In March, Susie went for her first MRI scan since the surgery. Buffett knew the stakes associated with this event. Susie had said she would have no more surgery.
“She won’t go back into the hospital. She won’t. I think the odds are reasonably good, but …”
The MRI came back clean. Buffett was overjoyed; he said that Susie’s doctors told her that this meant she had the same odds of a recurrence as if she had never had cancer. Susie may have put it this way to Warren because she thought that this was what he needed to believe, but what Dr. Schmidt had actually told her was that she could probably count on one good year. After that, the future was uncertain.1
Months of being trapped inside by illness, just as in her childhood, affected Susie predictably. As weak as she was, her pent-up urge to live her life again exploded. “I’m going to see my family,” she said. “I want to see everybody. I’m going to do everything I want to do until Dr. Schmidt tells me not to.”2
The first thing she wanted to do was go to the Laguna house and have the grandchildren come visit. For Warren’s sake, she wanted to attend the Berkshire shareholder meeting. She wanted to be strong enough to attend the premiere of Peter’s multimedia show, Spirit—The Seventh Fire, which was to take place in Omaha in July. She had a long list of other goals as well.
Susie’s hair, which had been light-colored for the last few years, was close-cropped now; her youthful face looked a little slimmer but otherwise no different than before. She spoke with a slight lisp, but it was easy to forget what had happened and not notice how little energy she had.
Buffett’s preoccupation was whether she would be able to attend the shareholder meeting in May. Susie’s presence reassured him; she was not a spectator but part of the show. If she could not attend, it was as though his leading lady would be missing from the stage.
The Buffetts had triangulated the shareholder weekend so that Astrid (who considered the whole thing a bore and was pleased to be excused) accompanied Warren only to the backstage social events, just as she did in real life, while Susie attended the “official” public social events in the role of “wife.” She sat in the directors’ section at the meeting and sang onstage with Al Oehrle’s band in the mall at Borsheim’s on Sunday afternoon. Buffett’s supporting cast of loyal Daisy Maes had grown larger over time, and made their own appearances. From time to time throughout the weekend, a clanking sound heralded the approach of Carol Loomis wearing her bracelet hung with a collection of twenty-seven matchbook-size gold and enamel charms, facsimiles of the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports—one for each year she had edited Buffett’s words. Sharon Osberg became part of the show by taking on any shareholder who wanted to play bridge with a champion on Sunday afternoon in the big white tent outside Borsheim’s. Buffett had not yet figured out a way to put his latest Daisy Mae, Devon Spurgeon, to work. Spurgeon, a Wall Street Journal reporter who had covered Berkshire for a while, was starting law school in the fall. Buffett had made Spurgeon one of his new people, a great rarity that now occurred only at intervals of years. Buffett had actually suggested that she get married at the meeting, where he would walk her down the long, long center aisle to the front and give her away as a bride. “Imagine how many gifts you would get from Borsheim’s,” he said. Genuinely touched by his offer—but warily envisioning news stories portraying her nuptials as the Berkshire version of a Moonie wedding—Spurgeon and her fiancé, Kevin Helliker, decided to get married in Italy instead. Buffett had granted her a seat with the managers in their reserved section;3 Osberg and Loomis, who were de facto family, sat in the section reserved for family and directors.
Everyone else had to scramble to avoid a place in the rafters. This year, so many requests for passes had come in that almost twenty thousand people were expected.
A black market of scalpers had sprung up on eBay, selling meeting credentials for as much as $250 for four passes. Buffett was mildly awestruck. Who ever heard of tickets scalped to a shareholder meeting? The eBay listing said: “Possibly meet in person Warren Buffett or ask him a question at the meeting.… Winning bidder also receives the visitor’s guide. The pass also allows you employee pricing at Nebraska Furniture Mart and Borsheim’s Jewelry Store.… BBQ party … Cocktail party at Borsheim’s … Shareholder party at Buffett’s favorite steak house … View displays from many of the Berkshire companies.”
As much as the P. T. Buffett loved it, Howard Buffett’s son wanted the scalping stopped. He couldn’t allow people to be gouged by scalpers just to attend the shareholder meeting. The man who, a year or two earlier, had professed (for good reason) ignorance of technology set up his own e-tailer on eBay, hawking meeting credentials at $5 a pair. People e-mailed anxiously. Would these credentials be “real,” or would they look different, stigmatizing the buyer as not a “real” shareholder? The question implied that this would be awful, labeling them as not a member of the “club.”
