Further Notes on the Visible Distance in Memory of Suzanne Davis

The first night Heather and I spent together, she slept in her upstairs room in the group house she lived in while I slept downstairs on the living room sofa. It was winter. We weren’t quite a couple yet, but I knew something was there. So, even though she was upstairs sleeping and I was downstairs, it already felt as if we were together. In the morning, I walked her to the bus stop on 16th street and waited with her for the city bus downtown, where she would catch another bus taking her to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a party celebrating her mother’s 50th birthday. Although Heather had talked about her mother before, I’m pretty sure that was when I found out her name was Suzanne.

Later that year, in the spring, Heather and I rented a car and drove up to Pennsylvania for a wedding and to visit with her family. The Davises were living at an old farmhouse by a two-lane highway back then. There was a dilapidated swimming pool covered with an orange tarp—or maybe it was some kind of faded green. From what I understood, it hadn’t been used in a long time, but there was a long front porch, and I immediately thought that if I had grown up there I would have spent a lot of time on that porch, watching the traffic go by during the day, and listening to the crickets and owls or whatever creatures might have been spending their nights sleepless like me.

Walking into the house with Heather, we headed straight for the kitchen. Suzanne was sitting at an oval, wooden table, with children coming in and out. Heather’s brother Brent was eight; her brother Tim, six. Her six foot five brother Bryan was 25, I think. After that I lost track of the ages. Also in the house were sisters Kara, and Sarah, and Kara’s infant son, Ethan. Not at the house were Heather’s brother Jeff, and sister Jenni, but from what I saw at the farmhouse was evidence that Heather did, indeed, come from a big family. My own mother had died two years earlier—Heather never got to meet her—but with Suzanne, I once again had a mother in my life.

She was a good, kind person and all that, of course, which wasn’t surprising. But what was interesting was that despite her not being one to seek any kind of spotlight, her presence in any room was deeply felt. You might not have been paying attention to her the entire time you were a room with her, but as soon as she spoke or just moved, that’s where everyone’s attention would be—as if you all you were doing and your great purpose for the moment was to wait for what Suzanne would say or do next.

Suzanne was also someone you felt safe with. I remember one time, riding in the family van with Heather, and her brothers Brent and Tim (when they were still just kids), we somehow got into a discussion of who loved whom.

“Do you love Heather?” Brent asked Suzanne.

“Of course,” she answered.

“Do you love Tim?”

“Yes.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Do love Jose?”

“Yes, Jose too.”

At that point, some car ran a stop sign in front of us, but Suzanne managed to brake and avoid hitting the reckless driver.

“Did you see that?” Brent said. “We almost got killed while we were busy lovin’ each other!”

“Yes, but we’re fine,” Suzanne said. And we were and we felt safe. All of us.

In more recent times Suzanne, even though she was more on the conservative side and religious, would often express her utter dislike of Donald Trump. She wasn’t one to fall for all the bullshit a lot of other people did. I know, you’re not supposed to get political in times like this, but the political is the way forward. Our politics speak of the way we conduct ourselves and plan for the future and future generations. Indeed, there is no future without political efforts. Suzanne’s politics were, ultimately, about sharing (though that didn’t mean you could take the last slice of pie or whatever it was she was saving for herself in the fridge).

Unlike a lot of so-called Christians today, she was not as concerned about someone getting something they didn’t earn as she was about someone not getting what they needed. I’m pretty sure she also understood that there were a lot more people not getting what they needed than there were people who got things they didn’t work for. I know, some people might say I’m turning her into a radical socialist like me now that she’s gone. But the truth is that as she got older, she woke up more and more to the times.

This isn’t to say that she became something of a liberal craft-making hippie woman in these last years. It wasn’t that long ago that I remember her asking me, “Are you still writing those things?”—meaning was I still writing poetry. As she said “things” I could almost sense her catching an uncomfortable chill from the word she didn’t want to say.

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m still writing them. I’m writing a lot of them. Haven’t you ever read any poetry you liked?”

“Well, maybe a few that Gary wrote for me,” she said—Gary being her husband/Heather’s dad.

“Well, maybe give some others a try,” I said. Of course I knew that my own book, with its gritty poems about my drunken days, was the sort of poetry she wouldn’t like. But I was fine with that.

And I loved the way she avoided saying the word “poem” as if it were the smelliest shit in the universe. That, although she didn’t realize it at the time, was in itself poetic. And, although the thought and possibility probably never occurred to her, she leaves behind an almost immeasurable amount of poetry that lives on and on. Because poetry isn’t just words, it’s more like a state of grace, an interruption in the basic structure of subject and predicate that moves you into spaces you didn’t know existed. I will feel that poetry in my bones for a long time to come, just as those who’ve come after Heather and me—our daughter, our son—carry it off toward some gloaming light in the faintly visible distance.

-Jose Padua