivetti electric, my heart pounding each week in class when I read my work aloud. Being a writer fueled a different part of me from being a mother, and I needed both pieces to survive.

When we moved back to North Carolina in 1989, I found freelance writing work, still plugging away at night on the novel. I joined the N.C. Writer’s Network, an organization support to fledgling writers. Answering an ad in their newsletter I found an established critique group and got serious about the novel, leaving my kids at the table doing homework in hopes of reclaiming my writer self.

In between, I placed a few essays in my local paper and gathered a small following. I pitched a story about a wedding photographer I knew to a bridal magazine and found a regular gig writing essays about being married and managing everything from money to in-laws.

In my early 40s, a Sunday feature story about a family’s generational beach cottage in my beloved Nags Head led to my first real success: the publication of a non-fiction regional history called Nags Headers. Its publication was hard-fought, as my vision and the publisher’s didn’t jibe at first and I walked away. But I convinced them my way would work.

I became an author, at last.

The First Crack
My heart skipped more than a few beats when I cracked open that first hardcover copy and smelled the pages. So this is what it feels like to be an author! Tingling skin. Throbbing heart. A tear or two. The next week, I dropped my kids off at summer camp and headed into my first book tour, armed with new clothes and boxes of my books. I loved talking about Nags Headers on the radio and local television —even arriving at a TV station hours before my interview and sleeping in the car. I could hardly believe this was my life.

The locals even hosted a book launch on the porch of the cottage I had first written about, and I dreamed the night before that my grandfather, long dead, showed up. He loved Nags Head, too. Only once did no one show up at a signing.

Nags Headers sold through it’s second printing, but I still couldn’t shake the fact that I wasn’t a “successful” writer.

I consider quitting. Had testy conversations with God about it, too, because I didn’t choose to be a writer. Writing chose me.

But I’d quickly fade back into the writing, taking more classes, understanding that I still needed to perfect on my craft. When I earned a spot in a writing residency with acclaimed North Carolina novelist Doris Betts, I listened when she said: “Kill your darlings.”

She was talking about beautiful phrases that say nothing, of course, but I took her literally, killing off one of my most well drawn characters. That night, the novel I had been writing since I was 25 years old became something I could no longer complete.

So I called my mother.

From Lament To Spark
My mother has heard my laments since I was old enough to say words, so I braced for her “It will all work out,” mantra. But my staid, Epsicopal church-going mother said instead: “You need to write yourself a trashy novel.”

What? The kind with sex and titillation, and a hundred different ways to describe the male anatomy? With throbbing and burgeoning body parts? What did my mother, the most elegant Southern lady I knew, know of those?

I started that night.

It couldn’t be that hard, right?

Church Lady Confession
When my friends learned about my new project, they each gave me one character trait for a sketch. I read early chapters to them on the beach, and we howled, imagining ourselves in the predicaments I’d invented, which turned out to be far more salacious than I—or anyone who knew me—would have thought.

I had no idea what I was doing, putting five women together on the page and letting them figure it. I’m a church lady, and I’ve long been intrigued by the secrets we keep. So I set my story in church, where we ask God, “from whom no secrets are hid,” for forgiveness.

The women of the Altar Guild of a small inner-coastal North Carolina church, each keep secrets from their best friends. When a stranger arrives, his presence sends the Church Ladies into a summer of restless questioning—about the nature of love, marriage, spirituality, and sex.

What’s Happens Next? Who knows?
I’m a “pantser”—I don’t know the end until I get there. I had no plan other than one character trait or situation my friends had provided for each of the women I hoped to bring to life.

Through the years I’d set it aside as I worked as a professional writer and editor, but I’d always come back to my ladies, wanting to know what they were up to. They grew to be my friends, and I wanted them to have happy lives, even though I wasn’t sure the secrets they had shared with me would allow them to. When I took permanent job in communications at my church, I abandoned them again. You can’t be writing a salacious novel while working for your church, can you?

Setbacks & Second Chances
In 2019 I was diagnosed with three kinds of breast cancer. All through my treatment, I kept thinking about the dreams I had for myself when I was young and wondered if I’d ever see them through. A cancer diagnosis will do that to you.

I had a writing career—a hardcover book and hundreds of articles to show for it. On the personal side, I had recently become a grandmother, I had a husband who supported my career, great friends, and a job I loved. But I had yet to complete a novel.