But, no, the credentials would be real, however obtained. And with that, Berkshire Hathaway—once a cozy club made up of rich partners whom Buffett considered friends—suddenly became a fan club. Buffett had opened up the tent and invited everybody in.
Omaha’s brand-new Qwest Center rose like a great silver circus tent near the Missouri River. Its facade reflected like a mirror on the grimy old Civic Auditorium across town, scene of the last four meetings. Inside, forklifts delivered bales of hay and crates of flowers, lampposts, and tons of mulch that would be landscaped into garden and seating areas in the exhibition hall. Construction crews built neighborhoods of booths to display awnings, air compressors, blocks of knives, encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, and picture frames.
Buffett bounced around the office like a teenager. His voice grew hoarser as the week wore on and the number of visitors kept increasing. Everyone nagged at him to save his voice for the presentations, but he ignored them, sprayed his throat, and kept talking anyway.
By Friday Buffett’s voice sounded like someone recovering from a bad cold. Still, he refused to stop talking. But Buffett never had stopped talking, never once in his life. Since he was a little boy and astonished his parents’ friends with his precocity; since he gave his high school teachers advice on stocks; since the Alpha Sigs gathered around to hear him lecture at fraternity parties; since he and Ben Graham held a duet around the conference table at Columbia; since he had sold GEICO as a prescriptionist; since he’d first picked up a stick of chalk and taught investing at night; since he’d bewitched people at cocktail parties in Omaha and dinner parties in New York; from the first meeting of the partners to the last; from the original Berkshire shareholder meeting in Seabury Stanton’s old loft to the latest group of students who had shown up at his door—as long as he could be teaching something to somebody, Buffett had never ceased talking.
When the doors opened at seven a.m. on Saturday morning, people ran for the arena and marked out the best seats. By eight-thirty, every seat was filled. When the lights dimmed, talking ceased instantly. Nobody whispered, nobody straggled in late. The audience was waiting, rapt.
Buffett and Munger entered like a couple of graying talk-show hosts and sat down at a white-cloth-covered table. Enormous screens displaying them had been positioned all around the arena, so everybody got a close-up look. Buffett was staring out at a dark arena filled with flashing lights and as many people as would show up in Nebraska to see the Rolling Stones.
Before taking questions, Buffett kicked off the meeting with rapid efficiency to cover a normally perfunctory five-minute business agenda of electing directors, ratifying auditors, and the like. This year, almost immediately, one of the shareholders stood up at a microphone and said in a timid voice that he was withholding his vote; he offered a motion from the floor. He asked that Buffett consider using some of the CEOs of his companies as directors because they were better qualified than Susie and Howie Buffett.
An audible ripple shuddered across the auditorium. The motion, even though presented in a respectful tone, fell like a big wet blot to mar the smooth, engraved surface of the shareholder-meeting agenda. Most of the audience was shocked. Berkshire was now the fourteenth-largest business in the United States, with over 172,000 employees, $64 billion in revenues, and profits of $8 billion a year. But it remained at heart a family corporation; as the largest shareholder, Buffett had the votes to elect a couple of board seats for family members if he wanted. He saw his family’s role in Berkshire as similar to the Walton family’s at Wal-Mart, a nexus between the Buffett Foundation and the company. Unquestionably, the way he chose his board was purely personal, although some board members happened to be successful businessmen.
“Thank you,” said Buffett. “Charlie, do you have any thoughts on that?”
This punting to Munger—no quick comeback or pithy comment—was a measure of Buffett’s complete discomfiture. However, it also put Munger on the spot, since anything he said might imply that he had some influence on how Buffett chose his board. He had none whatsoever, so Munger simply said, “I think we should go on to the next item.”
Another motion came to the floor. Tom Strobhar, on behalf of Human Life International, one of the organizations that had boycotted Berkshire Hathaway and successfully forced the company to end its charitable-contributions program, gave a speech about abortion that was, as he later wrote, “ostensively [sic]” disguised as a proposal that Berkshire publish a list of its political donations.4
Buffett merely said in response that Berkshire hadn’t made any political donations. The motion was voted down.
