On July 31, our dear sister Susan Fetcho passed away peacefully to be with the Lord. Susan’s contribution to the work and ministry of New College Berkeley and Radix Magazine is inestimable. A beloved music and drama teacher at St. Episcopal School of Oakland, she was also a long time writer and poet who offered her many gifts generously for decades as an instructor, editor, and board member.
I am personally grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and converse with Susan this past year, albeit too briefly, and to have her company in recent NCB gatherings and events. Her words and presence have inspired us as we continue forth in a new season.
Following are tributes to Susan from a few of her many friends and colleagues.
Craig Wong, Executive Director, New College Berkeley
In the first hours of the summer of ‘24, Susan Fetcho exquisitely curated a belated memorial for her beloved husband, David. He had died in 2021, when Covid made collective rituals impossible, but the delay had not diminished the deep affection which drew so many from near and far to celebrate his life in the golden light of a Berkeley evening. It was the kind of communal happening which the remarkable duo of Susan and David had fostered countless times over the years, overflowing with poetry, song, love and laughter.
For those of us who were there, the celebration seemed to bridge the divide between absence and presence, between this world and the next. It was as if David were still with us; as if it were yet another memorable Susan and David production, filling our hearts and feeding our souls the way they always did.
When Susan, just six weeks later, departed this life, my own grief was tempered by the ongoing sense of continuity and communion which we had experienced at David’s memorial. One of the songs we sang that night was “Farthest Field,” inspired by a gathering of friends who had climbed a hill to sing together as the sun went down. The songwriter saw in that moment a vision of loving community which cannot be broken:
I know one day, I’ll leave my home
Here in the valley and climb up to that field so fair;
And when I’m called, and counted in
The final tally I know that I will see you there.
Walk with me and we will see the mystery revealed,
When one day we wend our way up to the farthest field.
Susan and David loved to take the harmony parts of “Farthest Field.” We often sang it when we visited one another. Now that they are both on “the other side,” their harmonizing voices remain in my heart, a foretaste of the glory to come. As it turns out, that Solstice requiem for David, 3 years after his death and 6 weeks before Susan’s, proved to be a celebration of both their precious lives within the unbroken circle of “the mystery revealed.”
When I spoke at that memorial, I quoted Thomas Merton, who said that death is not something that just happens to us as passive recipients. It is, rather, something we do, an act of self-offering, what Merton called “the last free perfect act of love which is at once surrender and acceptance.” Then I added this:
When we depart this sweet old world, we perform the immense labor of letting everything go, surrendering ourselves completely to the ultimate reality of which we remain an inseparable—and beloved—part.
That reality has many names. One of the best comes from Jane Kenyon, another poetic soul who left us too soon. She said that the divine wholeness at the end of our journey will prove to be “mercy clothed in light.”
Farewell, Susan, until we sing together again in glory.
The Rev. Jim Friedrich, Bainbridge Island, Washington
One of the last things Susan Fetcho said to me was, “God is near. I feel God’s presence, even so.” “Even so,” I sadly understood, meaning “as I die.” Always a person who blessed others, that evening Susan was looking forward to giving her treasures away to particular people. On a very ordinary chandelier in my house, I have a wooden Balinese flying frog from her, which soars in wild greenness.
Susan was my friend and colleague for nearly 50 years. Together we created dozens of Advent and Lenten retreats for New College Berkeley, and we were together in times of celebration and of sickness. I remember her showing up at my house when I had pneumonia, bringing me hand-squeezed orange juice to address what ailed me. Decades later after David had died so suddenly during the pandemic, she and I took many walks with my Golden Retriever Rosy, who cultivates health almost as effectively as orange juice does.
Susan was a performer, teacher, choreographer and administrator of dance and theatre for nearly fifty years. Her training was in dance/choreography, theatre, mime, Laban Movement Analysis, and video production. She joyfully taught children for many years while serving on the Performing Arts faculty at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland, California, and she lent her great talents and warmth to the community of New College Berkeley (an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union), where she and David served for many years as Artists-in-Residence and Visiting Professors of Worship and the Arts. Susan also served on the board of Radix Magazine for several decades, bringing strategic, practical, and artistic vision to that work. With David, Susan participated in creative worship design for many institutions in the United States and elsewhere. They performed and taught in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and on tour to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and Bali, Indonesia. As founders and creative directors of foundlight.tv, they brought their wealth of experience as performance directors to the creation of compelling video content. The Fetchos cultivated a broad community of friends and artists, neighbors and gourmands. They filled the world with music and light.
