In December 2022, I was Associate Head of School. I’d built my career on the assumption that headship, if it came, would come the way most things in independent school leadership do, slowly, with a search committee and a timeline and a year to get my affairs in order. Instead, I got a phone call, and I was asked to step in that week.
I said yes before I’d let myself think about it, which is generally how I do the hard things. Then I spent the next month walking through my own days a half-step behind myself — nodding in meetings, running the numbers, saying the right things to the right people while I quietly went missing from the list of people I was taking care of.
My Mentor, Coach, and Friend
The following month, at a professional development workshop, I ran into AIMS Executive Director Peter Baily. I feigned composure, but he could see I was reeling. Rather than offering sympathy, he offered a name: Susanna Jones.
Susanna became my mentor, my executive coach, my friend. An advisor, my fiercest champion, my reflective skeptic, my lifeline. Now, almost a year after her sudden death, my second inner voice. The one that asks the question before I do.
We met on a freezing morning in January 2023 at the Annapolis Market House where she’d brought her own brewed tea, because of course she had. I listened to my own trepidation, and she handed me back my strengths with her dry wit.
For the next eighteen months we met nearly every Saturday — at the Market House, in my office, sometimes over Zoom. I’d arrive with a familiar complaint: I wish I could just… And she’d ask, simply: What if you did exactly that?
She walked me through my first executive contract, flew back from New York to hug me as I processed down the aisle of St. Anne’s Church for my installation, folded my family into her and Rob’s holiday parties where trustees, neighbors, and former students orbited her, all bound by the same wisdom and warmth.
We stayed connected informally during my second year of headship then reengaged regular meetings last summer as I was missing the consistency of her warm listening and practical counsel. On Friday, September 19, we had our regular call. She was in Maine. I told her about a new hire I was excited about. This year, we’d agreed, would be about my health and sustainability in the role. She died that weekend.
I received the call on Monday while in my office. I couldn’t catch my breath. I gasped for connection with others also feeling the pain of her sudden loss. Then a parent meeting, a hiring decision, a note to a grieving parent, State of the School. I showed up with the same competency anyone would expect, and underneath it I was numb and angry and sad, and made sure almost no one saw any of it. I told myself I would keep leading because of her, which was true, but it was also a place to hide. It is easier to pour yourself into other people’s problems than to sit inside your own grief, and I am good at that particular kind of easier.
I didn’t know, some days, if I could lead without her a phone call away.
At Susanna’s Corner
In July, I found a week suddenly open and remembered she’d always told me I had to see Maine. I thought, what if you did exactly that. I booked the flights within a day, and I flew out with two of my sons, both first-timers in Maine, like their mother.
We settled into the East Wind Inn and cut through a downed fence to a nineteen-day-old coffee shop called Wharfside. It was Susanna’s dream and now one of her many legacies: a place on the water built for community, not profit. Wharfside was hosting its first lobster bake of the season the night we arrived; Rob taught my sons to crack a lobster as the sun went down over the water twenty yards off. The next morning, I sat alone at Susanna’s Corner: her books; the borrow-a-journal shelf; the school magazine marking her career, reading paragraph by paragraph like someone rationing something precious. Later, walking through Susanna’s former office, I felt the strange disorientation of a space that still expected her back.
I drank cocktails at The Barn with Jolene, who’d built Wharfside alongside Susanna and now lives next door to Rob. “That I no longer have a playmate next door has made the days greyer,” she told me, then emailed me so we could stay in touch before I thought to ask.
I also learned that Marjo, an equally-esteemed head and Susanna’s competitor turned dear friend, had been summering nearby for years — a fact neither woman had known until their final years of headship. She insisted I visit while there. I drove my new executive coach past my former mentor’s old address, thinking, what if you did exactly that.
Marjo’s house was framed by hydrangea and water on three sides. The only word for it was magic, and I said so more than once. We walked the gardens, and our family members connected in laughter. I felt care, support, strength — of being in Susanna’s kitchen years prior.
Leading in Light
Driving away, I also felt something I hadn’t felt since early September. I hadn’t gone to Maine to collect stories about Susanna. I went to grasp her one more time: through Wharfside, through connection to a place and people she cherished, through Marjo’s serendipitous invitation — so that I could finally let her go, and lead with the best of her instead of the ache of missing her.
As I enter my fourth year of headship, I do so with peace. With a stronger inner voice. With stronger conviction in the lasting power of mentorship and relationships — of reflecting the strength and light of others they might not know they have.
What if you did exactly that.