The business section of the meeting had now consumed half an hour instead of its usual five minutes and for the first time had borne a vaguely unpleasant resemblance to the Coca-Cola meeting. All this time, shareholders holding written-out questions had been patiently lined up at the numbered platforms equipped with microphones stationed all around the arena. When Buffett opened the questioning, he used an unrelated query to address the issue that was bothering him: his family as board members. His wife and son, he said, were on the board as “guardians of the culture. They’re not there to profit themselves.”
It was a remarkable moment. For the first time, he seemed to feel that he had to defend in public the way he ran his company. Afterward, however, nobody else asked anything related to this topic. The shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway seemed to think that Buffett had earned the license to run his company any way he damn well pleased. How was the investing climate? they asked. Our capital is underutilized now, he said. It’s a painful condition to be in, but not as painful as doing something stupid.
In the course of answering the many repetitious questions he was asked in between the new and insightful ones, Buffett managed to work many of the items he wanted to discuss into his responses. This year he used the meeting to expound on his “Why I’m Down on the Dollar” theme. The U.S., he said, was like a family that spent more than it earned. Americans were buying huge amounts of products from other countries and didn’t have the income to pay for them, because we weren’t selling as much to other countries as they were selling to us. To make up the difference, we were borrowing money. Those who were lending it to us might be less willing to do so in the future.
Now, Buffett said, we were spending more than two percent of all our income just to pay the interest on our national debt, and that meant the situation would be hard to turn around. Most likely, he thought, at some point foreign investors would decide they liked our real estate and businesses and other “real assets” better than our paper bonds. We would start selling off pieces of America, like office buildings and companies.
“We think that over time the U.S. dollar is likely to decline in value against some of the major currencies,” he said. Therefore, the economy—which had been pretty wonderful over the past twenty years, with both low interest rates and low inflation—could at some point reverse. Interest rates probably would be higher, as would inflation, which would be an unhappy situation. As always when he made predictions, he couldn’t say when. In the meantime, however, he had bought $12 billion of foreign currency to hedge Berkshire’s dollar risks.
While Buffett and Munger were talking about the perils of debt, people rolled down the ramps and escalators to the shoe department and waited in lines to pull out their credit cards. Fitters from Tony Lama and Justin sold a pair of boots a minute. Over at Borsheim’s, on the west side of town, more than a thousand watches and 187 engagement rings were being sold. The Furniture Mart was doing a record $17 million of business.
At the south end of the exhibition hall, rising above the crowd, just as Buffett had pictured it, stood a full-size Clayton Home with a tidy front porch and a real grass lawn and brick foundation bedecked with shrubs. And just as he had foreseen, a queue snaked back and forth behind a zigzag rope, as if it were Space Mountain at Disneyland.5
The black-and-white See’s Candies store, conveniently positioned in the middle of the exhibition hall, also had jammed aisles. Many of the customers did not bother to pay. Those taking the five-finger discount hooked huge amounts of candy as well as dozens of pairs of shoes from the shoe store, while, above their heads, Buffett and Munger talked about honesty and the ethical way of life.
As yet unaware of the thievery taking place beneath their feet that might force them to consider installing a Berkyville jail by the bookstore next year, Buffett and Munger ambled on, answering questions and chomping on See’s candies, peanut brittle, and Dairy Queen Dilly Bars as they talked their way through the entire six hours.
Any normal person would be exhausted after putting on a six-hour live, unscripted performance, but when the meeting ended, Buffett and Munger went upstairs to a large room and parked themselves at a desk, signing autographs so that shareholders who had come from foreign countries could get closer to them. This was a recent idea of Buffett’s. Munger sat through it patiently, but he was getting tired and sometimes talked with bemusement of this circus that Warren had created. He, too, enjoyed being worshipped, but never would have gone to the trouble to stage-manage and encourage it, the way his partner did.
