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The ambulance crept onward through the darkened mountains. The quiet hum of the oxygen tank mingled with his tears. In the back there was only calm, a bare whisper of breath, no obvious sound of pain.

It was Warren’s chest that burned, it was his heart that exploded with each revolution of the wheels. You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, please don’t leave me.

But Susie was already passing beyond his reach; she was now in other hands. And the force of her withdrawal from his world to the next was tearing him apart.

62

Claim Checks

Omaha and New York City • 2004–2008

The first aftershocks of Susie’s death occurred at the reading of her will, even though most of its provisions were not unexpected. She left nearly all of her Berkshire stock, worth almost $3 billion, to the newly renamed Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, now headed by her daughter. Another six hundred shares, worth $50 million at the time, went to each of her children’s foundations.

She had been generous to people she cared about, although her husband’s influence doubtless dampened her generosity. Her children each received $10 million. A long list of other people, headed by Kathleen Cole and her husband, received smaller amounts. She had amended her will in the year before her death through a codicil executed by a new lawyer; the codicil gave John McCabe $8 million. It also left $1 million to Ron Parks, the friend who had spent so many years as the de facto chief financial officer of “STB Enterprises.”1

The secret codicil shocked nearly everyone. Susie had never reconciled the divisions within her world and in the end chose to leave them unexplained. The life she lived for others was her legacy; her inner truth would remain forever unspoken. Thus it would be left to others to form their own interpretations.

Warren had long loved his wife as an ideal. She had been the “grounding person who was his connection to the outside world” as well as the “glue that held the family together.”2 After her death, he was never able to look at Susie’s photograph without crying. But he did not lapse into a years-long depression, or commit suicide, as Susie had suggested he might. Instead he mourned. For about two months, he seemed deeply depressed. And then, as most people do, he gradually returned to living his life. The bathtub memory went to work and his love for Susie overcame the rest.

“That was the most important relationship he had personally,” says Howie. “No question about it. And he depended on it heavily. But my dad is a survivor. Anybody who thought he was going to fall apart because my mom died, I think didn’t know him. Because he is not going to fall apart over anything. He’s got his own toughness, even though people may not see him that way. He didn’t get to where he is because he’s some kind of wimp.”3

That toughness helped him not just to survive but to adapt and even to grow. When the dreamlike assumption that “Susie will take care of everything” popped like a soap bubble, Warren began to show a newfound realism. As each month passed, he began to deal more acceptingly with endings and mortality and to connect with his children in a new way. As his sister Bertie would say, Susie seemed to have willed him some of her strength, a little of her emotional fluency, and a lot of her generosity. Warren seemed to be acquiring unexpected dimensions to his inner life. He reclaimed some of the responsibility for the emotional territory that he had always left to his wife. He became more aware of his children’s feelings, of what they were doing and of what mattered to them.

Susie Jr. quickly stepped into the leadership role that her mother had played, especially when it came to philanthropy, a job for which she had been preparing much of her life. She began to hire and to enlarge the foundation’s offices to plan for the much larger sums of money it would now be giving away. Running two foundations seemed to her a wonderful opportunity, not a burden.

Peter was taking Spirit—The Seventh