Susan Doris Saso Maddox (a biography of sorts)

Taken from us far too soon, Susan was a delightful, energetic, enthusiastic, loving woman who fit a lot of living into her short, meaningful life. In the fall of 1963, Susan married her high school sweetheart, Steve Maddox (LTHS Class of ’62). Together they had a beautiful son, Douglass Brian, and embarked on their six-year adventure. Steve’s initial Army assignment took the new family to Germany (1966-68) and afforded them the opportunity to travel to many exciting European destinations. Included was much of Germany; Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; London, England; Rome, Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Milan, Italy; and Thessaloniki, Greece. They visited all three of “Mad” King Ludwig’s world-renowned castles; walked the battlements of Castle Frankenstein; rode a cable car to the top of the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak, outside of Garmisch; made a high-anxiety drive across East Germany for a Cold War visit to the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and an afternoon bus tour of the desolation still apparent in East Berlin so many years after the end of WWII. They cruised Venice by gondola, drove about Paris in their ’65 Mustang convertible, surveyed the mini-skirt madness in 1967 London, rode a giant hover craft back and forth across the English Channel between Brussels and Dover; crossed the Adriatic Sea via car ferry from Brindisi, Italy, to Igoumenitsa, Greece; braved harrowing, single-lane, pot-hole-plagued would-be roads across the mountains of the Grecian peninsula; motored Hitler’s magnificent Autobahns at what seemed obscenely high speeds, frequently having to pull over to allow the passage of some VW Beetle running at even greater speed.
In 1968, when Steve received orders to join the fray in Vietnam, the three Maddoxes crossed the Atlantic on the ocean liner SS United States en route to New York, arriving just days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Then it was on to southern California where, with Steve in Southeast Asia, Susan would resume the college education she had begun at the University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1965.
That final, worthy endeavor was never to reach fruition. Susan’s sky-rocket young life came to an abrupt and pre-mature end November 4, 1969. Shortly after her passing, Steve wrote:
A flower closed upon itself,
Pity the ill-used fragrance
Of brief bloom and early frost.
Returned to the sun,
Again folded gently to Spring-soft earth,
My love is no more,
No more.
Their son, Douglass, tragically died in a car-bicycle collision in El Cajon, CA, some eighteen months after Susan’s death.
Some losses are beyond words.