though she was working as a teacher in New Jersey while also parenting a young son and trying to hold herself steady as her marriage slowly imploded. We’d known each other as goofy, half-mature college girls, and now we were adults, with adult lives and adult concerns. That idea alone sometimes struck us as hilarious.
Suzanne, meanwhile, was the same free spirit she’d been when we roomed together at Princeton—flitting in and out of my life with varying predictability, continuing to measure the value of her days purely by whether they were pleasurable or not. We’d go long stretches without talking but then pick up the thread of our friendship with ease. As always, I called her Screwzy and she called me Miche. Our worlds continued to be as different as they’d been at school, when she was trekking off to eating-club parties and kicking her dirty laundry beneath the bed and I was color coding my Sociology 201 notes. Even then, Suzanne was like a sister whose life I could only track from afar, across the gulf of our inherent differences. She was maddening, charming, and always important to me. She’d ask my advice and then willfully ignore it. Would it be bad to date a philandering semi-famous pop star? Why, yes it would, but she’d do it anyway, because why not? Most galling to me was when she turned down an opportunity to go to an Ivy League business school after college, deciding that it would be too much work and therefore no fun. Instead, she got her MBA from a not-so-stressful program at a state school, which I viewed as kind of a lazy move.
Suzanne’s choices sometimes seemed like an affront to my way of doing things, a vote in favor of easing up and striving less. I can say now that I judged her unfairly for them. At the time, though, I just thought I was right.
Not long after I’d started dating Barack, I called Suzanne to gush about my feelings for him. She’d been thrilled to hear me so happy—happiness being her currency. She also had news of her own: She was ditching her job as a computer specialist at the Federal Reserve and going traveling—not for weeks, but for months. Suzanne and her mom were soon to head off on some round-the-world-style adventure. Because why not?
I could never guess whether Suzanne knew unconsciously that something strange was happening in the cells of her body, that a silent hijacking was already under way. What I did know was that during the fall of 1989, while I wore patent leather pumps and sat through long, dull conference-room meetings at Sidley, Suzanne and her mother were trying not to spill curry on their sundresses in Cambodia and dancing at dawn on the grand walkways of the Taj Mahal. As I balanced my checkbook, picked up my dry cleaning, and watched the leaves wither and drop from the trees along Euclid Avenue, Suzanne was careening through hot, humid Bangkok in a tuk-tuk, hooting—as I imagined it—with joy. I don’t, in fact, know what any of her travels looked like or where she actually went, because she wasn’t one to send postcards or keep in touch. She was too busy living, stuffing herself full of what the world had to give.
By the time she got home to Maryland and found a moment to reach out to me, the news was different—so clanging and dissonant from my image of her that I could hardly take it in.
“I have cancer,” Suzanne told me, her voice husky with emotion. “A lot of it.”
Her doctors had just diagnosed it, an aggressive form of lymphoma, already ravaging her organs. She described a plan for treatment, pegging some hope to what the results could be, but I was too overwhelmed to note the details. Before hanging up, she told me that in a cruel twist of fate her mother had fallen gravely ill as well.
I’m not sure that I ever believed that life was fair, but I had always thought that you could work your way out of just about any problem. Suzanne’s cancer was the first real challenge to that notion, a sabotage of my ideals. Because even if I didn’t have the specifics nailed down yet, I did have ideas about the future. I had that agenda I’d been assiduously maintaining since freshman year of college, stemming from the neat line of boxes I