Angie was 35 when she, her husband, and son moved into their first home. It was red brick with a big picture window and a pasture out front where their horses could graze. It was almost a dream come true. 

Almost, because Angie was dying. The lump she’d found just two years earlier had metastasized, multiple times. In the beginning doctors cut off both breasts, hoping to take the cancer with them. But the disease was stealthy, hiding somewhere inside, then popping up here and there: liver, lymph nodes, spine, brain. She was pumped full of chemo. Blasted with radiation. Time and again, surgeons opened her up, removing any fragments of the disease that they could. Then they’d stitch her back together, hoping to buy her more time. But eventually, Angie was told, there was nothing more to do.  

Hospice was called. A hospital bed in Angie’s new living room allowed her to watch the horses graze from the picture window, her favorite feature of the house. Her son, just 5, would perch on the window’s deep sill, quietly building Legos and trying to process what was happening around him. And it was all happening so fast. 

Horses are responsible for some of my dearest friendships, and it was horses who brought me Angie. We both volunteered for a local equine rescue. I put saddle time on the rescue horses, doing evaluation rides on new intakes and training rides to prepare horses for adoption. Angie, tech savvy and a gifted photographer with a company she named after her first horse, Sun Rae Photography, ran the rescue’s website and documented the horses’ rehabilitation journeys. 

Everything about Angie was big: her personality, her laugh, her heart, and even her body, ballooned by steroids. She swore like a sailor but baby-talked her horses. She rarely brooded about her illness. Instead, she’d say, “I’ll be crapping myself all morning from the *bleeping* chemo, but let’s get lunch then go take some pics of Coyote for the website!” 

It wasn’t long after Angie and I met that she took me to meet her own herd at an old stone barn she rented so she could care for them herself. Rosie, a pretty little pinto with health issues, was a pasture pet. Ella and Blue were mother and son; Angie’s husband claimed Blue as his trail mount and always stood out on the blue-eyed, medicine hat pinto. Angie’s friend Cortney was retraining Ella, a swan-necked chestnut, to ride English, and Angie beamed with a matronly pride when Cortney showed the mare for the first time. Romeo, a beautiful bay and white pinto, was stubborn and pigheaded, but he was Angie’s baby. Though top-dog in the herd, he respected Angie; in her eyes, he could do no wrong.

And Penelope, a bug-eyed, dust-colored mini, belonged to Angie’s son. 

Our work at the rescue blended easily into friendship, and Angie and I grew close quickly. By the last summer she was alive, I—a teacher with summers off—was regularly driving her to chemo appointments so her husband didn’t have to take time away from work. We’d call them “working chemos” and in her room at the hospital I’d write horse updates for the rescue while she worked on the website. Eventually, the Benadryl cocktail they’d drip through the port in her chest would hit, and when she dozed off in her chair, I’d settle in with a book or some work of my own. Usually, she’d wake groggy but feeling OK, and we’d stop at her favorite Japanese restaurant on the way home. 

Chemo stopped working and the cancer spread shortly after Angie and her husband closed on their house. They’d put up temporary fencing for the horses, but the property had no barn. Angie couldn’t work. They family was hanging in financially, but there was no extra to build a barn before winter, as hoped.

A group of friends planned a spaghetti dinner fundraiser to raise money toward a barn for Angie’s horses. Boarders and students from Cortney’s barn offered to cook, and her lesson students would serve the food. Friends and businesses donated more raffle baskets than we could store in one person’s home.

A few days before the dinner was scheduled, a group of us went to Angie’s. She was declining rapidly, now bedridden and with little appetite, and taking regular doses of morphine that her mother would administer through a dropper onto Angie’s tongue. 

“That stuff’s killing me, you know,” she’d say to her mom, delirious. “But it’s OK, Mom. It’s OK.”

It was a beautiful fall afternoon, and we wanted Angie to see her horses. While she dozed in her bed in the living room, we bathed the horses in her front yard, scrubbing their coats with shampoo and conditioning manes and tails. They grazed on the lawn to dry. 

When we tried to get Angie into her wheelchair, she didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t even sit without support. 

So we wheeled her hospital bed over to that picture window, sliding one end open like a drive-through. One at a time, friends led her horses over to the house. I sat on the windowsill next to Angie’s bed with a bucket of peppermints, luring the horses to the window with the crinkle of wrappers. Angie’s swollen hands, weakened by neuropathy, flopped helplessly. So I pressed mints into her palm, one at a time, then supported her hand with my own, reaching each treat toward the horse in the window.

