I spoke with Susan’s therapist this morning, I called to let her know that Susan had died, and she called me back.

First, she wanted to thank me for helping to care for Susan; then, she wanted to let me know that Susan was aware of her problems relating to people and was working on them when she fell ill.

I much appreciated that phone call.

Susan is gone now, and my wish for her is to rest in peace, and perhaps get another shot at an easier life.

I think after this post, I’ll leave Susan alone for a while, and let both of us move forward into whatever realm we occupy.

What I am thinking is this: I have to say that Susan was never really just my friend. Then I can let it go.

Much of the praise I’m receiving seems false and undeserving to me, I did help Susan to die well, but I can’t say I was a real friend to her.

I wish I had known how to be a good friend to her.

She was much closer to Jon Katz, the Best-Selling Author, she never quite had the time or opportunity – or perhaps the desire –  to know the real me. I never got to know the real her.

Maria learned that this was also true of her friendship with Susan. We had the same painful and confusing experience.

I know Susan was working on this entrenched tendency to be what other people wanted her to be – or what she thought they wanted her to be – and would have gotten there had she lived longer.

She had a great and ready smile; that was the face she wanted people to see.

She had an excellent therapist. They were, I think, working it out.

Susan had two friendships that were real that I knew of.

Donna and Debbie, both of them with her in this photo, taken at Bedlam Farm when they first became friends. She loved many of the people she worked with at Bennington Hospital, and I don’t mean to suggest those relationships were not real.

But she never spoke of them in the way she spoke of Donna and Debbie. She never spoke of them at all.

Susan was the first person to admit she kept everyone at a distance, and other than Donna, sometimes, she was entirely honest with no one. Those were her words.

Donna had no idea how sick Susan was. She also said the need to please other people was her biggest psychological problem. She said she was tough and would handle trouble by herself.

Maria and I fell in love with Susan’s story at first – how could we not? A middle-aged person unhappy with her life, upending it to move to the country, our town,  face the truth about herself, get healthy, and give rebirth to her life.

All through the first winter, she came up to Cambridge almost every weekend. She took my writing class, had breakfast with her friend Rachel at the Round House Cafe, and sat at the dining room table with us to plan her new life.

We had a lot of warm evenings doing that with Susan. I cooked, we all talked through dinner and beyond.

Maria began driving Susan around, looking at houses with her. When Susan moved, Maria helped her unpack. We wondered why she didn’t help. We know why now – she could barely walk, even then.

She just hid it.

That was my story and Maria’s story; we welcomed her with enthusiasm and love in our world and our lives. This is our story too, and we will try to support anyone who wants to begin anew.

For the first few months after her move, we saw Susan or spoke with her or fed her several times a week.

I always said the problem with moving to change my life was that I came along with the furniture.

Susan had almost no sense of self; there was a chameleon-like quality in her that caused her to be whatever anyone needed her to be. She had a genius for pleasing people and agreeing with them. But it was hard for her to nurture others, to give back, she usually ran from that.

This quality began to trouble me. Her interest in Maria and me seemed excessive and worsened as time went on. We realized it was getting unhealthy. I suggested some more space and urged her to see a therapist.

I know I contributed to this, I enabled it. It always takes two. I loved her story.

She started a blog, she said, because she loved mine. She asked me if she could take my writing class, and I agreed.  We worked on her writing, but she was devastated by any criticism or questioning, no matter how gentle.

She had begun taking photographs, she said, because she liked the ones I took and posted on my blog. She borrowed many of my lenses.

Her pictures and blog went deeper than that; she was a creative person. But we all – Susan, me, and Maria – agreed she needed to separate from us and begin to build her own life in her own way.

Susan said she agreed with me and added that she wasn’t that interested in writing and photography after all, and she abruptly stopped blogging and stopped taking pictures. I never saw my lenses again.

I was sorry to see this, as she was a good writer and a good photographer. But I also noticed that her blog painted a very different picture of her life than the one she was living.

She painted the country as a paradise, superior in any way to Long Island. She claimed she walked on country roads at midnight with milk cows. She said the people were all nice and friendly.

And she got four or five speeding tickets in a month or two; she seemed sort of proud of it. We feared she would lose her license.

She could not be forthcoming and truthful about herself, perhaps because she didn’t know herself.

She knew she had to find passions that were hers; that was the point. She had to put her own life together in her own way.

She went into therapy, planned for stomach surgery to help her lose weight, and began what her real adventure in this new world was.

All of that was shattered by her failing liver, her obesity, her rapidly spreading cancer. She never got the chance to finish that journey.

In the end,  I was Jon Katz, the big-deal author to the end. Afterward.

She was beginning to put together this new world when she got sick.  That is a heartbreaker.

When I tried to talk to her about our troubles, she just said: “I’m tough, I’ve been through this before, I’m fine.” And I think she was okay, in a Susan sense.

She didn’t want to talk about it; she didn’t seem to miss Maria and me much or at all, she went on with her own life, her friends, her work.

I want to say I have enormous empathy for Susan. As I have written, I have been broken myself. Almost all of us are in one way. I can’t fault anyone for being unwell; the true heroes get help and work to get better. Susan was doing that.

And I know how hard that is. She had been brutally rejected often in her life – by her mother, by husbands, lovers, and, worse of all, by people she trusted as friends.

That’s where it all was when I got the phone call about Susan lying on her sofa, unable to walk, eat, get to the bathroom or bathe and dress. She had been in that state for as long as a week, perhaps longer. Her condition was horrifying.

She told no one, including Donna, how sick she was. But her notion of me worked to help her. When I insisted she go to the hospital, she did. I heard her telling the ambulance driver as they carted her to the ambulance, “that was Jon Katz standing in my living room.”

She said she didn’t even notice the ambulance people, or listen to what they were saying.

And then and there, I swore to myself that I would help take care of her, help her to die a peaceful and comfortable death. I promised myself she would not die alone.

I knew she was dying the second I saw her face. How could anybody refuse to help? Maria and I were the only ones there.

Susan did not have a strong sense of self; she believed she didn’t deserve love or support.  She didn’t have the strength to resist mirroring other people.

I believe she was prepared to die on that couch that Sunday, and she would have if someone hadn’t called us.

I don’t know if we could have ever put together a true friendship.

In the hospital, she still seemed mesmerized by me as a celebrity, introducing me to everyone as her friend, the famous author. The nurses and doctors had all heard about the farm and me.

I wanted and need to write this because the truth is my most precious asset, and I can’t leave this story behind without being truthful.

I am so sorry Susan didn’t get to finish the work she started, there was a beautiful, smart,  loving, and compassionate human being in there, under all of that pain and suffering. Her love was resilient and never faded.

She was always loving someone.

I learned before, but learned again, that we never really know what is happening deep in the lives of other people. I don’t know if anyone got to know the real Susan, or even if that was possible.

When I look at this photo of Donna, Susan, and Debbie, I think that is the real Susan in there, in the middle of that picture. Full of happiness and promise.

Excited by the donkeys and the dogs and the people she met on the farm, so happy to be making new friends, so excited about the new life she was contemplating.

This feels like a closing to me, thanks for following me on this exploration of friendship,  love, and sorrow.

Yes, it was good to help Susan out, but that is only part of the story. I’m ready to move on.

I would have loved to have been Susan’s friend.

P.S. My final act of friendship for Susan is to help her dog Sally get out to Portland, Oregon, to her new permanent home. Donna Nicosia, Susan’s friend, and the person organizing Sally’s rescue is collecting donations on her Paypal page or by mail: She is [email protected].

We are only a few hundred dollars away.