Susie had left to go lie down after the first couple hours of the meeting. She flew to New York with Warren on Monday, but stayed in bed in her hotel room until one in the afternoon, mashing up pills in room-service ice cream. Susie Jr. wanted her mother to limit her outings to one thing a day—one visitor, one shopping trip, one fifteen-minute visit to the hotel lobby.6
Susie did attend the traditional dinner party that Sandy and Ruth Gottesman held in their honor every year. Since the mid-1990s, this had become the one time that many of the people in the Buffett Group could count on seeing their old friends during the annual New York trip. Now Susie Jr. said to Ruth Gottesman, “She’s going to try to do more than she should. She’s going to say she’s fine. She’s going to lie to you,” and she asked for help in protecting her mother. Most of those who gathered at the Gottesmans’ had not seen Susie at all during the past year, except perhaps at the shareholder meeting, and then only briefly. She sat in one room and Warren in another, while people came in to greet them and chat. Many people would later recall the event as emotional. Susie declared that she was glad she had gone. But afterward, she was exhausted.
Warren wanted her to do an interview with talk-show host Charlie Rose. Susie said many sentimental and flattering things about her husband, and explained that she gave Warren “unconditional love.” She also discussed her move to San Francisco, saying she left, as she told Warren, because “I would like to have a place where I can have a room of my own.” On Astrid, “She took care of your man for you?” asked Rose. “She did, and she takes great care of him, and he appreciates it and I appreciate it … she’s done me a great favor,” Susie said. Perhaps because of the set-up question, this exchange made clear that Susie viewed Astrid as the tool through which she managed Warren—something that Susie may not have intended to reveal quite so bluntly. Afterward, she said to Susie Jr., “Let’s go to Bergdorf’s.”7 There, she sat on a chair and looked at some things but soon said she was tired and went back to the hotel.
A couple of days later, on Mother’s Day, her energy rebounded in time to accept an invitation to meet her daughter’s friend Bono at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bono had been faxing her letters during her recovery, which Susie Jr. would read to her. The letters, according to Susie Jr., “were sort of this giant thing to her.” By May, after going to sleep every night listening to Bono sing, she had grown passionately interested in meeting the messianic singer. After their brief encounter, “I just can’t even explain to you how excited she was,” says Susie Jr.
Susie went to bed and rested for two days. Then Bono and his entourage came over to the Plaza to meet Susie for lunch. For three hours, Susie and Bono sat talking. Then he presented her with a portrait that he had painted from a photograph of her, overwritten with some of the lyrics to the U2 song “One.” Susie was overcome. Bono invited her to visit him in France with Susie Jr., who was coming for a meeting of his foundation board.
Susie made up her mind to go to France. She and Susie Jr. started by spending four days at the Ritz in Paris, where Susie recovered from the trip across six time zones. Then they took the TGV bullet train to Nice, to Bono’s salmon-colored stucco mansion in Eze Bord de Mer.
In Eze, Susie spent most of her days sleeping, but one afternoon Susie Jr. called her upstairs to a terrace overlooking the water while Bono played music from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, U2’s unreleased album. That evening they spent four hours talking over dinner, and Bono stood up and toasted her, saying, “I’ve met my soul mate!”
Her reverence for the charismatic rock star had grown so during the course of getting to know him in person that the next day, on the plane home, Susie stayed awake and played U2 music on her iPod the entire way. “I can’t explain the rest I got there,” she would later say about Bono’s house.8
Roughly a week after the two Susies returned from France, most of the family went to Sun Valley, while Peter and Jennifer stayed in Omaha, setting up for the premiere of his show, Spirit—The Seventh Fire. After the long year of pain and isolation, Susie was making up for lost time by trying to see everyone and go everywhere. But the feeling of liberation was not unqualified. On the second day, Susie Jr. got a golf cart to take her mother around. When Susie Jr. walked into the condo to pick her mother up, she was shriveled in a little ball on the couch crying, saying, “I can’t do it.”9 Even though she spent much of the trip resting, it drained her tiny store of energy.
When the family returned to Omaha, with everybody on hand for the upcoming premiere of Peter’s show, Susie took the opportunity to visit her daughter’s new knitting shop. Susie Jr. had gotten together with a partner to open String of Purls in a suburban shopping center. Buffett was genuinely excited at his daughter’s entrepreneurialism. He could relate to a knitting shop. He had analyzed its prospects and thought it might gross as much as half a million dollars a year. Once again he could bond with his daughter in a special way.
Peter’s multimedia event was nothing like the knitting shop; it was harder for Buffett to comprehend. Based on the PBS special Peter had done earlier, it had consumed four years of effort, during which he focused on improving the execution and experience of the live performances while refining the music and story line. And all of this work would have no certain result—except the satisfaction of the creative act.
