After graduating from Commonwealth, where she was dazzled by John Hughes and challenged by Charles Merrill, Sue Trupin’s next stop was 1962 UC Berkeley, “a really wild situation” at a “very exciting” time, full of activism on the cusp of the U.S. sending troops to Vietnam. After two years at the school, Sue opted to take a break from formal education for about a decade to get married, have kids, and become a “back-to-the-land hippie.” Shifts in her personal life, plus a knack for biology fostered at Commonwealth, ultimately thrust her into a “quickie RN program, which was really the best decision of my life,” she says. More than thirty years at San Francisco General Hospital also led her to the front line of the AIDS epidemic. As charge nurse for the hospital’s Infectious Disease Clinic, Sue and her team “were the primary first responders.” The disease ripped through her personal life as well, when she lost her younger son to AIDS in 1995. While that seismic loss ripples through her life to this day, her decades of work as a nurse have allowed Sue to support others through their own suffering. Today, at eighty-one years old, she still works as a private nurse advocate, overseeing care for a small number of patients, “everything from ear wax to death and dying,” she says. "It keeps me on my toes.” Keep reading for just a small slice of her life. (This doesn’t even touch on her work advocating for grandparents acting as primary caregivers for children of addicts, fighting food insecurity by teaching small-scale farming, or studying Cuban percussion, Spanish, and glass blowing—amongst other interests.)

1. Who was your favorite Commonwealth teacher?

John Hughes, who was my English teacher for three of my four years. I came from a public school where I was sort of a big fish in a little pond. Everybody at Commonwealth had a much, much better education, and they were used to flying high intellectually and academically. I could hardly keep up—and I really wanted to. I very much wanted to prove myself. We read Joseph Conrad’s Victory my first year, and it was really hard for me to read and think about. Every word I didn't know, I wrote down, and by the time I finished Victory, I had tripled my vocabulary. All of a sudden, I could keep up. John Hughes identified that I was a student on fire; I think I was exciting to him as a teacher, because I was so excited, and he turned me into a great reader, a great critical thinker. I dedicated my master's thesis to him because he taught me to write and he taught me to think. All of my teachers were fabulous, but John Hughes told me, ”You know, Sue, you’ve got the goods.” 

2. What is a standout Commonwealth memory?

After my first year at Commonwealth, I certainly wasn't on the honor roll or anything. Mr. Merrill took me into his office, and he said, “You know, you're great, but if you repeated one year, you would be on the honor roll for the rest of your time at Commonwealth. You just need to catch up.” I started first grade at just five years old, so I was young for my grade, but it's still unbelievable to me that as a fourteen-year-old I agreed to this, because staying back had great stigma attached to it. But I just wanted to be really good at Commonwealth, and so I ended up staying an extra year.

3. What habit sustains you?

I've always loved to write, and I write a lot in my job—all these really sensitive letters to family members and to patients. Everything is a writing exercise, so I kind of love it. And I have had two essays published, which I’m proud of. One is very sad, about being a nurse on the front line of the AIDS epidemic and then losing my twenty-six-year-old son, who was a fabulous dancer, who had a dazzling career—I mean dazzling. The other I wrote about the experience of having a very serious episode of depression about fifteen years ago, and I ended up being put on a medicine that's been much maligned; I now am part of this global expert group that is resurrecting this family of medicines.

4. What’s your advice for Commonwealth students?

I always say to young people: Half of having a good life is just showing up. Be grateful for your education and use it to be a good person. And I tell all my young women friends to be really good to their girlfriends, because it's like money in the bank, with all that implies. I've taken really good care of them, and they, in the end, have taken really good care of me.

5. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

The greatest sorrow of my life is losing my son. I'm not a Buddhist, but all the wisdom I needed to endure that experience and make sense of a lot of things has come from Buddhist thought. We are all just part of the history of living things. Human existence is joy and suffering; know which is which. Regret is hell on earth.

6. What does your ideal afternoon entail?

Hiking around and looking at birds, alone or with a friend. Birds have been a sustaining passion since my twenties, when I was living in the country with two little boys and going a little crazy. It got me through COVID, too. I’m not a meticulous lister, like a lot of bird watchers, but watching the miraculous migration of birds never fails to make me completely, deliriously happy. 

