SUZANNE MARRIOTT: WATCHING FOR DRAGONFLIES
In Suzanne Marriott’s deeply honest and inspiring memoir, “Watching for Dragonflies: A Caregiver’s Transformative Journey” (She Writes Press, June 6, 2023), she explores how caregiving for her husband throughout his journey with chronic illness allowed her to gain a spiritual awareness that would ultimately help her through her own medical crisis and into a place of healing and solace.
Amid the many obstacles she and her husband, Michael, face after his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, Suzanne learns to be a compassionate caregiver both for him and, ultimately, for herself. Through love, psychological insights, and spiritual inquiry, she cultivates her abilities–and gains the courage to confront a medical system that saves her husband multiple times–but at other times threatens his life. Despite Michael’s many hospitalizations, he makes miraculous recoveries that bring fun and adventure back into their lives, including his numinous experience with dragonflies. When Suzanne faces her own medical crisis with cancer, their world is once again shaken–yet throughout it all, love is their bond, one even death cannot sever. Candid and illuminating, Suzanne’s story of growth through caregiving will appeal to anyone facing a life-changing crisis and seeking hard-won wisdom, comfort, and hope.
SUZANNE MARRIOTT is a memoirist and deep-travel writer who shares her transformative experiences with her readers. She was her husband’s caregiver for the ten years he suffered from multiple sclerosis, and her writings on compassionate caregiving have been published in The Union newspaper’s Healthy You magazine. Writer Advice awarded her the “Scintillating Start Prize” for the first chapter of her memoir, Watching for Dragonflies: A Caregiver’s Transformative Journey. Her personal essay, Indian Summer, won the Fall 2012 Memoir Writing Contest from Women’s Memoirs.com and was included in the eBook anthology Seasons of Our Lives: Autumn. Suzanne’s stories of deep travel have appeared in the award-winning online magazine Your Life is a Trip and in Soul of Travel Magazine.
A native Californian, Suzanne has traveled up and down the coast of her state, exploring as far north as British Columbia and south into Mexico, where she fell in love with the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende and the Maya culture of the lower Yucatan Peninsula. She has been to Europe three times and hopes to continue exploring Europe’s many cultures and natural wonders. Her interests include transcendent experiences, afterlife communication, Jungian psychology, and Tibetan Buddhism.
Suzanne holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley, an MS in education from Cal State University, Hayward (now Cal State University, East Bay), and an MA in transpersonal psychology from The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sophia University). She is a member of The Institute of Noetic Sciences, Sierra Writers, and the National Association of Memoir Writers. She lives in an ecologically conscious cohousing community in the Sierra Nevada foothills. For more information on compassionate caregiving, visit Suzanne at www.suzannemarriottauthor.com