Buffett had seen the earlier live performances and knew the show involved Peter on keyboards with a band; a special theater shaped like a tent; lasers, drums, video, and Native American singers and dancers. Warren always gave students advice to pursue their passion, but the examples of passion he used, like becoming backgammon champion of the world, were competitive at their core. Someone driven by an inner fire of artistry, irrespective of the world’s rewards, was simply off the map of his reality. That was Susie’s territory, the realm of spirit and soul and heart. Nonetheless, his own passion and patience and creativity as he worked with capital resembled Peter’s passion and patience and artistic vision with music. Thus, Buffett’s genuine wish for Peter’s success found its expression in the best and only way he knew—in the marriage between art and commerce. The show’s potential for commercial success preoccupied him. “It gets enthusiastic responses, but what I don’t know is just how big the market is. It’s not like a Broadway musical, in terms of the depth of the market, so we will find out.”
The Buffett name had worked heavily against Peter when it came to raising money, because people assumed that he had easy access to unlimited funds. People did not take him seriously about not having money until he actually mortgaged his house to fund the show. In a no-lose deal, Warren offered to pay the last ten percent of the cost if Peter could raise the rest. When he had raised two million of the total, his father went ahead and gave him $200,000 of the $300,000 he had promised. Peter then raised the rest of the money himself. From start to finish he struggled against heavy odds to raise funds while trying to stage and produce the show at the same time. His parents, during the same months, waived their “no donations” rule and wrote a $10 million check to Tom Murphy’s Save the Children as a gesture of friendship and support.
It seemed a little chilly—even in the name of cultivating self-reliance—to support their son’s cause with only two percent of what they gave a family friend. With hindsight, Peter was grateful that his show did not become a vanity project funded by his father—which no one would have taken seriously. He felt that his father had found one of his typically brilliant solutions to complex problems. Peter had his family’s endorsement, for which he was grateful, along with the pride of raising most of the three million needed by himself—although he could have used that last hundred thousand dollars.
Spirit—The Seventh Fire was a dazzling story acted by a Native American who told the story of his return from the modern world to reclaim his cultural heritage. Warren did not quite understand his son’s fascination with Native Americans. The show’s symbolic exploration of stolen identity, and the triumph of man’s will in reclaiming what was lost, escaped him. But Warren loved music and was proud of his son, and when he looked at others in the audience at the premiere and saw people clapping and cheering, that told him the show was good. And when the Omaha World-Herald called it “poignant, sad, uplifting, thrilling, and powerful,” he was delighted. But he also feared, with reason, a hometown bias and waited to see if the show would be well-received elsewhere.
As Spirit continued to play in Omaha, Susie went to Laguna with a group of her grandchildren. They were used to Susie indulging their wishes and giving herself to their needs, going here and there with them, the perfect grandmother; she didn’t disappoint them now. She took them shopping at the mall, like old times, sitting in a chair and pointing at things around the store, saying, “I’ll take one of those, and two of these, and one of those.”10 After this visit, she was exhausted, but began to prepare herself for the annual trip to Herbert Allen’s post–Sun Valley gathering.
