Susan S. Barber
Our friendship was one of politics – we believed the same things, so we were friends. We met in an animal rights group, Concerned Arizonans for Animal Rights and Education. Susan had just become vegan when she joined the group, and she had an anger and intensity to her that was wonderful. I think we shared a sense of possibility together – that we were young and aware of the true state of the world and had endless amounts of energy available to shape the world in any image we wanted. Our eyes were wide open, but we weren’t depressed, we were optimistic. We would talk on the phone hours every night, but although we only lived about an hour apart we would rarely do things together except animal rights work. We were both too busy, she in college and me in my frantic senior year of high school, when my family was dissolving and I was so ready to step off into the abyss of college in a part of the country I’d never even been to. We had different lives. We talked about the things we had read, what we believed, what we wanted to do.
In college we emailed all the time, long emails all about
I don’t share my secrets (lagusta.com not withstanding). I like keeping them. But I shared everything with Susan, in quiet phone conversations from dorm rooms, in long letters written in boring lecture classes, in longer emails written in the middle of the night.
In my sophomore year I went to California for winter break and she met me there and we visited with our respective boyfriends in tow.
In my junior year she came to visit me in Rochester. It wasn’t a great visit. As is the case with many political friends, day-to-day interactions can be hard. We believed all the same things, but they came out in different ways in our everyday lives.
Slowly we were growing apart. Well, I’m not sure that’s quite right. What is the word you would use for a friendship that is just as well rooted as it ever was, but where both people silently acknowledge that they don’t need to talk as often as they used to? It wasn’t really growing apart, it was more like moving around. We still sent birthday cards and presents, and I always sent her a card on her vegan anniversary. Whenever I traveled, she was always on my postcard list. Once in a while she sent me a mix tape. when I
We hadn’t been in touch for a while.
Last August we emailed a bit about our lives, and it all sounds very rushed, from both sides, the kind of: "I’m fine how are you very busy here’s the list of things I’m doing" conversation that characterizes too many of my emails.
I didn’t send her a card for her vegan anniversary card this year. She didn’t send me a birthday card. But I didn’t mind. She was in law school. But I often thought of her, happy to know she existed.
* * * .
The day after my 25th birthday, Susan was murdered by her boyfriend in her Tucson home. Or maybe not murdered. Maybe it was an accident. She died of head trauma. He might have just pushed her too hard. She was so small, so small. 4’ 10". The floors in her house were concrete. No resistance. Her boyfriend fled in her car and was found a few days ago at his parents' house.
How hard her life was. Susan’s father was Caucasian and her mother was Korean. She was constantly fighting with her father about her veganism and politics in general. She always seemed to be on the cusp of something, open to everything and trying everything, and, because of that, never really focusing on just one thing, until recently when she decided to go to law school and become an environmental lawyer.
She was loud about the things she cared about, and people don’t expect a 4’ 10" half-Korean girl to be loud about anything. She didn’t shave, which in Arizona takes a mindblowing amount of courage. Arizona people are constantly swimming, live in shorts and tank tops year round. Not to shave your legs and your armpits is just social death. There is no hairy women subculture to speak of, really, except the hippie college kids in Tempe.
Susan was loud and hard and fought everything, all the time. She worked mostly office jobs, just to make enough to keep on living and going to school. Vegan feminist
I wonder what she would say if she saw all I am writing and thinking. Maybe she would say – you’ve got it so wrong. It wasn’t even that that hurt, it was other things, or it didn’t even hurt. I don’t know. Whatever it was, Susan was almost always in bad relationships. Never abusive relationships, but always with dudes that you knew weren’t as awesome as she was. But I wasn’t about to say anything, especially with me being so far away and not wanting to seem to lecture.
I know it’s a big cliché to feel guilty when a friend dies that you didn’t tell her you loved her and all that, but it’s probably not a big surprise that I do feel guilty. I feel like I could have talked her out of being with this guy that we all know now was quietly horrible. Maybe he didn’t do anything to her before that day, no one in her family seems to think he did, but when I saw his picture in the papers I knew I should have talked her out of it. If I had seen the picture before I know I would have, but I didn’t. He just looks like your average frat boy, and fuck you if you don’t like me using that term. I can tell that he was an asshole, and I know that I would have known it before, and would have said something.
They took 4 journals from her home, and all I can think about is what they might have said. I wonder if she thought I let her down, if she felt she was in over her head with this guy, if she needed someone far enough away to have some perspective to talk to about it. I hope she didn’t think I was ignoring her. I wonder what her last thought was, right before her head hit the floor. I wonder what it’s like to die. I’m sure she was angry. I don’t think she thought she was in over her head or scared, I bet she was just angry and opened her mouth like all us political girls always feel we need to, and he was angry, and she was so small and the floor so hard.
