To the Editor:
It was a normal late winter day here in England. I had caught the train, as usual, from my home down to Birmingham to attend my daughter's birthday party. I settled down in the railway carriage and began reading The Guardian (a British daily newspaper) when I happened on the report of the awful incident that happened in your community. We often use words such as stunned without thinking, but reading this did stun me. Suzanne and Half have always been a special memory for me and even now some twenty one years since we last met I still speak of them whenever I want to evoke the model of how us humans might be. It was in September 1978 when I was studying as an exchange student at U.Mass that I first met Suzanne. I was in a German Philosophy class, and before I had properly met her I recognized a special woman of inordinate intellect, in that first seminar she stopped us all in our tracks with a decisive intervention. Later I was attending an Anti-Oedipus reading group and here she was again. I resolved to meet her. A resolve I have always been glad I made. We became very good friends, Suzanne was that rare creature, an intellectual with warmth and humanity, not for her the aloofness of the brahmin, but rather the friendliness of the comrade who seeks to make the world a better place through the virtues of friendliness and compassion. That Christmas my wife and I decided to stay in our small university apartment and see out the cold winter break. On Christmas eve morning there was an unexpected knock on our door, and there, in the bleak winter air stood Suzanne. She told us that she and her family had no intention of letting us stay in Amherst alone, and that she had driven down from New Hampshire to pick us up and take us to her home. Half and the two girls, still very young then, made us feel not only welcome but special. We ate great food, drank beer and wine and stayed up late into the night discussing art and politics and people. We all agreed that while we were Europeans we felt a special affinity with Americans and America and they had found a place that they could call home. It was a glorious five days. The love that Half and Suzanne displayed for their children was a model of how the family could be and we were grateful recipients of that love too. I still have the clumsy photographs that we took that Christmas, red faced and wrapped-up against the sublime snowscapes of New England. Needless to say that although we never met again after we left Massachusetts in the summer of '79 we carried on corresponding for some time, and the Zantop family have long remained a brilliant light in my memory. I was so pleased to see that Suzanne had received her doctorate and that she had found a home at Dartmouth. I will remember Half and Suzanne always. My love goes out to their family and friends at this cruel time. Their lives are a beacon to us all who knew them and were touched by their limitless humanity.
