I love Sue so big and wide, so my grief equals that love. #griefislove and I will keep actively grieving. Let’s feed her and Jayce with our tears. Thank you. Here is the eulogy from her service on Saturday March 14, 2020. As I said at the funeral in imitating Sue’s KY drawl & in pure Sue-ness, about it being lengthy, “TOUGH SHIT!”
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I want to name the loss of us not grieving in community today b/c of the coronavirus, as the social aspect of grieving is so important. And, there are those of us here at the church right now, and I suspect hundreds of you live-streaming. And, I wish we were ALL together. In accepting what is, may we also feel and maintain connection with one another today and in the days to come. If we were together in this church today, organized by some of Sue’s dear former students, you would have had an opportunity to create a “Mandala Hug,” an art activity Sue coined, for the family. I encourage all of us to make art; artist or not, for & about Sue today. Hug her with your art. And, please know that a dear group of Sue’s former students, led by Nancy Wolff, have been busy working to create an art memorial in her honor. If you are not on social media, you can visit the website, suewallingfordartmemorial.com to learn about this project and how you can become involved. And we will gather in person again for Sue and her family.
I also want you to know that this is long, and in Sue style, I say, “TUFF SHIT.”
I want to start by honoring and bringing in the presence and memory of Sue’s departed, beloved ancestors. Her dad, Hank, her mom Peggy, her sister Beth and most recently and tragically, her dear son, Jayce. A few months ago, in talking with Sue about the mystery of death, she shared how she believed that when she died, she would be reunited with them. So, I trust that they are greeting her into their loving, embracing presence and together with Sue, they are also shining starlight onto all of us who are grieving; mainly Jay, Emma, Jannae, Ezra, Zane, Chip and Andy an her furbaby “woo-woos” as Sue called all animals and little, cute creatures.
My name is Merryl Rothaus, known to Sue and Jay and them to me as HORDY. I met Sue in 1997 when she interviewed me as a candidate for the Transpersonal Counseling Psychology and Art Therapy program at Naropa University here in Boulder. For the next three years, as a student, Sue became my Advisor and Instructor and like hundreds of others all over this planet, Sue became one of my greatest mentors; teaching and modeling to me as one of her former students said, “an ability and implicit permission to be playful, silly, and unconventional, without ever deviating from the core principles of therapist integrity….that being this way does not at all compromise one’s gravitas as a therapist.” During my final semester at Naropa, when complaining (and probably crying) in Sue’s office about my Masters Paper, Sue looked me straight in the eyes and with her compassionate yet “I’m not gonna sugar coat it” way, she imparted her wisdom: “MERRYL. IT’S A HOOP. JUMP THROUGH IT.” This pith advice was spot on and like those of us here who were blessed to be on the receiving end of Sue’s wisdoms, I have passed that pith advice on to many. When I graduated from Naropa I immediately began working as the Art Therapy Academic Advisor and Adjunct Faculty and Sue and I worked closely together, sharing our Naropa office for 6 years. We laughed to the point of falling to the ground in that office, and we got in one of the worst fights EVER in that office. And, after some time for both of us hotheaded, strong women to cool down, we talked about the marriage and family therapist John Gottman’s “connection, rupture and repair” model and found our way back into beautiful and stronger attachment and connection as soul sisters, dear friends, colleagues and artists. Most recently, Sue encouraged me to join the Crowd Collective, an art collective where she had a studio, here in Boulder. I did and Sue and I met almost weekly, especially after Jayce died. We sat at what she named “The Depressed Table” and while making art together and sharing various encaustic techniques, we would talk about EVERYTHING; life and death, grieving Jayce’s death and talking about her “apprenticeship with grief” as the teacher Francis Weller called it. We grieved the state of the world and our lamentations about the man in the Whitehouse and the patriarchy in general. We made one other laugh deeply. We cursed. We drank red wine and ate charcutrie, and supported one another in this journey of life and loss in companionship with our tried and true friend, Art.