Why don’t I feel more angry at him? I don’t pity him or feel any compassion for him, and I guess I’m a little proud that I don’t want to see him put to death or anything. I’ve always wondered if my views on the death penalty would change if someone I loved died. Well, I know, and I guess that’s something good. I really do feel that i don’t want to add any more death to the world by killing him. I just feel a numb spot when I think about him. I feel he’s scared. All I can think
But when I’m not thinking about that, I’m wondering how someone so feminist could have such a thing happen to her. That’s why I think it was an accident – she would never have let anyone hit her. But I don’t know. I don’t know at all the reality of her personal life. And that’s the thing about domestic violence – it can happen to anyone, and it’s ridiculous for me to think that It couldn’t happen to her. I just don't know.
I don’t feel I feel as sad as I should. I guess I’m still numb, but maybe suddenly I’ve learned what zen is all about – just being. It sounds so dumb. But since I heard about all this, I have been so able to just do whatever I’m doing – just cut a carrot. And all I do is focus on the carrot. It’s amazing. Mindblowing. I’ve never been able to cut the carrot without thinking of making the dessert after I’m done with the carrot soup, and the onions burning on the other burner, and that Bush’s plan for Iraq is 3,400 bombs in 48 hours. Susan is dead, brutally murdered, but I am cutting the carrot and the carrot is all that is in front of me. I think maybe thinking about Susan has just opened me up to life in a different way
There is a sadness named Susan sitting at the back of my throat and deep in my heart, but most of the time it’s quiet, and my life right now is very deliberate, very very quiet and focused and just softly sad. I don’t know if it’s healthy, or cruel, or if I’m over her death, or if I haven’t yet even begun to deal with it, but I am so thankful for this gift it’s given me.
March 2003
Update
Well, it's been almost a year. As is the thing that you do with grief, I've had all kinds of emotions about her and the situation, anger and hopelessness and helpnessness and all that. A little while ago things got worse, because more facts came out about the whole thing.
Her murderer was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He admitted to second degree murder. Somehow the fact that he hadn't planned for weeks to kill her makes it better in the eyes of the court.
He's just a hothead, so that's fine I guess. In 16 years he'll be 41. A friend of hers told me that in court he said they had faught about a trip to Mardi Gras that Susan didn't want to go on with him. Things escalated, and he ended up hitting her, first with his fists, then with a hammer.
"I want a hammer, a hammer, a hammer, to hammer dem down...."
That Bob Marley song was, previous to this, my only experience with the word "hammer" running through my head, but now it runs through it quite frequently in quite a different context.
Before this, I imagined all kinds of horrible things. But on better days, I could imagine better things -- that she fell, he got scared, and left.
She didn't fall, he didn't get scared.
A fight, a hammer, 16 years.
After, he disappeared for 5 days. Everyone assumed he was agonozing about what had happened and/or hiding out. But Susan's friend told me that he said in court he went to Mardi Gras and "partied." He actually used that word, that made-up verb. Then he went to his parents' house in some other state, where he was found.
Susan's body wasn't found for 4 or 5 days.
A fight, a hammer, a party, a bloated and battered body, 16 years.
I guess that's all there is to say. I guess I want these facts to be up online so that if anyone does a search for "Susan Barber" on Google, maybe this will come up and people will know that there was a Susan Barber,
and this is what happened to her. I want these facts to be everywhere, because it's so horrific i can't not talk about it.
january 2004
Here is a poem Susan wrote a long time ago, when she was just getting into animal rights.
A Pig's Silent Plea
From somewhere dark and cold
I hear my heart beating
I feel something out there
That chain on my neck
But I don't feel it.
I don't feel.
From the dark and damp recesses of my mind
I hear someone calling to me
It's me.
But I don't answer.
I have nothing to say.
I can only scream and rail
Alone
Inside my head I scream!
I beg now
Tears running into my mouth
Snot dripping down my face
I pound the walls with my bleeding hooves
I throw myself into despair and my body racks with hopeless sobs
I kick and cry and plead
I plead
for Mercy.
Inside my head.
Outside my head is a strange scary place
This cold, unyielding prison camp where my body lies immobilized in
the grip of
dominion.
The lights--
The repulsive vomitous smell of my own urine and feces
The ammonia--
But I don't see
I don't smell
I don't have senses
I'm just an empty vessel
I'm just some Thing
I'm just some food on someone's plate.
That's what They say.
I live in a small musty room
Inside my head.
Where I lay in a ball
curled up
and piteously mewing like the helpless tortured being I am.
I want my mommy
Inside my head.
I don't want to be in my body
They do things to my body
Things that hurt
They hurt my body
I don't want to know about that
I don't want to feel that
I don't want to acknowledge that other reality
I pace up and down my room now, waiting...
hoping...
needing...
wanting...
pleading...
for the Knife to stop the pain so I can float away.
"Someday I'll float away"
I whisper to myself over and over
A pathetic lie I weave to wrap myself in--
but it's still cold.