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Bill and Sharon went ahead with a bridge tournament they had been scheduled to play in—with Warren—that week. He managed to join them for dinner one night at the hotel where the tournament was being held, and he did watch them play for a while, which helped to distract him. Another night they were over at the house, where Warren wanted them to sit with him to watch the Charlie Rose video of Susie’s interview. Astrid didn’t want to see it, which was just as well, and he was afraid to watch it alone. They put it on the DVD player and it began to play. After a while, Warren was weeping. Bill left the room while Sharon crawled into his lap and rocked him as he cried.28

The mere mention of Susie’s name sent Warren into tears. As the funeral approached, it became apparent to Susie Jr., who was planning the event, that something else was bothering her father. It dawned on her what this must be. “You don’t have to go,” she told him.

Warren was overcome with relief. “I can’t,” he said. To sit there, overwhelmed with thoughts of Susie, in front of everyone, was too much. “I can’t go.”29

Unlike Warren, hundreds of others did want to grieve for Susan Buffett in person, at some sort of memorial service. None was ever held. Only the family, a couple of Susie’s closest friends, Bono and his wife, Ali, and Bobby Shriver were invited to the funeral. Susie’s musician friend Dave Stryker played the guitar, and the Reverend Cecil Williams from Glide Memorial Church conducted the service. Bono sang “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” The grandchildren wept.

And for several weeks more, that was all. Warren faced the emptiness. Many people, including Susie herself, had questioned how well he could survive without her. He had never recovered from the death of his father and still could not face the unfinished business of Howard’s boxes of papers in the basement. As Sharon put it, he had a tendency to think in the third person. But he suffered this time in the first person, grieving fully, living in the now, even though the now terrified him.

Susie’s death carried with it deep intimations of his own mortality. His seventy-fourth birthday was approaching with its metronomic tick of doom. He wanted cheering up badly and talked to a couple of friends who then made plans, as he wished, to visit him in Omaha on his birthday. A few days later, Susie Jr. called them and said, Don’t come.30 Warren wasn’t ready. Indeed, distraction was not the best thing for him. The process of mourning could not be shortened; it could only be endured.

He could not escape from grief, even in sleep. The nightmares haunted him, every night the same. The separation from Susie, the split that he had never been able to contemplate during all the years of their living apart, was happening right before his eyes. He was captive on the endless ride to the hospital in Cody, locked inside the ambulance, helpless to help her, unable to stop the momentum of the wheels. The silent mountains stood silhouetted against the July stardrift in the thin evening air. Silently the driver picked his way through the winding hills. The road unreeled before them, mile after mile, rows of trees passing like pilgrims up to the foothills above. In the back, Susie lay on the cot, pale and still. The sounds in the ambulance faded as the miles went by. Strands of juniper hung like dim moss from the mountainsides while the road ahead stretched thinner in the distance. The stars fell still in the vast black overhead. Time slowed to eternity.

All he had ever asked of her was not to leave him, and she had promised that she never would. No matter how many other people she had cared for and supported, no matter which way her heart had tugged her, through all her travels, no matter how many different directions she had run, Susie had always come back to him. She had never let him down.

Now there was no response. He needed her so much that it was impossible that she would leave him. He would