My chemo treatments lasted from mid-2019 through all of 2020. (You can read more about my “cancer kidnapping” in other posts.) While on lockdown during covid, I signed up for a Zoom class on finishing your novel, working for weeks to figure out where the story was going. And then one day I actually wrote the words “The End”!

I pitched it to agents to no avail, kept working my day job, hoping to live long enough to retire, when I could finally start revising now that the “shitty first draft” was done.

In 2022 I did retire. My mother, the originator of this crazy idea, was failing. I wanted to do her proud, even though I’d never actually told her I was following her direction.

Finding My People
When an offering through Curtis Brown Creative—the teaching arm of the literary agency in London—popped up on my Instagram feed, I decided to investigate. Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry, which I loved, completed her novel during a Curtis Brown course. So I signed up for ‘Edit and Pitch Your Novel,’ hoping to learn something new. Something that would take me from a would-be novelist to a successful debut author.

Polished To Shine
In the course, I learned how to revise my work on a line level, wrote new chapters and added characterization, backstory and interiority, meeting with a mentor who critiqued my book. In the end, I had a polished manuscript, including an entire pitch package—query letter, opening pages and synopsis. I had increased my word count from 64,000 to the required 75,000. The other writers liked my writing and laughed at the premise. As the completion of the course, my mentor said she thought I’d find success.

Two women from the course who live in the NYC area invited me to continue in a private critique group, and though we were writing in different genres, I agreed. After our course was over, our efforts really began.

The Work That Changed Everything
Our small writing group worked daily to improve our manuscripts and pitches. For two years, we submitted chapters to each other weekl

y and offered tough but valuable critique. It was hard, sometimes painful work, but they challenged me to go deeper into the lives of these women than I’d dared before. They asked questions about the characters they’d become invested in, called me out when I shied away from the tough conversations and consequences each of my ladies had to face, and their suggestions added complexity and credibility to my plot and characters.

By the end of those two years, I had added another 10,000 words to my manuscript. They had worked just as hard as I had, and we each had books we were proud to share with Beta readers—to get even more honest feedback on what were now fully realized novels.

No, everything wasn’t perfect — there was still much work to do—but the novel now called CHURCH LADIES, was funny and smart and profound and honest according to my Beta readers—a novel worthy of any reader’s bookshelf.

Up Next:
Part 2: Making the Landing

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I don’t know what I was thinking.

A lighter pink might mean a softer blow?

Yes, I’d lost my hair, but I kept my pace that first couple of infusions, resting when my body said to, pushing forward when it felt like I could. I sat for those two hours crunching on cherry popsicles (which I hate) and talking to my sister and my friend AB about everything except all that redness flowing into my veins.

I would not be outdone by this. I had bandanas! I had special chemo scarves! I’ve had what has felt like a sky filled with cumulus clouds full of witnesses praying for me! And one of my first “counselors” was named Joy!

An Intruder in the House
But it didn’t take long to learn there is not much joy in the actual treatment for breast cancer. A stranger has moved into your house, uninvited, and you have no way to evict. You must trust other strangers you’ve only just met to rid your home of this intruder. It may be a complex mission but it’s not complicated, you remind yourself.

They do this every day, like the people you hire to do all sorts of things you aren’t personally trained to do yourself. Roofers and electricians and carpenters and such. And though you might be “one in eight” in the statistics, you are one among dozens they will see in a day’s time who might be getting some version of the cocktail they have prepared for you, to shed you of this unwanted parasite.

And though you might be one among almost 270,000 women who will be diagnosed just this year with invasive breast cancer—15 percent of whom will have the triple negative kind like you—that’s not really a very large number in the scheme of things. But then, you are that one in eight.

Scraping the Skies
So that’s what I scrape the skies about in the middle of the night—at two and three and four a.m. I lie in the dark, praying—even when I don’t feel like it—for myself and my doctors nurses and all the people I know in this world who are hurting—way too many—and the millions I don’t know but who are not well, like me. Like the young nurse in scrubs in the waiting room at the cancer center last week—younger than my daughter—but already wearing a wig—herself the one in eight among her own peer group.

Back in June, they signed me up for four doses of this Red Devil—Adriamycin— which, Joy, my nurse told me just this week gets that name because it takes you to hell and back before it makes you well. Joy first called it that as she was plying me with popsicles. (Adriamycin can cause mouth sores, so they try to keep your mouth as cold as possible in the 10 minutes or so that it’s actually being pushed into your veins.) It’s so toxic, apparently, that there is a lifetime maximum on the number of doses patients can have.

