Grief and Wonder

Grief and Wonder: A Memoir

This is a story shaped by two truths held at the same time: profound trauma and extraordinary beauty. A childhood fractured by loss and mental illness. A lifetime of going through the motions. And underneath it all, a collection of magical things that kept calling her back to life.

For fifty years, Susan Cato was waiting. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for her life to begin. Waiting for someday. She was successful by every measure that mattered to the world. She was also absent from her own life. Then came the moment she decided to live her life instead of waiting for it.

Grief and Wonder is an unflinching memoir about a journey from survival and postponement to presence and aliveness. It traces the moment when simply existing transforms into truly living. Susan Cato weaves together childhood trauma, decades of performative living, and the pivotal recognition that waiting for life to happen is itself a kind of death. Through poetic interludes and raw honesty, she examines what it takes to stop performing and start being. To step out of survival mode and into actual aliveness. To recognize that every moment is your life, not a rehearsal for it. She explores how beauty and devastation coexist, and what it means to show up fully for your own existence.

This is a love letter to everyone who's been waiting. An invitation to choose differently, no matter what stage of life you're in. To live passionately. To show up. To find joy. Because this is not a dress rehearsal, and simply existing is not the same as really living.

"A window into an extraordinary and ordinary woman whose span of living brings words to the depth of the human experience. Susan shows us that we all carry stories that help us remember how remarkable our lives are, that there is magic in the pain, nuance in the in between, and heartbreaking beauty at the peaks of our humanity. This book is a love letter to the living, breathing woman." - Sora Schilling, Writer, speaker, and Minister of Walking Prayer. Creator of the Devoted Archetypes | Founder of Devoted Way.

About the Author

Susan has lived many lives inside this one. Mother. Executive. Master Naturalist. Amateur powerlifter. Seeker. She has wandered solo through grief and reinvention, through loss and unexpected wonder, driven always by curiosity - the bone-deep conviction that there is more, that an extraordinary life is not somewhere else but here, hiding in plain sight, waiting for us to finally look up.

Nature has been her most constant teacher. Community, her anchor. And curiosity, the kind that refuses to stop even when the answers are hard, even when the path forward is dark, has been the thread that holds it all together. Grief and Wonder is her first book. She lives in Central Virginia, where she lifts heavy things and spends time immersed in the mountains of the Blue Ridge.

Susan can be found on IG @thesusancato and at susancato.com