A little background…In 1983, Sue was studying Art Education at the U of KY and a professor of hers told her about Art Therapy, which led her toward am internship at Eastern State Hospital with severely mentally ill patients. It changed the course of her professional life. In 1993, Sue became a student in the MA Art Therapy program at Naropa. She wrote:
“I can’t even believe I am actually going to Naropa U. After all the years of working in mental health agencies I can finally legitimize myself and become a real A.T. I don’t really know what Transpersonal Psychology is and I have never really meditated but I love learning about it. My teachers are so great and my classes are amazing. Today we had Process Painting with Bernie Marek all weekend. Wow! To be able to paint all day for two days like this, as just process, is blowing my mind. Like, today Bernie came up behind me as I was painting this beautiful abstract of the most wonderful shades of pink, peach and red, swirling the colors on the page felt as if I was swimming in some sort of magic sea of whipped cake icing. I asked him, “Isn’t it pretty, these colors and shapes?” Unimpressed, he replied, “Yeah….they’re nice, but is that all you got?” “WHAT?” I responded incredulously. “I just wonder if you are just pretty colors and shapes” and he walked away leaving me face to face with my pretty painting. I then loaded my brush with black paint, hearing his words, “Just trust the process.”
And from there it all began. Sue became and was a pillar, a matriarch of the Boulder Art Therapy world and Naropa University where she taught for many years, once being honored as Faculty of the Year. She deeply and indelibly impacted hundreds of therapy students and the ripples of her ways, I know, come out with how we art therapists and therapists work with our clients. The tributes written about her from dozens of her formal students all over FB and Instragram speak of the myriad of ways that she influenced and molded some of the finest therapists through her heart-full, soul-based, art-infused, gentle, wide and wild hearted teaching and example.
Sue was all about creating. If she wanted it to happen, it did. In 2011, she poured her passion for art therapy and social justice into the creation of the Naropa Community Art Studio International, bringing art therapy, and art therapy students to Cambodia to work with local NGO’s that shelter women and children rescued from domestic violence, extreme poverty and the sex trafficking industry. She formed partnerships with Transitions Global, Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center, and Partners for Social Justice and gave many students a once in a lifetime opportunity to augment their University out of the Boulder bubble, to learning and being of service in Cambodia. This program went for three years and significantly impacted many students who shared that this program opened their eyes; changing their lives and profoundly guiding and informing their work as social-justice informed therapists.
In 2014, Sue started the Boulder Art Therapy Collective (BATC). Under her direction and the collaboration of many community stakeholders and collective members, the BATC partnered with several Boulder organizations and non-profits, including Realities for Children, Mental Health Partners, I Have a Dream Foundation, Boulder Housing Partners, Boulder Veterans, Queer Asterisk, Boulder Public Schools, Boulder Pottery Lab, Naropa, SPAN and more. The BATC opened their doors for art-based workshops, clinical trainings and supervision of AT’s, held open studios and participated in the North Boulder First Fridays, as well as offered individual and group art therapy offered on a sliding scale to support accessibility to all community members.
And there is more. In 2018, in partnership with the Ragamuffin Project, who brings together Qualified, registered and accredited Arts Therapists working with Statutory and Voluntary Sector organizations in the UK, Cambodia, Russia and Peru, sue, along with alumni created the Nourish Art Therapy and Wellbeing Conference in Cambodia, geared toward mental health professionals about vicarious trauma. Therapists and people from 25 countries presented and attended. Whatever Sue thought, she created it and she was a true leader; impacting and trailblazing as a fierce social justice warrior in therapy for Naropa.
So many of us have wonderful, meaningful personal stories about our times with Sue and over the course of the last week, in many hours by Sue’s side at the hospital while she was unconscious, I got to hear many of them from her dear brothers, Chip and Andy as well as sharing some of mine with them.
I will share just one here. Many years ago, when Sue and I once taught the Child/Adolescent Art Therapy class together we had a student who presented their “Inner Child” AT project, & as part of his process, after presenting, really wanted to burn it. Because Sue believed so whole-heartedly in the truest expression of art therapy, metaphor and ritual, and because Sue was all about um…..,rule-bending, her response was “HELL YES!” and we went outside into the parking lot at Nalanda and lit it on fire. The student, and us were absolutely delighted and cheering as the art went up in glorious alchemical flames. When we quickly got in trouble by campus security, Sue tacitly apologized to the security person, and as said security person walked away, she shrugged her shoulders, cursed and we moved onward knowing that Sue’s HELL YES had helped this student complete a necessary part of his learning about art therapy, and transforming his process. She said to me as we walked away, “That’s what it’s all about, Merryl. True art. True art therapy.” Many of us have stories about how Sue, well….broke the rules and yet somehow did so in such a way that it was a significant and important teaching. She truly spanned the range from the sacred to the profane, never missing a beat to create her mark. Like sculpting clay, her mind, heart and wisdom and Sue- ways formed so much of who I became as a therapist and Artist as she did for sooo many.
