From February 2012 through July 2013, Sue Williard visited my mother Jane once a week in her nursing home to bring her delicious food, often flowers, and always warm and sunny and engaging company. After each visit, Sue wrote up a “Jane Report” giving all the details of her visit, and we would send these reports around to all members of our extended family.

My mother was in her 21st and 22nd years of Parkinson’s disease during this time, confined to either bed or a wheelchair, and no longer able to be taken out of the nursing home to see or experience the wider world. Sue’s visits were always a breath of fresh air and a weekly liberation for my mother from her confinement and its boredom. Sue took real interest in my mother’s life, she liked my mother as a person, and she was always completely straightforward about my mother’s condition and limitations while staying focused on what made life still worth living – delicious interesting food, flowers in the garden, news from the family, lovely weather, things to laugh about, my mother’s memories (and sometimes hallucinations) and Sue’s own life and interests.

To say that Sue’s visits to my mother were a blessing for our entire family is a complete understatement. Most of us lived far away and were constantly concerned about how my mother was without being able to get more from the nursing home than dry monthly staff reports. Sue’s weekly reports were vividly and beautifully written, deeply humane, and full of honest detail about exactly how my mom was from week to week. This was an enormous relief to all of us. It brought the entire family into better communication and set the stage for a far more peaceful exit from life than could have ever happened otherwise. Sue went out of her way (across the country) to attend a large family event that let her meet all of us in person, and she stayed in warm and open communication with all family members despite the many rifts we still had between us.

By chance, Sue happened to visit my mother within a few hours after her death, before the body was whisked away. Sue sat with her, and shared those precious moments of passing with us that we would have completely missed otherwise. As the unifying force in a very split family, Sue was also the natural choice to lead the memorial service, which she did with wonderful grace and reassurance, giving our many voices room and encouragement to speak and to say goodbye in a meaningful way. This could have been a time of more suffering and strife, but instead it became one of completion and real honoring of a life fully lived. Sue’s ability to look life and death in the eye and hold compassionate space for an entire family is a great blessing, and her decision to pursue this path of work is a huge stroke of luck for those of us in need. Her work was a complete godsend, and we cannot thank her enough.