7. Which word or phrase do you most overuse?

“The devil is in the details.” The young people around me roll their eyes, because they always have brilliant ideas, and I'm always like, “Okay, so how's that gonna play out?” The devil is in the details—the boring but important stuff. 

8. If you could have studied any field aside from your own, what would it be?

I would have liked to have been a wildlife biologist, a Jane Goodall kind of existence. And I thought I was going to do a lot more international medicine than I ever ended up doing, but the fact is, I've worked in communities right in my own city that are like the third world. 

9. What was your favorite aspect of your career?

Being on the front line of a lot of suffering and being present for people in a very meaningful way. Becoming a nurse has given me superpowers of a sort, because in the face of unbelievable pain and suffering, I have been able to make people feel better. It's the quality of your voice, looking people in the eye, promising something that you could actually deliver: doing that over and over and over again has been really a powerful thing. I do a lot of work in death and dying now—and there's nothing like nursing your twenty-six-year-old son to his death to teach you everything you need to know. I’m very calm, and I’m very helpful. To be that presence for someone else and be helpful in some way is really the greatest privilege of my life. 

10. What do you appreciate most about being semi-retired?

Well, my husband passed away around the same time I retired from San Francisco General, and the truth is, it did take a few years to figure out who I was and what to do with this time. It's a long day. How do you fill it in a meaningful way? But once I started to get it, I really got it. Because I'm fit, more or less, and in my right mind, thank God, life is very good. I don't have a grueling job the way I did for a long time. (I loved my job, but it was grueling.) I still take care of a lot of people, but they take care of me as well. I still suffer from various personal things, but I'm not beating myself up about not writing the great novel or that I could have been a doctor—things I did in my 40s and 50s and 60s, even. I feel like I'm my best realized self at this age, and I'm actually really having a good time. I'm free. 

11. How do you define success?

It's this weird thing, losing a son: through this experience, you learn what is most important. The only currency of any value in this world, in this lifetime, is love. It's the only thing that really matters. There's so much despair, because the world is really messed up, but success is just exchanging real love—in any form—and just being awake to what's going on.

12. What are people surprised to learn about you?

Oh, I have a lot of stories, which is true of anybody my age who has been awake and engaged. I have these different communities—my medical community, my old hippie community, and my music community—and the different communities are always surprised by different things. Like that I started a music camp with my husband [jazz drummer Eddie Marshall] and a few other people, and I took care of my husband's business for thirty years.

13. Coffee or tea? 

I love coffee more than anything. It's my favorite drug.

14. What is your favorite paradox?

The ability to hold two opposing truths in your mind at the same time is really a reflection of wisdom. Paradoxical truths coexist and make your understanding of the world more nuanced and useful. 

15. What do you bring to a potluck?

I used to bring fabulous pesto. These days I'm getting a CSA delivery of fabulous produce, and I brought a radicchio, blue cheese, and walnut pasta to a potluck recently. It was very cool and very good.

16. What was your go-to Boston eatery?

I commuted in from Winthrop, so we would run around to whatever cafe. I got into all kinds of mischief in Harvard Square with Cathy Merrill and Amy Merrill ’64. I used to get lobster rolls at Kelly's in Revere.

17. Who would you want to play you in a movie of your life?

Julie Delpy. 

18. If you could live as a local for 48 hours anywhere in the world, where would you go? 

Clarksdale, Mississippi. I've never traveled in the South, and a girlfriend and I did a little road trip last year, where we spent one week in the Mississippi Delta. That was a bucket-list trip that I wanted to take for the civil rights history, the food, the music. Clarksville was really a fascinating place to sit for a while. It's been so rocked by history.

19. If you could join any past or current music group, which would you want to join?

Goodness, there are so many. But I'd like to join this women's jazz group called ARTEMIS that is just so fabulous.

20. What is the best gift you have ever received?

Hmm, I don’t think about things very much, but I will say my husband once gave me a really great pair of binoculars. When you’ve lived this long, it's really hard to think of one thing. But I also don't really like that kind of thinking. I don't think people live lives for things.

Bonus: What should your epitaph be?

"The bitch that made everything happen." 

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