Sue had a deeply contactful presence with whomever she engaged; making every person she sat with feel seen and loved through her potent gaze and words; sometimes gentle, sometimes cuttin’ to the chase and sharp and fierce. As one of her former students said, she was paradoxically wild, yet gentle. She had a never-ending capacity in her heart for every person that she loved and there were oh so many that she loved…. And loved her back…widely, big and with all of her being.
I asked some of her former students to share some words about Sue. I can’t share all of them here but, here are some of their comments:
You taught me patience. You represented compassion, kindness, forgiveness and strength….Because of you, I believe in myself, my intelligence, my power.
She was an illuminator w/ her warmth and ability to shine inner insight. She knew that sweetness also contains knowledge of the depth of sorrow.
She was strong-willed and stubborn.
What I didn’t know when I went to grad school was that a brown refugee kid would leave grad school with a deep and unusual friendship with a white, southern lady from KY. She taught me that love knows no boundary.
You were a radical example of creating something out of nothing.
Your wisdom flowed out in stories, art, laughter and sass.
Your work supporting victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia arose from a box of matches- and with that you set the whole world on fire.
In Cambodia, she taught us how to improvise daily, how to work across language barriers in shifting conditions, outside our comfort on so many levels,
Sue taught me that tools traditionally meant for children can be the ideal means to unlock the highest coping capacities of a traumatized adult.
Sue was a wily instigator who always had a plan for how mischief could transform people.
Her life was a rare and brilliant example of how deep magic could persist beyond childhood
Sue recognized the loving man I would become, before I could see this man myself.
She knew how to hold others and herself in joy and sorrow, w/ tenderness and grace.
She was an illuminator to all she crossed paths with, with her warmth and ability to shine inner insight. She knew that sweetness also contains knowledge of the depths of sorrow.
I could go on and on. There were so many more.
The most devoted of artists and art therapists, she explored every kind of art medium and project that she envisioned in her brilliant mind, knowing no bounds and never missing taking a risk in her art to learn something about the art, the materials, or herself. She would take meticulous notes in her art journal about construction and chemistry of materials. It was not uncommon for Jay to smell something burning or hearing pounding, from something she was creating. Whatever she dreamt or envisioned, she then created. Her art spanned from aesthetically lovely & beautiful, and “nice to look at” to pure, raw and downright creepy, (and she’d get a wide-eyed grin about sharing some of those pieces and she seeing people react). She created art about the underbelly of life as she saw meaning & or beauty in all things; even the discarded…. including road kill (yup), and she was not afraid of the dark, the macaubre, or the unsavory. In line w/ this, she was all about honoring and ritualizing process. She once took the ashes of her kitty, as she called that cat,”Shitty Kitty” and made art out of it; placing them in meticulously ordered, numbered tiny glass vessels placed into an antique wooden case.
She created a stunning and riveting altered book out of her childhood bible that through her capacity of visual literacy, brought her fierce feminine stance and disdain of the patriarchy into her recreated bible. She saw art and made things out of the many things her eyes landed upon or her hands touched. The tiniest particles of earth matter. Moss. Grains of sand. Carpet tacks. Skulls, bones, feathers, leaves. Rocks. Amulets. Gold thread. A discarded teabag became a world she filled with gems and trinkets from the earth and sewed together as pockets of love and dreamlike musings. Matchboxes became their own contained, magical environment filled with wishes, visions and memories. Altars of art. Nests and bowls. Mandala hugs. Nature Baskets. A clay “Bitch-Goddess” with a necklace containing Emma and Jayce’s baby teeth. And her forearm became the canvas where she had tattooed, a firefly, a symbol of her dear Jayce; the ink mixed with his ashes. She gave form in art and words to her dream images; Jayce as a tiger in her dreams & her benevolent helping spirits like the dragonfly, the seen and the unseen realms of the shamanic. Sunsets, crashing waves, rocks and the jungle of CR.
When Jayce died in October, her powerful spirit rose amidst the rubble of a mother’s absolutely unfathomable grief, and she made blunt, uncensored art out of her unthinkable loss, continuing to teach us and blow us all away with her ability to sublimate her grief into line, shape, color, texture and words, ripping and tearing, collaging and pouring tears into her paint.