The wisdom of spending another long weekend with a crowd of people at the high altitude of Cody, Wyoming, so soon after Sun Valley, seemed questionable. Some in the family were strongly against her making this trip. But Susie was doing cartwheels at the sheer joy of living, and Warren wanted to feel that everything was back to normal. Thus, the last week of July, Warren and Susie reunited for a long weekend at Herbert Allen’s J—9 ranch.*
Susie struck people as exuberant, elated to be there.11 At dinner in the great room, where an oversize fireplace took the chill off the high mountain air, she was chatty and outspoken.12 Afterward, when the table had been cleared and everyone was thinking about dessert and coffee, she stood in the kitchen talking.13 Suddenly, she blinked and said there was something funny going on inside her head.14 For a split second, Herbert Allen thought she was doing a silly dance step. Then he realized she was going down. As her legs buckled, he and Barbara Oehrle caught her before she hit the floor.15
They carried her to a nearby couch, where the yoga teacher Herbert Allen had brought in for the weekend held her. Susie’s health had always been so uncertain, and she had pulled through so many other crises, that nobody thought it was that serious. Still, they put through a call for paramedics. Warren called Susie Jr., who was at the Democratic Convention in Boston. He said something about a headache and asked for her doctor’s phone number. She gave it to him and he hung up. She wondered briefly if something was wrong, then thought, My mother could have broken her toe and he would be calling for her doctor’s number.16
Lying on the sofa, Susie was having trouble lifting her arm. She vomited a couple of times and said she was very cold and her head hurt terribly. They wrapped her in blankets. She began drifting in and out of consciousness, at times struggling to speak. As Warren observed Susie’s condition, he grew more and more distressed; it was becoming apparent that she had probably had a stroke. The other guests waited, helpless, for the ambulance to arrive. The time passed slowly. After a while they all grew more hopeful when Susie commented that her head felt better and started responding when asked to move her arms and feet. Then the paramedics arrived and did a few tests. They placed her onto the ambulance cot and wheeled her outside, as Warren followed. After they lifted her into the back of the ambulance, Warren got into the front seat and the driver began the thirty-four-mile journey through the winding mountain roads to West Park Hospital in Cody.17
As soon as they were in the ambulance, Warren called Susie Jr. “You need to come here,” he said. “Something has happened to Mom. I think she’s had a stroke.” A few minutes later he called again and said, “You need to find your brothers and bring them with you.”
Susie Jr. reached Peter in Omaha, where he was in his hotel room preparing for the show.18 Howie, who was in Africa, was horrified, once reached, to be stranded with no way to get a return flight until the next day.19
While Susie Jr. worked on logistics, Herbert Allen and a friend, Western sculptor T. D. Kelsey, followed the ambulance in Allen’s car. They grew frustrated at how slowly the ambulance was proceeding; it upset them that Buffett was trapped inside and subjected to the interminable ride. At one point they pulled up alongside the ambulance and Allen shouted at the driver, asking what on earth was going on, but no one answered.
When they finally reached the hospital, the CAT scan revealed that Susie had had a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Warren paced back and forth in the emergency room, and eventually the doctor came out and told him that Susie had little chance of lasting through the night. Tearful and distraught, he went out to the lobby and told this to Kelsey and Allen.20 Then he walked back upstairs and sat in the room with Susie, waiting. They were alone.
At around four-thirty a.m., the plane carrying Susie Jr. and Peter arrived. After their car pulled into the hospital parking lot, its mountain backdrop much like that at Sun Valley, the first person they saw inside the lobby was Herbert Allen. Susie Jr.’s first thought was “Oh, my God, this feels just like Mrs. Graham.”
Upstairs, they found their father sitting next to their mother, holding her hand. A Cherry Coke sat untouched on the table nearby. “I’ve been here for five hours,” he said. Susie was so quiet, you couldn’t see her breathing.
Warren went to lie down on the bed in the adjoining room. Peter lay down on the floor, and both fell asleep. Susie Jr. sat down in a chair next to her mother on the bed, touching her.
A little while later, she realized that Susie wasn’t breathing. She went and found a nurse. Then she braced herself and woke her father up to tell him.21
Warren wept while his children spent the next few hours doing what had to be done. By noon all of them were on the G-IV for the worst flight any of them had ever taken.
After some time in the air, Warren took a deep breath and asked, “Is there a bathroom in the front?” There wasn’t. “Walk with your back to the couch,” Susie Jr. told him. He inched his way to the back of the plane, his eyes averted from the plane’s sofa, where the zippered bag that contained Susie’s body lay.22
When they landed in Omaha, the family had another surreal experience as the plane taxied straight into the hangar, where a hearse was waiting, rather than stopping on the tarmac, so that they could deboard without having their grief invaded by a band of paparazzi. Warren went straight home, walked upstairs into his bedroom, shut the door, turned off the lights, and got under the covers.
Astrid knew what to do, which was nothing. She made sure he had his sleeping pills and left him alone. Now and then she went over to Susie Jr.’s and cried herself. The rest of the time she stayed at home to take care of Warren.
