April 12, 1997

I knew it was inevitable, but Susan's death from cancer still took me by surprise. I wasn't ready to give up the hope of meeting her for the first time. She had become an integral part of my life, gently giving me a global education during our year of friendship. She listened with a practiced ear to my trials and tribulations, my joys and dreams, responding with just the right mixture of empathy and logic. Susan had a knack for making me feel valued, respected, and loved.

All of this was accomplished primarily through the most untechnological of ways: with letters. Not e-mails, mind you. Letters: little blue envelopes with red stripes and fancy Swedish stamps on them; typewritten missives filled with metaphors and imagery and descriptions of places and things I will be lucky to ever see. Susan hated computers. She trusted her manual typewriter and used it to write volumes to her friends all over the world. I don't think any e-mail has ever created the fervor in my heart that Susan's letters did when they arrived to surprise and delight me.

I wish I could say that I was as good a letter writer as she, but poor Susan rarely received a "real" letter from Seattle. She had to content herself with lengthy, rambling e-mails from me, sporadically written at odd hours of the night. I did try my hardest not to fall into the vernacular. I paid attention to my grammar and structure, aware that I was writing to an accomplished English teacher. Still, I could never match her prose.

Ironically, I received the e-mail about Susan's death only an hour after reading a brief announcement in the newspaper of the death of the author of "84 Charing Cross Road." I have a little copy of this book, sent to me almost a year ago by Susan. She wanted me to read it because Susan's husband Boris and I were involved in an e-mail exchange that had progressed from polite, impersonal queries about America and Sweden to passionate opinion statements on everything from art to socialism. Boris and I had met electronically in a computer class on the Internet a few months previously, and Susan saw a parallelism between our relationship and that of the man and woman in the book.

Susan delighted in the fact that Boris was actually writing letters, albeit e-mails, and she gave me far more credit than I deserved for this accomplishment. Our relationship became a platonic triangle, and the e-mails and letters expanded into packages and phone calls.

This summer I will spend time with Boris in Stockholm, and we will talk about life and culture and Susan. The three seem inextricable to me. I will miss my letters from Susan, and I will miss meeting the wonderful woman who so enriched my life with her graciousness.