After the second dose, all that redness started seeping out, my skin erupting in ways I’d not seen since acne days, a painful and unsightly rash that looks like measles, creeping across my back and chest and arms and legs. A constant dry cough took over at night, so neither I nor my husband could sleep. By day, fatigue set in that wasn’t curable by an afternoon nap.

I’m on my third dose of Prednisone for the rash, and the number of pills I take morning and night for various things when I barely took more than vitamins three months ago is embarrassing.

Trying to Work
Meanwhile, I kept trying to show up for life outside the cancer center. All this time, I’ve been trying to work, at a slower pace, surely, but work. If I didn’t have work to take my mind off myself, I don’t know what I would do. I’m grateful for an understanding boss.

When it’s all over, I plan to add the moniker “cancer survivor” to my identity list—way at the end, after grandmother, writer, yeast roll maker, left-hander and dog nose kisser—not the first thing to define me, but one small thing among many that make me into me.

Keeping it to just a small thing has proven harder than I thought. Two months in, I’m weary. I long to have a Friday night out with friends or spend a weekend at the beach or visit my mother. But in recent days, I’m pinned to the corner chair in my sunroom trying to concentrate on a book because I have little energy for anything else.

Leaning in to Weariness
Which is why on Monday of this week, I was back at the cancer center, trying to get someone to hear my weariness, to help me out of it, if that was possible. To find some way to stop the cough and the sore throat and the fatigue so I could actually sleep for several hours in a row.

The young nurse sat across from me, handing me Kleenexes, as I listed my laments. If I could sleep, we agreed, the world would look a little brighter.

“You’ve gotten through the worst part,” she said.

The worst? But I had another 12-week stay at chemo camp before my mother could retrieve me.

“A lot of people don’t have as much trouble with this next round,” she assured me.

Even though I am indeed a crybaby, I lied, telling her through my tears that I am not really like that. Except it wasn’t a full-one lie, just a tiny one, as I have kept my counsel, proudly so, throughout much of this ordeal.

“It’s ok,” she said. “You have a safe place here.”

In that room with her I did feel safe.
I changed the subject from myself to my son and his wife, whose first baby was due that day. I wanted to be well enough, I told her, to meet the newest member of our family without a thought of this damn disease that had stolen my summer.
I wanted to be there for my grandson, Henry, and for my daughter,
who would have her own daughter in January.

“Right now you have to take care of yourself,” she said to me. “But keep your eyes on the goal.”

“They are my goal,” I said back.

Leave it up to me to make a cancer nurse cry.

Of Grace, and Hope
She had a six-month-old daughter—Grace —who shares my daughter-in-law’s name. During our conversation, she thought about her own mother and baby, and for a small moment imagined what it might feel like if her mother had cancer like me.

As we both dried our tears, I searched for her name, but her ID was upside down.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Hope” she said, straightening out her identity. “It’s Hope.”

Of course. Of course.

And so, there was God again, stepping into my eighth week of chemo, with Joy and Hope and Grace. Too serendipitous to be coincidental, at least in my thinking.

Hope was Right
I’m sleeping well now. My cough is almost gone, and I’m feeling more like myself than I have in weeks. Next week I’ll start my new camp session—two new drugs that will do other crazy things to my body—but I do so feeling renewed, somewhat, and ready for the onslaught.

Finally, a Rescue
And I’m so for today.

It’s before dawn on August 10, and today is BIG. For I hope to finally meet our newest family member, who has taken its own sweet time getting here. We don’t know yet if we’ll be greeting a baby boy or girl—yesterday I bought both blue and pink bows for my son’s mailbox—but it doesn’t matter.

Born in the middle of what has been a stolen summer, this new baby offers my rescue. And no devil, red or not, can steal it away.

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Susan Byrum Rountree is the author of Nags Headers, a regional history set on North Carolina’s storied Outer Banks; In Mother Words, a collection of essays; and Church Ladies, a novel in hopes of finding a publisher.

