“If we have the intention to live with love and compassion, we can handle anything. We are amazing beings, we humans. We can also really screw up badly, but if we have the intention to live with love and compassion, it changes what we do and how we are.”
~ Susan J. Tweit
In her memoir, Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying, Susan J. Tweit, an award-winning writer and plant ecologist, recounts her journey accompanying her husband toward the end of his life, following a diagnosis with brain cancer. We explore what it was like for her to navigate those devastatingly bittersweet last two years of his life, which included a 4,000-mile honeymoon road trip they’d long put off and the death of Susan’s mom to Alzheimer’s. But as Susan shares her experiences of grief and death with us, what shines through is not so much the challenges and pain of her journey — though she is candid about both, especially having been a caregiver — but her insistence on fully living during those years. She and her husband Richard were committed to filling their days with love, compassion, beauty, wonder and gratitude for each other. As she speaks to life after Richard, Susan reflects on how she still carries him with her, what it’s been like to reclaim her independence and what we can all learn from facing death with less fear.
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About Susan J. Tweit:
An award-winning writer and plant ecologist, Susan J. Tweit began her career in Wyoming, studying grizzly bear habitat—collecting and dissecting large piles of bear poop—coring trees to map historic wildfires, and researching big sagebrush. Tweit began writing after realizing that she loved writing the stories behind the data as much as collecting the data. Her beat is interpreting the community of the land, and what those interwoven lives have to teach we humans. Tweit has written thirteen non-fiction books, including the new memoir, Bless the Birds, winner of the Sarton Award, along with hundreds of magazine articles, columns, and essays. Her “WildLives” nature commentaries were a popular weekly feature on public radio for over a decade. She admits to being a plant nerd focused on the intriguing lives and interrelationships of our indigenous flora, and a consummate "reader" of landscapes. Her passion is re-storying this earth, and we who share the planet. When Tweit is not writing, she's most often outside eradicating invasive weeds—restoring nature, plant by plant. As a Quaker, she walks her talk, and she searches for stories in the Rocky Mountain region, wherever big sagebrush perfumes the air.
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