Susan Sink Obituary
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Susan Sink passed away at 6:20 am on Thursday, August 15, 2024 at her home in St. Joseph, Minnesota.
Susan was born on June 25, 1964, to Nancy (James) and David Dale Sink in Reading Pennsylvania. A year later they moved to Park Forest, Illinois, where she lived until attending Grinnell College. From the beginning, she was curious and creative and devoted to words. There are stories of her at three riding her tricycle through the Co-op neighborhood with a purse full of words written on cards, reading them to anyone who asked.
She loved her younger sister Kathy and brother David and spent hours with them and neighborhood friends playing Legos, performing plays and puppet shows on holidays, and dancing in the living room after dinner.
After college she moved to Atlanta, then to New York for her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, then Palo Alto, California for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, then back to Chicago. She married George Hart while living and teaching in Joliet, Illinois, then moved with him to Reno where he had a fellowship, and to Long Beach, California, where she got a teaching position at Fullerton College. She published her first book of poems, The Way of All the Earth in 2003. When the marriage ended (his fault) she moved to central Minnesota for a writing residency at the Collegeville Institute and stayed there from 2005 until the end of her life.
After the residency, she took a job at Liturgical Press and wrote a series of books eventually collected into one, Art of The Saint John’s Bible. She gave talks on this topic for many years. In July 2008 she married Steven Heymans, moved to his house on 80 acres of prairie, and began work as the communications director for the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota. The land where they lived had previously been the Sisters’ hog farm. Here Susan became a serious vegetable gardener, engaging with the land by growing food, canning, freezing, and cooking seasonally. Her great joy was sharing the produce with others and cooking from the garden. She also counted it a great honor to work for the Sisters and help promote their story and ministries. She left the position in 2011 for a part-time job as administrator at the Episcopal House of Prayer so she could have more time for writing. Her first project was Habits, a collection of 100-word stories based on oral history accounts in the Sisters’ archive.
Susan was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer in February 2016, a month before her poetry collection, H is for Harry, was released. She was grateful for those next eight years, two of which were in remission, with periods of treatments followed by long breaks. In the first years, she did some work as a freelance education writer and editor working on textbooks for Catholic faith formation and English Literature. But her primary business was writing, and she published the novel Officer Down (2019) written before the diagnosis, and wrote and published her second novel, Failure to Thrive (2023. At the end of her life Susan finished a poetry manuscript she had been working on for several years, Examen (2023).
Susan found great joy in all aspects of her life. She was grateful to have lived in New York City, backpacked in the Sierras, and witnessed the May tulip fields in the Netherlands. By far her greatest joy were the years spent with husband Steve, at home on the prairie, taking winter vacations, or spending time with his three daughters, especially visiting them in Brooklyn and hosting holidays at the farm. Particularly memorable was a trip to upstate New York for their tenth wedding anniversary that was extended by visits with her friend Susan Mastrangelo and early mentor Kate Johnson Philips as well as a stay with the daughters and their partners on the Hudson River in a renovated 18th century pub. In her last years, but really throughout her life, she was sustained by wonderful friendships and, in the last 15 years, by the beauty of the prairie and great love within her marriage. There were more challenges than cancer in those years, and both Steve and Susan learned the privilege as well as difficulties of caregiving, lessons in love that every human should experience.
Susan is survived by her husband, Steve Heymans, her parents, brother and sister, three step-daughters, and both nieces and nephews and great-nieces and nephews. We are grateful to all those who stepped up during her illness, those who brought food, sent cards, visited, called, and prayed. She never felt alone and we wanted for nothing. We are also grateful for the care provided by Dr. Ufearo and the Coborn’s Cancer Center’s many skilled and compassionate nurses, CentraCare Hospice, the Church of Saint Joseph, and the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Sisters at sbm.osb.org. Better yet, buy and read one of her six books, her legacy, all available at lullu.com under a search for her name.
