BOISE, Idaho – Linda Morris was fighting COVID-19, contracted during a recent trip overseas, when her friend Susan Richard, who’d been battling cancer, fell and took a turn for the worst.
When Susan passed just days later, on Oct. 12, 2023, Morris booked a flight to Fargo for the funeral “just in case.” The night before she was to leave, she still felt awful, she said, and realized her August visit to Richard’s home would have to suffice for her final goodbye. But the next morning she suddenly sprang to life and quickly packed her bags. “There was something pulling me to get there.”
To Morris, Susan was worth it. “She’s my kind of celebrity; the kind I hold up…the kind you want to go to the ends of the earth for.”
Susan wasn’t perfect, Morris acknowledged, but the way she lived her life, with radical faith in God, was something to emulate—enough that she calls her “Saint Susan.”
“Linda, it just means we gotta pray more,” Morris recalled her saying whenever an obstacle appeared. “What an absolute privilege to have witnessed that. She just always called me to do more and inspired me.”
A legacy of life
Susan’s clarity, guided by her focus on God, impressed Morris. The two met when Morris and her family relocated to Fargo in 1990. Wanting to be connected to something life-giving, Morris wandered into FirstChoice Clinic—now Women’s Care Center—a pregnancy resource facility offering counseling and other assistance to those experiencing unplanned pregnancy.
“She was the lone person running this ministry out of a small office in the lower level of a building,” originally called AAA Problem Pregnancy Center, said Morris. “I got to sit at the feet of this pro-life master as she explained how she kept the doors open.”
They’d closed for a time, but Susan was adamant that women deserved this ministry. When Monsignor Wendelyn Vetter and others stepped forward with support, Susan reopened it, making the service stronger than ever.
Few people understand the efforts it took, Morris said, but Susan was “always guided by the Holy Spirit,” and never gave herself any credit. “She often said, ‘I didn’t always know what I was doing,’ but she knew that God did. God was always at the helm.”
Morris also mentioned that one of her crowning achievements was bringing the first ultrasound machine to the facility, a tool that has been known to connect many mothers with their children, and save lives.
A legacy of family
Renee Johnson, now of Plymouth, Minnesota, met Susan as a fellow mother with similarly aged children. “We had a monthly gathering, and we would do a field trip to the Carmel of Mary (Monastery) once a year,” she said. “It was Our Lady (Mary) and our kids that brought us together.”
Humility was a hallmark of Susan’s, Johnson said, a virtue fostered in her childhood growing up on a farm with nine siblings—three adopted along with a cousin—leading to an exceedingly practical approach to life.
It was all bound, however, in a deep prayer life. “She would get up in the middle of the night and go to Adoration (in the chapel) from 1 to 3 in the morning,” Johnson said, from their rural farm. “Those country roads weren’t the best. You can’t even see the road sometimes.”
But Susan didn’t waste time worrying, Johnson said. “She just radiated a trust in God in everything.”
One year, Johnson wanted to take Susan’s daughter Elisabeth and other youth to World Youth Day in Toronto. “She called and said, ‘Pennies came down from heaven. She can go!’” Johnson said. “She just prayed about it, and it all worked out.”
Johnson said she’s borrowed from Susan’s prayer life, now taking on many of the devotions she practiced. Similarly, Morris said she brought her own newfound skills for successful fundraising—learned by watching Susan—to Idaho to help non-profits there thrive.
Her passion for life issues, Morris said, came from her love of God and an external sense that cannot be learned through books. “When you love God, you know right from wrong. She just knew how horrible abortion was, and it drove her.”
Despite her accomplishments in the pro-life arena, Johnson said, Susan’s family formed the core. “She’s left a beautiful legacy with her (four) children,” she said. “You can see the fruit.”
Morris agrees, saying Susan cherished family life and new life. “She always saw it as such a beautiful, pleasing thing to God. And she lived that.”
Susan hoped to meet her newest grandbaby, and had a box prepared for her with little gifts inside, Morris said. Maryanna Joy was born on Dec. 8, a Marian feast day, which her family and friends say Susan would have loved.
A legacy of love
Along with God, Susan had a faithful husband standing nearby. She and Larry Richard met at North Dakota State University when she was a freshman, and Larry, a sophomore. He was just out of the seminary when they began dating. “Susan always clarified that she was not a chalice chaser,” Johnson said.
It was 1973, and the Supreme Court decision of Roe vs. Wade legalizing abortion had just been handed down. These two young collegians, who firmly opposed the decision, helped start a student group, Save Our Unwanted Life (SOUL), and began traveling and speaking to spread the message.
“When you spend hours together in a car, you get to know each other’s character and foundation,” Larry said. Then one day, it hit him. “I thought, ‘Well, jeepers, we should be looking forward to what the future would hold.’” He proposed, and they married right out of college.
The couple moved to Devils Lake, then back to Fargo a year later, eventually taking over the Richard family farm south of Fargo when Larry’s dad retired. Along with at-home mothering, Richard took a job as convention director at the Moorhead Holiday Inn, developing skills that would be put to good use in her pro-life work. “Once she got into a project, she made sure it got done right,” Larry said. “She did all the hard work.”
Eventually, Susan stepped down as director of FirstChoice Clinic so that Pauline Economon could shine, Larry said, and the ministry continued to grow and thrive while Susan took on other behind-the-scenes work.
But Larry saw what the public didn’t: Susan’s deep commitment to her family. “She wouldn’t go to bed until 2 in the morning,” he said. “The house would be a mess when you went to bed, but by morning, all the dishes were clean, laundry done, kids’ schoolbooks and papers ready for them to jump in the car and drive to school.”
In retirement, he said, Susan’s vocation became prayer, along with organizing an annual memorial for aborted children and other pro-life efforts at church. She also invited many people over for holidays when they might otherwise be alone and “always had the welcome mat out.”
Her final months were spent receiving friends over for visits, saying goodbye to those who’d accompanied her, and thanking them—another of her gifts, said Morris. “She wouldn’t forget even the tiniest thing someone had done for her.”
Morris said working with Susan “was like having a front row seat to seeing God in action,” and observing countless miracles. “Everything would seem against her, and then God would just part the clouds and the rain would disappear.”
Johnson said she has a new attitude about death, having watched Susan’s casual, but purposeful, approach to it all. “She took every cross that was thrown at her and offered it up for her family,” Johnson said. “She understood the value of redemptive suffering, and never complained, nor was she saddened by her diagnosis.”
Morris agrees. “In these last four years of battling cancer, she could have easily felt sorry for herself, but she didn’t,” she said. “She was just a pure, pure gift to me.”
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Jan. 12, 2024.]
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