Remembering Dr. Sue Hendler
Our columnist Christine Overall refects on losing her friend Dr. Sue Hendler
by Christine Overall
On the evening of the fi rst day of the 2009 fall term my friend and colleague Sue died of metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Sue Hendler was a faculty member in the school of urban and regional planning at Queen’s University. For several years she also led the department of women’s studies, laying the groundwork for the department’s sexual and gender diversity program and for its new MA in gender studies.
It was perhaps fi tting that Sue’s death occurred at a time of new beginnings for students, undergraduate and graduate. She was a well-loved teacher. When word got out that she was dying, the e-mail messages from former students, printed out, fi lled a three-ring binder.
There’s a clunky epigram circulating on the Net: “A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove, but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.” I would add, “or in the life of a student, whatever her or his age.”
But Sue would also have insisted that it does matter what sort of house you live in and what kind of car you drive. She was a dedicated environmentalist, conservationist, gardener, recycler, antique-collector, old-house-fi xer-upper, animal lover, ethicist and feminist. Her values both inside and outside the university were seamlessly integrated. More than many people, she lived by Gandhi’s maxim, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
For example, Sue was a vegetarian for the whole time I knew her, which was over 20 years. She never lectured me about it, and never expressed disappointment that I, a philosopher who specialized in applied ethics, had not adopted vegetarianism myself.
She did not comment on what she must have seen as the hypocrisy of people who would cherish some animals and keep them as pets but happily eat others that had lived in horrible conditions and then been killed for food. She gave only occasional hints about her views. For example, she referred to herself as someone who “loved animals enough not to eat them.” But for the most part she simply modeled her own values by always refusing to eat meat or fi sh. At one of the many wonderful restaurant meals she and I enjoyed together, Sue told me that her criterion for what not to consume was: “Never eat anything that has a face.”
I admired her vegetarianism and thought it was morally justified, but in my case, the spirit was willing but the fl esh was weak. I fi nally gave up meat in 2000, but not fi sh or other seafood. One day, about a year later, I was sitting opposite her in a restaurant, where so much of our friendship was lived. I was eating a salad that had seafood added to it. Sue peered closely at my salad, and then said fi rmly, “Shrimps do have faces.”
After she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, in February 2008, Sue sought to bring meaning to the time she had left. She offered to write a column in the Kingston newspaper, The Whig-Standard, about what she called her cancer journey. In her bi-weekly dispatches from cancerland she provided an unfl inching documentation of her experiences with the disease and the medical care she received. She approached breast cancer like the scholar and planner that she was, learning about the causes, treatments, both standard and disputed, and potential cures.
In Sue’s case, a cure would never be possible. Yet she continued writing, and thereby also educating, until the end of her life. Posted online, her columns reached readers across the country. As an ethicist, she wrote about our responsibilities to the terminally ill, the justifi cation of assisted suicide, and making a “bucket list” in one’s last year of life. Her final column, written in anticipation and acceptance of her death, was published four days after her life ended. True to her values, she devoted most of the column to thanking all the people who had helped her. Sue kept a quotation taped to the door of her university office: “If anyone is going to change the world, it’s going to beyou.” At her memorial service, speaker after speaker attested to the ways in which she had affected their lives.
It’s hard to make sense of the loss of a vivacious, energetic,and principled colleague who died when she was only 49. Yet particularly in her last months, Sue Hendler reminded me of the meanings we can fi nd or create within academic life. As both teachers and scholars, we have the satisfaction of knowing that we may live on through our students and colleagues as well as through all those who read our published work.
Christine Overall teaches in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University and is our regular columnist on philosophical issues in the academy.
