Ode to The Goddess

Susan Bernadette Schiedl 09/07/62 - 05/23/22

I have been fortunate to have spent the last ten years of my life with a most magnificent woman. Susan had an aura of loving energy around her always, even the day before she left this earthly realm. She was still upbeat & positive even though she knew she was not long for this earthly realm.

I was fortunate enough to have met her back in early 1981 and from the beginning, there was a bond of some sort between us. That unknown bond was always something about her that stayed with me through the years and thanks to Facebook we reconnected in 2010 and from that point we spoke/texted almost daily.

We had never dated never been intimate and had been with other people thru all of our talking, that bond was present always, shortly before she ended up in Toronto for a funeral in 2011 she had said she wanted to visit to see if there was a spark, well as fate would have her Dad wasn't able to fly due to a minor surgery and I agreed to pick her, her Mom, her Aunt and her cousin at the airport and take them to her Aunts which turned about to blocks from my home. We had not seen each other since the early eighties and I recall being very nervous and I didn't know why?

Upon seeing each other at the airport both our lives changed forever. She hugged me, sighed and said she had never before felt so complete, I looked down into her eyes, mine were tear-filled and I said I think you just changed my life.

In order to keep this as short as possible I will move ahead to Susan agreeing to move to Toronto in August of 2012 to be together.

The Goddess as I called her even before she moved here, was stunningly beautiful, funny, sarcastic (when she wanted to be), and loved life. Her ties to family were a huge part of her life and I agreed that we’d find a way to get her back home a few times a year and whenever needed.

In the years we were together there were perhaps 3 times we came close to a blowup, there was so much more joy and happiness at stake than either of our egos could get in the way of.

I often called her the energizer bunny, she was always thinking of ideas or doing things. Even though she was 4’11” she had a presence about her that was larger than herself and felt by those around her.

She LOVED life on a scale beyond what I can fathom, her family, her children, and her friends. Her smile energetically lit up a room when she entered and did so all her life. She was always there for others to help in any way she could, sometimes to her own detriment.

In learning how to love her in the best way that would have her feeling taken care of, I learned and was taught by her love, how to love myself and her more deeply than I ever could have imagined being possible. I say this to emphasize the fact that when a man is able to get out of his own way and allow a woman to fully love him, he grows in ways he could never have imagined. In my growth with her, I was also able to love her more deeply and this allowed her to love herself more. That dance of love was almost like an ascending spiral raising both of us up. Even her diagnosis in November of 2021 could not undo what we had, and the dance after her diagnosis actually accelerated how much we loved each other.

I will forever be grateful and honoured to have experienced such a blissful life with her, she embraced and became the Goddess I had seen in the beginning, and watching her feminine power flourish was inspiring, she went back to college at 52 and after graduation worked with seniors with dementia, she was pursuing her bachelor's degree when her mother got ill a year ahead of her own illness, she didn't hesitate to put life on hold to travel home and care for her, for my part I fully supported her decision and I became a frequent flier during the pandemic going out to support her and her family.

The Goddess was a strong woman who had fought for what she believed in and never quit. She had totally exhausted herself trying to get her marriage to work and when she made the decision it was done there was no looking back, for years according to her she felt alone and unsupported in pursuing her dreams of family and self. Accepting her power and supporting her dreams was so easy and the more support she felt the better my life got so why would I want to get in the way of that?

Supporting her to fulfill her dreams and her leaving this earthly life so early has taught me to appreciate every day and enjoy it to the fullest, she inspires me every day in my coaching and continues to encourage me to put myself out there. I will forever be grateful to her.

For every man out there, Susan became a Goddess when she felt safe and taken care of, however, she isn't special that way, given unconditional love, support of her dreams, and a man who can keep his ego out of the relationship every woman on the planet is that Goddess! I encourage you no matter where your relationship is at, to get out of her way and watch her flourish.