The story behind the book...
Watch the video to learn how Notes from Susie began as informational updates on Susie's journey with cancer for a small network of family and friends and became a devotional book for everyone.
Susie Edwards – a prolific writer of personal notes – demonstrated to literally hundreds of people how to live and die at the hands of ovarian, colon, and liver cancer. Her profound gratitude and abiding sense of peace was evident in the frequent Facebook updates that she and Mark – her caregiver husband – posted during their two-year battle. Devotional books typically tie a scripture passage to daily entries, but in Notes from Susie they chose recent and timeless hymns to capture and express their gratitude, pain, joy, lament, peace, sadness, and worship. They fought the battle together but Susie set the tone and led the way.
The largest section of the book consists of a condensed version of the more than three hundred updates. Ahead of that body of material, Mark sets the context by introducing Susie from the time they met in 1968 until her diagnosis March 1, 2013. Behind the updates, the Epilogue offers a “this is what I make of it all,” “this is what we’re learning” and “where we go from here” chapter. Daughter Weslee and son Nathan share how they navigated their own pain and loss to help their young children through their first major life tragedy.
Notes from Susie is an honest look into how one couple, completely devoted to each other and joyful together, meet head-on one of life’s low places drawing on the support and power of the large cloud of witnesses surrounding them.