Health Note:
*Adriamycin is an antibiotic and potent chemotherapy drug that has been used to treat cancer since the 1960s. It’s part of a group of chemotherapy drugs called anthracyclines—medications which stop cancer cells’ growth by blocking an enzyme that’s necessary for cells to divide and multiply. It is given as a liquid injected into the vein. —from verywellhealth.com

Editor’s note:
In May of 2019, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. These are reposts from my blog, susanbyrumrountree.com. I hope my story will help others facing the same. If you know someone who has recently been diagnosed or someone who has braved this kidnapping, please share. By the grace of God and exceptional medical care, I’m six years cancer-free! sbr

The Camp Story Legend
Anyone who knows me well at all has heard my camp story. It’s legend in my family, and as we head into our annual beach week, it’s bound to come up. How my parents sent me to a two-week stint at an Episcopal Church camp on the Pamlico River where my sister had gone and loved it. And how I didn’t stay. We sit around the kitchen table and laugh about how the counselors all tried to entertain me with sailing lessons and camp fires and songs and whatnot, but I was having nothing of it. All I wanted was to go home and sit at the feet of my beloved mother.

Packing the Trunk
Since it’s my story to tell, I’ll tell what I remember. And it’s a lot. I was excited about going, spending what felt like weeks packing my steamer trunk with all I needed for those two weeks — short sets and new Keds, books and my Bible. Towels and clean white underwear and white socks. Crisp notepaper and stamps for writing home. Some cash for something called Canteen. Sheets and a blanket that smelled just like my mother’s linen closet.

When the day came, I was ready, and my mother drove me, with a friend, I think, the two or so hours to the river. The counselors took me to my assigned cabin, and I dragged my trunk up the steps and into a sparse room filled with bunks and names written all over the walls.

Trouble in Cabin #3
First issue: I had the top bunk. Second issue: No private bathroom stalls, but a room filled with showers with flimsy curtains and girls everywhere. It was almost as if I was late getting there. Then we all donned our bathing suits and headed to the river for the swim test. I think I passed, because they let me in the murky water the next day.

I tried not to cry that first night, up in the air as I was with the crickets hiding in the rafters, but it was hard. I was quiet, at least I hoped. The next day, we got to the work of riverside camp life—swimming and learning to sail a Sunfish, meeting each other, taking a group picture by the chapel. I have it somewhere. I felt like I met everybody in camp that day, boys and girls, even enough to pick out which boys I thought were cute! At the time, they say, I had the memory of an elephant, and I recall some of them still. (Years later, one of my three-day crushes joined my church. I remembered him, but he did not remember me. Big surprise!)

It seemed pretty fun, but I was wary, having never spent time away from home except at my grandparents house. Back then, I’d stand in front of my mother’s wedding portrait and wail. But I was nine and about to go into the fourth grade, and I was a big girl.

The Milk Meltdown
But at supper after my first full day of camp, they served me milk.

I have hated milk since I was a baby, and my mother used to add chocolate or sugar and vanilla just to get me to drink a whole glass at supper. But I gagged at the thought of drinking a carton of plain milk.

Chocolate please? None here, they said.

What about water?

Nope. Milk it is or nothing.

So I began to cry. And what these kind people had no idea about was that when I started, there was just no way to stop it, as the Broadway song goes. So I cried and cried. And cried some more.

The next day, the camp assigned me my own counselor, a cute young college kid who took me sailing and tried to talk me out of my misery. (Many years later, I sit in front of his sister at church. All Eastern North Carolina roads lead to other Eastern North Carolina roads, but I digress.)

But even on a bright day with the wind in my face, there was nothing he could do. By afternoon, they let me call my mother, just to speak, but I pleaded for her, screaming, to come and get me.

The Great Escape (Almost)
On the third day she finally relented, and I waited on the steps of my cabin, my trunk packed, until her station wagon pulled up, my sister riding shotgun.

And this is where the legend really begins.

We walked around camp, and I showed her everything I’d done in the past three days. I held on to her, afraid she would sneak away from me, until I heard the words: Ok, go in the cabin and get your trunk.

Joy! Relief! I was going home! Forged by this news and super human strength, I dragged the trunk out onto the sandy soil, only to see my mother’s station wagon heading toward the camp gates in the flurry of dust. I ran behind her, sobbing, STOP! STOP!!! And just before she reached the arched entryway, her brake lights flickered.

I can’t imagine what went through her mind as she set her foot on the brakes, or the conversation in the car, or when she saw me run into the cabin. Or in my sister’s, as she witnessed the three-point turnaround to flee — though I would learn later that she begged to take my place. (Here with me a few days ago, she still can’t believe our mother made the decision to leave me.)