We didn’t know she had so little time left, but I think Angie did. And one by one, she said goodbye to her friends. 

I got the call that she was gone three days later, on Friday morning, as I unlocked my high school classroom’s door. I ducked into the teacher’s lounge, choking back sobs.

Angie’s fundraiser was scheduled for Sunday, just two days away. Now, she’d be laid out the same day, in the funeral home just blocks from the fire hall. 2-4. 6-8. 

Before the doors opened for the fundraiser, a dozen of us walked from the fire hall to the funeral home to see our friend. Someone made matching shirts for the fundraiser—hot pink ribbons on a black background—and my heart caught in my throat when I walked up to her casket and saw Angie dressed in hers, too. 

We talked to her, as if doing so might keep her with us, joking about how dorky we were in our matching outfits, and how glad we were that her bald head was covered by a bandana rather than the itchy wig she hated. We noticed that she wasn’t wearing her bra with the sewn-in prosthetic boobs. It was probably lost, we joked, like always. (Once, it went missing for a few days and she found it in the freezer when we were on our way to chemo. “Chemo brain,” she’d said with a shrug, then she hung it on the coat rack on our way out the door.) 

We laughed, and we cried, and then we said goodbye to Angie and walked back down the street to the firehall to scoop meatballs and sell raffle tickets to all the people who loved our friend.

The fundraiser brought in over $20,000 that night. We delivered the money after the funeral the following day to Angie’s husband and son. They built a little barn for her horses and cared for them for the next few years.

But Angie’s guys weren’t really horse people; it was her love of horses that had fueled their own riding. Without her, they’d lost their fire, and they decided it was time to find new homes for the horses. Her husband asked her friends to help, and we did, each horse carefully placed and protected through contracts from the horse rescue that she’d helped found and run. 

Penelope went to Cortney’s farm, the first pony for her new little daughter.

A few years later, in 2020, I had my first child, a little boy. When my son was turning 2, Cortney called. Her girls were getting older, and Penelope had become a pasture puff. The pony had a home with her for life, Cortney said. But if Penelope would get more attention at my farm, if I thought my son would enjoy her, then I was welcome to take her home.

A few days later, I hooked up the trailer and drove to Cortney’s farm. We were both teary-eyed as Cortney said goodbye, and as I said hello, to an old friend. 

Penelope, now 16 or so, has been with us for a little over a year now, and it’s hard to remember life without her. 

She lives in a little open stall in the center of the barn, nipping at anyone who dares walk past without a pet. She bosses around her two full-sized pasturemates. Our instructor has been teaching her liberty work, which she loves; she’ll trot behind Meagan over poles or little crossrails, then nuzzle her for treats or pats when she’s done. There’s a lot of baby-talk in the barn, with Penelope here.

Our teenage students call her “P-Dawg,” and one taught her to navigate trail obstacles, showing her successfully in-hand this season. At horse shows, which Penelope loves, students fight over whose turn it is to hold her, and they walk her around the show grounds like a dog. 

The other day, my son, now 3, told me, “I love all the horses, but Pen-o-pee is my fave-wit.” He rides his bike down the aisle to her stall where she’ll nuzzle his face. He pokes tiny scraps of hay at her, giggling as she eats it, her whiskers tickling his fingers. 

Sometimes he’ll lead her to the pasture, zigzagging distractedly across the yard with her in tow. Sometimes he’ll climb on her back, learning now that a cluck will make her walk and a very dramatic “whooooooooaaaaahhhhh” will make her stop. Other times, he’ll say, “Pen-o-pee wants to dig with me,” as he scoops up shavings with a tiny little toy excavator in front of her stall as she sniffs his head.

Before bed, we crack the hallway window so he can yell, “Sleep well, Pen-o-pee,” into the dark. In the morning, he looks for her when he wakes. He’ll never remember life before her. 

This fall marks eight years since we lost Angie. Time blurs memories, and it’s harder to hear her voice or see her face in my mind. 

But fall brings her back to us all: She was born and she died in the fall, and it was her favorite season. October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and every pink ribbon will forever remind me of her. 

And having Penelope in our barn, and as part of our family, helps keep Angie close. That pony is our little silver lining, and we’re grateful for her, every day. 

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Sarah K. Susa is the owner of Black Dog Stables just north of Pittsburgh, where she resides with her husband and young son. She has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Allegheny College and an M.Ed. from The University of Pennsylvania. She teaches high school English full-time, teaches riding lessons and facilitates educational programs at Black Dog Stables, and has no idea what you mean by the concept of free time.