MY TURN: She had a special knack for making the hard look easy

Sisters, some male sibling once said, are either the joy or the bane of a brother’s existence.

As the brother of three older sisters, I have been blessed by experiencing only the former, enjoying a lifetime of love and support from the real rocks of the family.

Sadly, one of those gems went missing last week, the victim of a cruel two-year battle with cancer that took an enormous toll on her and all those who loved and admired her.

Susan Jean Stanley, 78, was a master mathematician, the kind of brainiac who understood the complexities of calculus, the puzzles of geometry, and the abstracts of algebra, gladly sharing her worldly knowledge of such subjects to thousands of students over a teaching career that spanned more than three decades.

I was one of her pupils, earning my mathematical stripes in high school and college due largely to her teaching brilliance. She reveled in explaining the nuances of the Pythagorean Theorem and Polynomial Expressions, distilling such matters into forms that could be understood by even her academically challenged brother.

After she retired from teaching, she took her love of numbers to the world of banking, finding even more joy in balancing the books of a multi-office financial operation.

At each step of her career, she made the job look easy, just as she did in building an ever-growing circle of friends that was approaching exponential proportions at the time of her passing on October 23rd.

She credited her smarts to the benefits of a rock-solid education, graduating with high honors from University High School in Ann Arbor, earning even more academic glory while obtaining her bachelor and master degrees from Michigan State, her beloved alma mater.

And oh my, how MSU could use her now. She would have made short work of the leadership crisis that continues to engulf the Big Ten university, cleaning house of the bad actors and eliminating the series of dim-witted decisions that have soiled the reputation of her once proud school.

As a lifelong Democrat, she also could have made her mark in the political world, ensuring that such words as “cooperation” and “compromise” are bedrock principles that help form bipartisan coalitions that have the public’s best interests at heart.

Instead, she devoted much of her time and talents to helping the less fortunate, spending untold hours delivering daily meals to homebound residents of communities in northern Michigan and southern Wisconsin over the past two decades.

For all her smarts, she was perhaps best known among family members for her assortment of “Sue-isms,” regularly imploring friend and foe alike to “get your butt in gear,” especially when it came time to tackle a vitally important household chore that would make the world right for the opportunity to enjoy a “cool and refreshing adult beverage” while playing bridge or cheering on her favorite sports team.

Being of universal good cheer was one of her many trademarks, as was her well-intentioned “Type A” personality that kept all of us in order whether we needed a certain piece of direction or not.

Her penchant for mapping out detailed plans was the stuff of family legend, and took on a special luster while she lived abroad with her husband Tom. Over the course of their 50-year-plus marriage, they lived in such places as Okinawa, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and Germany while teaching for DoDDS, otherwise known as the Department of Defense Dependents Schools.

Together they comprised the ultimate traveling team – she with her uncanny ability to make everything run on time (whatever the country) and he with his almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history and cultures of their far-flung destinations. Wherever they eventually landed in their travels, there was no question about who was in charge of their itinerary, according to her husband Tom, who liked to joke that his wife signed the couple in to each hotel registry as “Mr. and Mrs. Susan Stanley.”

Their shared love of travel was a joy that they imparted on their son Howard, a social studies teacher in Chicago who partners with his wife Karrie in guiding their children Ryan and Kate on regular cross-country adventures.

Like the rest of us in the family, the younger generation of “Stanleys” are now faced with the task of mourning the loss of our treasured guiding light, someone whose love of life was somehow enveloped in her need to always keep an immaculate home. As one admirer of hers just remarked, we can all take comfort in knowing that “Heaven will definitely be cleaner by tonight.”

For that, we can rejoice in saying, “God bless.”