What My Mother Knew
I don’t want to cast my mother as cruel here. She was not. I think she was trying to break me of my dependence on her, trying to make me stronger, as she had tried so many times in my short, almost 10-year-old life.

She drove me home that day saying I’d be grounded for the full two weeks I would have spent at camp, and I was ecstatic! I never returned to camp until I took my own second grader all the way across the state, and I cried the entire way home.

Camp, Again
I’ve thought about my camp story a lot in the past few weeks, as I have begun a new kind of camp, one where there is no going home, no matter how much I wish my mother could rescue me. This time, she leaves me standing in the middle of that swirling cloud of dust and sand and her taillights never flicker.

And I’m the one who turns around and heads into the cabin and opens the trunk to see what she has hidden there for me.

Just after Mother’s Day I was diagnosed with breast cancer. In the weeks since, I’ve heard it called a journey, but it feels more like a kidnapping, so I’ll stick with that. I know it sounds harsh, but that’s how it feels to me. A journey to me is something you choose, like a pilgrimage or a river cruise and a trip to the Grand Canyon, something vast and inspiring, and one you hope will change you. Not that this kidnapping won’t change me — it already has — and though it’s come with lots of colorful brochures, it still feels a bit like I’m stuck on the top bunk in a place I really, really don’t want to be.

But in these weeks, I’ve found that my cabin is full of amazing women who didn’t want to be there, either. But they navigated the murky waters from that top bunk where newbies like me land, to the door where they have welcomed me, heavy-laden trunk and all.

Chemo Camp Begins
So Chemo Camp has begun, and for the next few months I’m stuck here as the Red Devil, as they all it, seeps into my core and does its work, trying to kill what’s in me without actually killing me. So far, my days have been spent meeting some beautiful faces—almost all of them women—in my church, in my neighborhood, on my care team in the cancer center—and this time, my camp days seem almost bearable. I’ll tell you about them in later posts, as this kidnapping drama continues.

I realize I’m mixing my metaphors here. Camp and kidnapping are not at all the same thing—for most people. But I’m finding out lately that I am not most people, at least in the kind of cancer I have (two kinds — Triple Negative and invasive ductal, in the same breast. (UPDATE: 3! Her2neu) Typical me, that.

But I promise not to be unique in the way I navigate it. When I first began sharing with friends, I wrote that there was no way through it except through it. A few weeks later, a friend sent me a book of daily meditations, and there it was in Psalm 21: “‘Lift up your eyes it the hills’ and go forward. There is no other way.”

Lessons from Cabin #3
A friend, diagnosed last year and not yet 40—just as she was about to give birth to her fourth child—wrote to me that she wished people would treat each other all the time like they do when they hear the word cancer. (She is cancer free after a year, with a beautiful healthy year-old baby boy!)

She is right. It’s been like having a birthday, almost every day for the past two months. Cards come, presents, flowers from gardens, food and visits. I couldn’t have told you the last time a friend stopped by for a real visit, until this happened to me. It’s been wonderful to feel so loved, and it’s humbling. To know that so many are thinking of me and praying for my healing is beyond measure. And I’m learning how to respond when I hear—and I will—that someone else around me has been kidnapped as well.

What’s in the Trunk?
So I thank my mother, both for taking me home that day, but instilling in me that some things you just have to get through. You have the tools, and you will help others as you use them. She has done a lot of that in her life, and knowing that her youngest child has to go through this might be the hardest for her yet.

But I am not alone. I have my family, my faith and my cabin mates. And I have my trunk. And I know my mother packed it well.

+++

Postscript: Penny Spence Found
Years after camp, I was on a book tour for my first book, Nags Headers, signing books in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, when a woman asked me to sign a book for a child whose last name was Spence. “I knew a Penny Spence from here years ago at camp,” I said. From way down the line I heard a voice: “I’m Penny Spence.” She didn’t remember me, but I did her. I have a picture of her by the door of our cabin. sbr

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We buried my mother’s ashes on a warm September afternoon.

Next to my father’s. In the town where I was born.

Their graves sit above the road—NC Highway 258 North—two giant’s steps from the house they lived in for more than 50 years.

A year ago now, my two siblings and I gathered under the tent with her eight grandchildren and sixteen great-grands, to put her in the ground with her beloved dog Ruby (please don’t tell). My father’s ashes had been waiting for eleven years for her to join him.

She took, as we all said, her own sweet time.

