My friend suffered silently for years. I didn’t know the depth of her pain until it was too late.

Even 50 years after my first encounter with Sister Mary Beth, the memory of her can elicit a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. “Barbara Brown,” she had bellowed from within her head-to-foot navy blue and white habit.

“Yes, Sister.” All summer I had practiced playing it cool, but my voice sounded freakishly high-pitched and my face glowed like red-hot metal.

“Sit there, young lady.” She pointed to the first desk in the second row, but my feet seemed stuck and my pulse hammered in my ears.

“Don’t take all day,” she barked with the gruffness of John Wayne.

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Praying I wouldn’t trip over my clunky, new Hush Puppy uniform shoes, I crept across the room and sank into the wooden chair, wishing I could beam aboard the Starship Enterprise and escape to a different galaxy.

I didn’t breathe until Sister refocused her gaze on another one the jumble of girls wearing identical skirts, white blouses and powder blue blazers. “Susan Broxton!” (I’ve changed my friend’s name out of respect for her family’s privacy.)

The students parted, and a chestnut-haired, slender girl seemed to float through the air. Flashing a confident smile, she politely thanked Sister Mary Beth and strolled across the room as if she owned the place. After sliding gracefully into the desk behind mine, Susan Broxton whispered: “Relax, Brownie. We’ll go to Del Mar’s later. My treat. Pancakes cure everything.”

I spun around. Susan’s ear-to-ear grin disarmed my anxieties and I joked, “Hope you got enough money for an entire platter!” We erupted into infectious giggles until Sister Mary Beth lunged across the room with hockey player speed. But nothing, not even Sister’s tough classroom management skills, could shake the certainty I had met my first high school friend.

As young Catholic women, we could serve God and accomplish whatever we set our minds to do.

Sitting in alphabetical order all four years gave me a literal front-row seat to Susan’s blossoming popularity. Each year, classmates joined me in electing her homeroom student council rep and, at school dances, guys from our brother school lined up to meet her. This magnetism even extended to teachers, who selflessly mentored her artistic and linguistic talents, beaming when she aced humanities, French and Latin exams.

In and out of religion classes, we discussed weighty issues like faith, abortion, drugs, civil rights, communism and Vietnam with youthful, know-it-all arrogance. We sang our hearts out in choral class, learned not to end sentences with prepositions and enjoyed friendships with others. By graduation, many of our childish antics and pomposity had faded and our instructors, including Sister Mary Beth, became spiritual role models whose wisdom helped us understand that as young Catholic women, we could serve God and accomplish whatever we set our minds to do.

Full-time office work rooted me in adult conformity while Susan evolved along liberal and cosmopolitan lines at the university, studying art and anthropology. One evening, between bites of pancakes, I scanned her new ghoulishly glamorous look—black flowing clothes, red lips and long black hair. “You’d win first place in a look-alike contest for Morticia from ‘The Addams Family,’” I teased.

Not missing a beat, she shrugged with practiced nonchalance, “I’ll look great in Greece.”

“Greece?” I leaned forward with interest.

"Brownie, abandon your typewriter and see the world.”

She smiled coyly and flashed a distant look in her green eyes. “After graduation, I’m heading to the Riviera and Greece. Brownie, abandon your typewriter and see the world.”

Even as a hipster university student at the dawn of the tumultuous 1970s, the unique, honest and endearing aspects of Susan’s personality remained. Unfailingly gracious and loyal, she would show up at each holiday celebration and stood next to me at my family’s hospital vigil when cancer stole my father’s life.

Our visits dwindled and stopped at the decade’s end when I enlisted, and the U.S. Army shipped the re-christened Private Brown overseas. Months later at mail call, a letter from a mutual friend made a dreary German winter day even bleaker. Praying that the news of Susan’s death was an unreliable rumor, I fed coins into a pay phone as if it were an insatiable slot machine and called Susan’s mother.

