This site is intended to collect our thoughts and memories of Susan and her life. We hope you enjoy these memories and we'd be pleased if you could add some of your own, as well. Please share a message below (as a"Tribute" beneath the obituary on this page), or--a unique feature of this site--you can post stories or anecdotes (of any length) and/or photos of Susan (use "STORIES" tab above). Her sons will be building the "LIFE" section over time as an expanding biography, and if you can contribute a description of an event or period/aspect of her life, please email to me and I can include it there (danbrown333@gmail.com). Thank you.

Memorial Service
Obituary (published March 4, 2021 in the Westfield Leader) 
Susan Brown, 74 years old, born on July 23, 1946, and passed away on February 19, 2021 after a twelve-and-a-half-year battle with lung cancer. The daughter of Henry K. Warner and Edna Mae Donahue Warner, Susan graduated from Westfield high school in 1964 and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Keuka College in NY in 1968. She then earned a masters in social work from Rutgers University in 1970, where she met Robert Allen Brown in the same program, and they married in 1971. Together, they lived in New York City and Susan worked at Beekman-Downtown Hospital while Robert worked for the Community Services Society in Jackson Heights, Queens. In 1974 Susan bought her family home in Westfield on Mountain Avenue when her parents retired to Kennebunkport, Maine. Susan then spent the next 12 years raising her three sons, Charles Benjamin Brown (45), Daniel Warner Brown (41), and Theodore Aaron Brown (37). At this time, Susan was involved in volunteer work: La Leche League leader, Den leader coach for Cub Scouts, and a PTA member. She returned to work part-time at Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center for 20 years in psychiatric emergency services, their detox unit, and eventually full time for in-patient acute psychiatry where she was a short-term care facility manager. Throughout that time, she also worked on acute psychiatric emergency services on weekends. Her husband Robert died in 1994 at 48 years old leaving Susan to care for her three sons (11, 15, and 19 at the time). In 2008, when Muhlenberg closed, Susan took a job as a social worker for the VA on a home-based primary care team, a job from which she just retired on January 22nd, 2021.

Susan enjoyed camping with her family on lakes and enjoyed anything related to water; swimming and kayaking in the Adirondacks and on the ocean in Maine alongside harbor seals. She had a love for gardening, nature and the outdoors in general. She practiced Qigong at the First Congregational Church, loved going to opera and ballet in New York City, and reading historical novels. In addition to her family, she had great love for cats and adopted a number of rescue cats. She also enjoyed all the opportunities she had to travel through her sons. Ted was an all-American gymnast at the University of Illinois, which allowed Susan to travel all over the U.S. for his competitions. She later traveled extensively internationally with her son Dan, who taught English as a foreign language abroad for many years before going on to earn a PhD in Applied Linguistics (currently a university professor in Michigan). Together, they traveled to Thailand, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet, China, Indonesia, Singapore, and throughout Europe, including a trip to Hungary in 2011 where they discovered previously unknown relatives. She also spent 40 years visiting her retired parents on the coast of Kennebunkport, Maine.

After discovering her diagnosis of a rare form of lung cancer (unrelated to smoking) and attending the grief seminar at the First Presbyterian Church in Cranford- “Journey to Wholeness”, she began volunteering her Sunday evenings facilitating for the program to help others with loss and grief in the healing process. She was an integral part of the facilitating team and developed many long-lasting friendships within the group. She will be missed by all. She is survived by her three sons, two granddaughters (Emma and Sofía Brown) of Dan and his wife Ingrid, and her sister and brother in-law, Linda and Ted Drescher, living in Golden, Colorado.