Gathering the Family
That day, surrounded by children ages one month to seventeen years—most of whom had never seen a funeral, much less a burial—it felt important to explain. There are churchgoers among them, though some were not.

When looking at the wooden box that contained her, a few wondered just how she had gotten in there, small as it was. The tiniest had no idea of anything that was going on, except that there was dirt and a hole and some large stone things that looked fun for climbing on. I suppose the girls, and maybe some of the boys, thought the flowers were pretty.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the priest said, reciting the ancient words from the Book of Common Prayer. He gathered some nearby dirt and marked the box with a cross, then quietly retreated. I wondered where Ruby was, her own ashes in a box with her name in gold plate. As she lay dying, my mother never understood what had happened to her Ruby, a somewhat annoying Cavalier King Charles who favored pooping on the carpet in her old age to relieving herself outside.

The funeral home director, whom my mother loved since he buried my grandparents years before and then my father, waited nearby.

Where’s Ruby?
“She’s right here,” the funeral home guy said. “Would you like to do this now?”

Usually, they wait until the family has retreated to the house for the casseroles and the drinks and the lemon squares made by friends to bury the dead. But we had no home there anymore, no lemon squares to savor.

“Yes. Please.”

So this dear man drew Ruby’s ashes out of his SUV, took off his suit coat, tossed his tie over his shoulder and created a learning moment for all these grands and great-grands gathered to celebrate their “B”.

First, though, he brought out a sheet.

He laid it on the ground, then knelt by the hole that would contain my mother’s crypt.

“I want to preserve my suit,” he said, distilling our tension.

This was the same man who eleven years before had driven more than an hour in torrential rains in the middle of the night to retrieve my father’s body. That night, we wondered if he would show up in sweats and a t-shirt, but he walked into the room, his suit crisp as a summer Sunday at church.

So he picked up the crypt, and placing it in the hole, reverently placed my mother’s urn—a beautifully and locally rendered wooden box—inside it, the dirt cross sprinkled by the priest still intact. He tucked Ruby’s box in the crypt, too, the old dog nudged right up against my mother, forever.

Passing the Shovel
A shovel stood nearby, ready for burial “the Anglican way”, the funeral director said. He took the first scoop of dirt and shoveled it into the hole. Then he turned.

“Who’s next?” (Maybe he said it this way, maybe not.)

This, also, was unexpected. I’d never been a participant in a burial… only an observer. At my father’s commendation, we left before they did the honors. But somehow this seemed right for “B”. She had always wanted all of us to be there. All around her. No matter the occasion.

It’s here that I have to refer to the photographs. In my memory, I don’t know who actually took the first shovel full of dirt, but in my photographs, it’s the oldest great-grandchild. He’s changed out of his suit into shorts and a t-shirt—he started college this fall—tears dripping. He loved my mother—both my parents—who were fixtures in his life.

We took our turns, one after the other, the younger ones asking questions. Did B fold herself up tiny, so tiny, to fit into the box? What about Ruby? Did she do the same?

My own grandson, then 6, stood by, and I could tell by his fidgets that he had questions, too,

“Would you like to ask a question?” I said.

He came over, leaned in over the hole.

Soul Talk
I wish I could say truthfully what his question was, but I can’t. Somehow, though, I started talking about how the body is the vessel of the soul.

“It’s what make you you,” I said, unsure myself about souls, really.

“Nobody has your soul except you,” I offered. “When we die, our bodies just give out, but our soul goes to heaven. B is there, in heaven. With Pop B. And Ruby. Her body just gave out, and her soul didn’t need it anymore.”

She was 96 after all.

But how did she get in the box? they asked.

That’s when I mentioned how our body becomes ash when we die. God made us out of dirt, and we go back to it. Thank goodness the little ones didn’t feel the need to ask how.

On and on we shoveled. My sister. My brother. My nieces and nephews. (My mother never let a speck of dust lie in her house, so one niece, even though she shoveled, said B would not like this at all.) She is right.

Even the the two 2-year-olds took part in this ancient ritual, my grandson lifting the heavy shovel, pacifier never leaving his mouth. (The tiniest, a year old and change, was born the day B died,)

God was in the midst of her
God was in these very few but monumental minutes that it took to lay my mother to rest. I could feel it. What an honor to witness the closing of her life surrounded by the evidence of my parents’ love for each other. My siblings and me. Our children. And their children, a virtual clan gathered around her remains to say goodbye.

There will be no other day quite like it.

Sadness abated, surrounded by joy.

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