Susan had many amazing qualities, but the one that stands out for me as a rare gift is her wisdom. I was grateful for it in faculty and board meetings when conflicts surfaced, and Susan listened and spoke with a calming presence. I experienced it in times of my own suffering and in her struggles with health and grief. Better than my words about Susan, are her own words. In October 2007 she published a piece in the East Bay Times titled “Healing Words,” written when she had recently completed treatments for breast cancer and was given a “clean slate.”
Receive Susan’s words as a benediction, a treasure she gives to all of you who read this:
My brother is a professional harmonica player. From him I’ve learned that the instrument is animated by two actions: blowing and sucking. Sounds rude, but it’s true. Inhale and exhale. Ebb and flow. Yin and yang. Life’s all about balance. When cancer shows up, you realize that yours has become—as in the film Koyaanisqatsi—a life out of balance, a microcosm of our planet’s crisis….
[Later, when told the cancer was gone…]
You resolve to excise the phrase “sometime we should . . . ” from your vocabulary. You pray for deliverance from the demon of multi-tasking, discipling yourself to your Zen-master dogs and your kindergarten students who practice presence in the now. You keep gratitude lists: artichokes, Bebop, bees, David, family, friends, pesto, Tango, zydeco. You become an omnivore, a slow-food flexitarian, each colorful fruit and vegetable, grain and legume bringing unique cancer-blocking phytochemicals to the healing potluck. You sing your heart out, your attention so completely absorbed that time disappears. Ellington and Elvis. Balkan women’s music and sacred harp. You sail past Angel Island into the sunset and back to Berkeley under a sky full of stars, your gaze rising to meet the curved embrace of their flickering benediction. You give thanks for the ecology of kindness that has sustained you, and hope that the pursuit of balance, of work and rest, passion and play, mission and creativity might just save your life. You remember to breathe. Out and in. In and out.
—Susan English Fetcho
Susan S. Phillips, former Executive Director of New College Berkeley. She happily and creatively collaborated for decades with Susan Fetcho at New College Berkeley and at Radix Magazine (where both have been trustees).
I will miss Susan, who has died far too soon. My first memory of her was seeing her dance during a service at First Pres decades ago. I wondered who this woman was, engaged in liturgical dancing—something completely new to me at the time. She was ahead of her time in her creative passions. Over the years, I got to know Susan in several contexts: as a fellow trustee of Radix, as the devoted wife to her beloved David, and in her final years as a determined fighter against cancer. I envision Susan and David in heaven now, singing, dancing, and loving together.
Raymond Yee, former Radix trustee
Susan’s love for music and movement wove a thread through her entire life, from childhood and High School church choirs to her regular joyful participation in Appalachian “Shape-Note” or “Sacred Harp” singing with her dearest family of friends in California and beyond.
She was a performer, teacher, choreographer and administrator of dance and theatre for twenty-seven years. She taught music, dance and art as part of the Performing Arts faculty at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland, California for over 25 years.
With her husband David, Susan served for fourteen years as co-artistic directors of the intermedia performance ensemble, New Performance Consort, writing, producing and directing fourteen original dance/music/theatre productions for both theatrical and liturgical venues. They performed and taught in the greater San Francisco Bay area, and on tour to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and Bali, Indonesia.
Susan bravely met the recent medical challenges of her life with courage, grace and a great sense of humor. Facing her own mortality, she elected to travel, to sing, to perform, and to live life even more fully. She is deeply missed by everyone whose lives she touched with her own life, love and music. Her knowing smile, her thoughtful pauses, her regal presence, her pleasing voice, and all of her unique traits will be remembered and recounted time and again by those she encountered along her epic, influential journey.
Adria Peterson