One of my oldest girlfriends died this week, Suzy Quinta McGrath Barichivich, Suzy Q, died on March 24, 2026. She was 52 years old. I gleaned from facebook posts that she had a degenerative condition of the brain called frontotemporal dementia. You can google it, but suffice it to say, it sounds terrible. I know she seems to have stopped working in 2021, so it looks like it was a slow and steady decline over several years.
I was crazy about Suzy. She was my first serious kissing girlfriend, and I think I dated her for about a year. She was a senior in high school, and I was a freshman going into my sophomore year. I think I met her at a band clinic. I know the first time I ever saw her was at a band clinic, because I can still see the image of her playing her trombone in the yellow-lit band hall, and I became smitten the the girl trombonist. I just had eyes on her. I must have gotten her number or something. I wish I could remember exactly how it all started. It makes me sad that I can’t, but I just don’t have access to many memories about Suzy or our time together. She was Catholic and that was very important to her, and she was from a large family, and all of her sisters and brothers treated me very well. By the time I was dating her, her father had already died, and that was a big part of her story. She worked a job at Bonanza steakhouse waiting tables. She was in the band, and she was in the Madrigals at THS, and she worked very hard at her academics. I remember that she was very frugal, she did not have her own car, and that she operated using her own money she earned at Bonanza as much as she could. With her father gone, and so many siblings, money was tight in her family. What I’m saying is that Suzy was the very opposite of a spoiled diva. She worked for what she had, and she was entirely down-to-Earth and completely put-together. Our worlds were so different, too. My family was small; I only had one sister. She was Catholic, and I was raised in the more fundamentalist-flavored protestant Churches of Christ, and I do remember we would sometimes have conversations about our religions. It represented a significant expansion of my social awareness at the time. I just don’t remember many specifics. I don’t remember much about what we did together, the places we would go, things like that. I suppose we went out to eat at restaurants. I had a car, and I would pick her up, and we would end up sometimes at this new neighborhood under construction that she knew about, and we’d get in the back seat and make out. In fact, Suzy is the girlfriend that I think about when I remember how when I was a teenager I could make out forever and that was enough. I never had sex with Suzy. It was completely innocent in that way. We’d go parking, and we’d sit in the car and just kiss and kiss. Just lots and lots of kissing.
For my birthday, she gave me an executive portfolio, you know, the binders that hold a legal pad, and it had my name engraved on it. It said, “Jason’s Chronicles”, and I still have it.
She was smart and hard-working. She graduated from high school and went directly to Mississippi State, having earned a good scholarship, and I went down there and visited her at least once, and I stayed at a friend of hers, and they had a fridge full of beer, and I drank all I wanted, the first time I ever got truly drunk. Bud Ice and Bud Dry are the beers I remember drinking. I do not remember much else about that trip, but our worlds seemed so radically different to me back then, her at the big university, and me stuck at Pontotoc High. I broke up with her because I couldn’t manage the long distance factor, and there was this gap between her college life and my life in high school. I met another girl in high school, and I thought the honorable thing to do would be to break up with Suzy, and she cried, and it still sort of hurts me to remember her crying that day. That was it for us, though. I talked to her again in 2009 when Crissie and I got divorced the first time. She told me a story about her boyfriend cheating on her and how she ran into him with another woman, or something like that, and another story about mothballs making her house stink. Before she got married, probably in 2015 or 2016, I reached out to her and arranged a coffee date, just to catch up, but she cancelled it, without really giving me a good reason, and she was uncharacteristically sort of rude about it, and it hurt my feelings, and I stopped communicating with her entirely from that point, so I never knew she was ill. Her death struck me completely by surprise, but I respect her family for not staging it publicly on social media like so many people do nowadays.
She was a big part of my life when I was growing up and figuring out women, and I’ve never felt anything toward her but love. Rest in peace, Suzy Q.