Mrs. Broxton confirmed Susan had died three months earlier. I still remember snippets of our conversation.

“How? Why? What happened?”

Mrs. Broxton sounded robotic, “She went to sleep and never woke up.”

“Thirty-two-year-old healthy people don’t die in their sleep,” I challenged angrily.

“The angels took my girl. It was her time.”

We didn’t know the cause of her pain until, well, until it was too late.

The finality of Mrs. Broxton’s words silenced us both. She could not or would not continue, so Susan’s older sister took over. Rachel swallowed hard and, as if revealing a national security secret, whispered, “Susan intentionally overdosed on sleeping pills.”

Still rooted in denial, I wailed: “Overdosed? Impossible. She was always drug free.”

“We didn’t know the cause of her pain until, well, until it was too late. She was always private and fiercely independent. Our family had a small memorial service, but according to the Catholic Church, suicide is a mortal sin. Would her soul be eternally damned? We became confused, ashamed, grief-stricken. Horrible time. You understand, right?”

“No, I don’t understand.” Refusing to talk about my friend in the past tense, I steamrolled: “Nothing about Susan is damnable. She’s a genuinely good soul. More worth than there are stars in the sky.”

She’s a genuinely good soul. More worth than there are stars in the sky.

“You’re right, but her last 18 months became a free fall without a parachute,” Rachel said. “She lived her dream of working at an art gallery and swanky restaurant until her boss seduced her, saying promotion depended on having sex, said, ‘Give me favors, and I’ll do favors for you.’ When she became pregnant, the cretin fired her for not using birth control. Didn’t want to mess up his marriage and mini-van-in-the-driveway lifestyle. Handed over a few hundred bucks and told Susan to get lost.”

My feelings erupted into an emotional kaleidoscope. Selfishly, betrayal percolated to the top. “Why didn’t she tell me? I’d do anything for her. Even go AWOL and out for pancakes!”

Rachel laughed humorlessly. “Yep, that girl could eat pancakes every day, but she found out pancakes don’t cure everything. Nothing eased her feelings of regret, betrayal and shame.” Financially and emotionally unable to have a child, Susan chose abortion, Rachel told me.

Abortion. The word rattled around the phone, incompatible with my memory of the once buoyant high schooler’s pro-life moral certitude that crumbled in a head-on collision with adult reality. Abortion activists maintain abortion is not murder, that it hurts no one. It is a lie that has probably silenced thousands of Susan Broxtons, forever depriving the world of their gifts.

If we could all have second chances, you know?

“She went through the ordeal alone, all legal, impersonal and sterilized. After that, she died a little every day. Death by a thousand paper cuts,” Rachel moaned. “Self-destructed. Lost faith in God, couldn’t hold a job, clashed with bosses. Spent two months in a psych unit, but gobbling prescription drugs and talking to an atheist shrink couldn’t exorcise her demons. We urged her to talk with a hospital chaplain, but the priest stayed on the medical floors. No mixing psychology and religion. Kept sinking until—until she crashed at the bottom of the bottomless pit. Sorry you found out this way. Germany’s so far away. If we could all have second chances, you know?”

Her voice disappeared, leaving an unrelieved haunting silence that signified the end of Susan Broxton’s earthly life.

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said, “Time heals what reason cannot.” But even now, decades later, my feelings remain raw. In one of life’s biggest ironies, I lived many years in Germany, traveling through Europe during my Army career as a chaplain’s assistant. Where has the intrepid Susan Broxton been since 1983? Interred in Hillside’s Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Chicago, about one mile from Immaculate Heart of Mary, our suburban high school.

If my friends and I could be with Susan again, she would laugh, realizing we are all now Medicare old. “Yep, time passed,” we would agree, “but without your unique self, there’s a void. This world misses and needs what you are.” There’d be no judgments, only hugs and reminders that Christ’s teachings of love and forgiveness also mean loving and forgiving one’s self. Then we would celebrate the gift of her life with a batch of pancakes.