She was a storyteller through her art and words about both her personal pain and beauty and that of the collective. Sue was a Queen in a tutu, a glitter goddess. As a lover of archetypes and characters, she embodied many; The Mama Bear. The High, Holy Priestess. The Ghastly Ghoul. The Forest Fairy. The Skeleton Woman, From “Women Who Run With the Wolves”. The Goddess. The Bitch Goddess. The Mermaid Medusa…. and so on. A stink bug that landed next to her recently could and did teach her about life and had a place in her heart as art. She was an instigator and inspirer, an activist and a deep-sea diver of the emotional terrain. Art was her most sacred type of prayer. Sue’s entire life was a ritual. A holy altar. She lived her art in the studio, classroom and therapy room and as a mom, wife, grandma, sister, aunt, friend and in her endless service to the community and the world. Looking at Sue’s art always shows me what is possible and gives many of us inspiration to create and BE way outside of the boxes.
She was a witchy and wild one. In the last days and hours of her life, we supported and helped as she was leaving her body through ritual, to usher her onward in those witchy ways with which she loved so much. When planning and thinking about these thresholds, I kept hearing her voice come through, with excitement saying “We’re gonna get WITCHY.” And we sure did as we heart-wretchingly said goodbye to her in this form.
Losing you in this world, Sue creates a cavernous and painful crevice of grief in my heart. Our hearts. Knowing you, you would tell us with your eyes wide, “Aww. Fill it with gold.” And she would tell us to learn about, and do our griefwork. Through her many losses, especially Jayce, Sue was getting stretched, in her apprenticeship with grief. Through her emotional and creative excavation, she surrendered and befriended grief and it became her unwanted muse. None of these losses make sense, and the loss of Sue on top of Jayce’s death is too much. A true and horrific WTF; especially to Jay and Emma, Janae, Zane and Ezra who have been through way too much in this tragic cascade of grief and loss. Just 2 weeks ago, Sue and I were talking about how there will never be a satisfying answer to the WHY’s of great tragedy and loss. I shared a teaching with her from the writer Elizabeth Gilbert who said, “Life is a mystery. And there is a period at the end of that sentence.” We just have to grieve in our own ways.
Sue appreciated the teachings of shamans and teachers, Sobonfu and Malidoma Some, from Burkino Faso in West Africa and loved a few teachings that I shared with her from their culture… so I want to share it here. That when we grieve, our tears feed the ancestors. So let’s grieve…together & let our tears flow to feed Sue and Jayce. In strongly valuing the importance of active grief, the departed Sobonfu Some would look you in the eye and say “HAVE YOU GRIEVED ENOUGH TODAY” so let’s ask one another that in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. Additionally, it is true that grief is love or as Martin Prechtel says, grief is a form of praise. We grieve because we love. And we love you Sue… so so much.
Into each one of us, Sue poured drops of magic and love, layers of the sacred and profane, swirls of wildness & gentleness, bright colors and varied textures, shards of raw truth & beauty, and so much more. Like the many bowls and vessels she painted and sculpted, maybe we are those vessels, holding her ways, her medicine, her gifts, her teachings, to offer with the world to make it a better place as she did. May it be so…that we make these lessons an offering to our communities and especially to Jay, Emma, Jannae, Zane, Ezra, Chip, and Andy.
I am going to close with two more offerings from Sue to us.
Sue wrote a poem recently upon grieving Jayce that is apt for us all in our grieving process which Sue would admonish us to do.
“A Poem for Grieving Hearts.”
Inside your heart there is a flicker of light left,
to help you along your journey.
Pull it out to light your way.
Let it shine, though dimly, upon the shadows about you.
Look deeply into what is there,
and you will see all who journey with you.
You are not alone.
Sharing your flicker invites others to share theirs too.
One by one, small flames appear
and a familiar warmth fills the space.
Your eyes meet the gaze of others
and you know.
Shallow breaths rise in whispered blessings.
Hearts beat in unison.
Salty tears drop like diamonds, and into the river
we flow like one big ship on an endless sea.
We rest in its embrace.
Looking to the stars that blanket us,
while we wait to see our loved ones again.
A few nights ago I watched a three-minute film that Sue created as part of a storytelling video class she took. It was about losing her mom and sister to lung cancer. At the very end she said, “But life goes on you see…..and we’ll be ok”
Let’s hold one another close-in.
You were one in a million, Sue. We love you more than words can tell.
Love for Sue 