The next day, Friday, he was still under the covers. Ron Olson, who had some legal obligations under Susie’s will and was a close friend and strong influence within the family, particularly with the children, arrived from Los Angeles with his wife, Jane. Warren came downstairs, and the Olsons sat with him for a while. Within an hour, the phone rang. It was Don Graham. “Where are you?” asked Susie Jr. “At the Hilton downtown,” he said. He had known to come without being told. Then Susie Jr. drafted a couple of her own friends to join them at the house. Over the next several days, they all sat in the living room to help distract Warren and make sure that he was never alone. At nine-thirty each night, he went up to bed and took his sleeping pill.
A day or two later Warren tried to call a couple of people. When they answered, no words came out; his throat had closed. He gave up trying to talk and heaved with sobs for a few minutes. Then, when the storm of tears passed, he choked out, “I’m sorry,” and hung up the phone. They would never have known who it was, except that the sound of Warren sending out an SOS was so unmistakable.
Susie Jr. had already sent for the people who were needed. The following week, Bill Ruane and Carol Loomis arrived to visit for a few hours. Sharon Osberg came. Bill Gates arrived. Kathleen Cole flew in. And Howie finally returned from Africa after “the longest trip home,” one that he never wanted to think about again.23
Bill and Sharon went ahead with a bridge tournament they had been scheduled to play in—with Warren—that week. He managed to join them for dinner one night at the hotel where the tournament was being held, and he did watch them play for a while, which helped to distract him. Another night they were over at the house, where Warren wanted them to sit with him to watch the Charlie Rose video of Susie’s interview. Astrid didn’t want to see it, which was just as well, and he was afraid to watch it alone. They put it on the DVD player and it began to play. After a while, Warren was weeping. Bill left the room while Sharon crawled into his lap and rocked him as he cried.24
The mere mention of Susie’s name sent Warren into tears. As the funeral approached, it became apparent to Susie Jr., who was planning the event, that something else was bothering her father. It dawned on her what this must be. “You don’t have to go,” she told him.
Warren was overcome with relief. “I can’t,” he said. To sit there, overwhelmed with thoughts of Susie, in front of everyone, was too much. “I can’t go.”25
Unlike Warren, hundreds of others did want to grieve for Susan Buffett in person, at some sort of memorial service. None was ever held. Only the family, a couple of Susie’s closest friends, Bono and his wife, Ali, and Bobby Shriver were invited to the funeral. Susie’s musician friend Dave Stryker played the guitar, and the Reverend Cecil Williams from Glide Memorial Church conducted the service. Bono sang “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” The grandchildren wept.
And for several weeks more, that was all. Warren faced the emptiness. Many people, including Susie herself, had questioned how well he could survive without her. He had never recovered from the death of his father and still could not face the unfinished business of Howard’s boxes of papers in the basement. As Sharon put it, he had a tendency to think in the third person. But he suffered this time in the first person, grieving fully, living in the now, even though the now terrified him.
He could not escape from grief, even in sleep. The nightmares haunted him, every night the same. The separation from Susie, the split that he had never been able to contemplate during all the years of their living apart, was happening right before his eyes. He was captive on the endless ride to the hospital in Cody, locked inside the ambulance, helpless to help her, unable to stop the momentum of the wheels. The mountains stood silhouetted against the July stardrift in the thin evening air. Silently the driver picked his way through the winding hills. The road unreeled before them, mile after mile, rows of trees passed like pilgrims climbing to the foothills above. In the back, Susie lay on the cot, pale and still. The sounds in the ambulance faded as the miles went by. Strands of juniper hung like dim moss from the mountainsides while the road ahead stretched thinner in the distance. The stars fell still in the vast black overhead. Time slowed to eternity.
All he had ever asked of her was not to leave him, and she had promised that she never would. No matter how many other people she had cared for and supported, no matter which way her heart had tugged her, through all her travels, no matter how many different directions she had run, Susie had always come back to him. She had never let him down.
Now there was no response. He needed her so much that it was impossible that she would leave him. He would hold on, he would not let go; therefore she must stay with him.
The ambulance crept onward through the darkened mountains. The quiet hum of the oxygen tank mingled with his tears. In the back there was only calm, a bare whisper of breath, no obvious sound of pain.
It was Warren’s chest that burned, it was his heart that exploded with each revolution of the wheels. You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, please don’t leave me.
But Susie was already passing beyond his reach; she was now in other hands. And the force of her withdrawal from his world to the next was tearing him apart.
*Pronounced J-bar-9.