Susan Sanders

July 28, 2003

I was struck by how accurately the editors of the Millwheel captured Susie Sanders way back in 1961, enumerating attributes that would be true throughout her 59 years. Her big brown eyes, for example, that the editors said express the sweetest kind of friendship. My 38 years of experience with those eyes was that they peered deeply into your soul, even as they slowly blinked while Susan gobbled up everything about you. Or the comment by the editors: Susie goes out of her way to lend a helpful hand. Putting others before herself, yet somehow steering them to do the best thing for themselves, was an almost magical quality upon which her friends and family depended.

The editors also noted that Susie was nifty with a needle. She even won the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award in 1961. That, too, would be a signpost to her future career choices. She entered Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University) as a Home Economics major. While this major encouraged Susan’s creative side she was, after all, a member of the MHS Fashion Design Club it also prepared her to be not only the backbone of our family, but of an increasingly needy society as a valued teacher of young children.

The Millwheel entry also noted that Susie was a transfer student. In fact she spent only her senior year at Millburn High. Yet it was during that year that Susan gave her life to Jesus Christ, an act of commitment that would shape her worldview and a lifetime of choices.
I met Susan she was still Susie in those days at the first meeting of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship at Carnegie Tech in the Fall of 1962. She was a sophomore and I was an entering grad student in physics from Georgia Tech. She wore an appropriately short skirt just above her knees pink tennis shoes and braces, and I had trouble keeping my eyes off her. Many years later she told me that on that very night the Lord told me I would marry you someday. But it took three years of dating and courtship with all the ups and downs associated with two immature adults before I figured out the same thing.

We married in 1965, I finished my PhD, and we promptly moved to New Jersey, not that far from Millburn High! I took a job at Bell Labs, and she began teaching high school home economics. These teaching jobs were prophetic of her ultimate calling at the end of her life. She retired in 1970 to have our first son, then two more in the next four years. Both of the older boys had challenges, one with ADHD and the other with dyslexia. After much research we enrolled them in the New York Institute for Child Development in midtown Manhattan. Every Friday Susan would take the two of them for therapy, via train and PATH tubes. The management of the Institute was so impressed with Susan that they volunteered her to appear with the director on WOR TV. The tape of that broadcast shows Susan, with her quiet voice and big brown eyes, speaking so articulately that she slowly takes over the whole program as she explains how the therapy has changed the lives of her two boys.
Fast forward to the nineties, where by now we had moved to Texas and become empty nesters with the three boys attending various colleges. At this point Susan was convinced that her calling was to become a teacher of dyslexics as they struggle to learn to read. She took courses in multi sensory integration and became a certified language therapist. She started her own practice and touched the lives of a number of boys and girls who through her instruction overcame their handicap and became readers.

A survivor of breast cancer in the nineties, Susan was diagnosed in 2000 with ovarian cancer. She began a heroic battle with the disease over the next three years of surgery and multiple chemotherapies. In all these trials she never complained but rather, encouraged others. People who visited to comfort her in her illness walked away shaking their heads. I came to encourage her, but we ended up talking about me, they would say. That helping hand that the editors of the Millwheel identified so long ago was still in operation to the very end of her life. And to everyone who asked her how she felt about being burdened with such a terrible disease, she always simply answered with a verse from Psalm 139: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” This was a particularly poignant quote when we realized that Susan was born with the BRCA1 gene mutation that almost guaranteed she would be afflicted with ovarian cancer someday.

Susan’s funeral on August 1, 2003, was a testimony to God’s covenant faithfulness to her, to her children, and to her children’s children throughout all generations because of the redemptive work of Christ. The text chosen by her pastor was her favorite verse: All things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28). In all her afflictions she never doubted the truth of that verse, nor do we as we look forward to seeing her again in glory.

~ John Dishman, Susan’s husband of 38 years