Susan Marilyn Brooks-Druva

      Since this is Memorial day, it is appropriate to remember my late wife Susanna Brooks-Druva, Lt. Commander, Public Health Service 

She was born as Susan Neuman on 21FEB43 in Erie, PA while her Jewish father was on patrol in the North Atlantic on the sub-chasing Corvette, USS Alacrity as a Pharmacist's Mate. After the war, they moved into the projects in Queens, NY where her father became a health Inspector for the City and her mother worked as a nurse. 

While in school, she excelled in sports, primarily in track and field. After graduating at 17, she went into nursing training and work at St. John's Episcopal Hospital in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After graduating, her parents let her spend a year abroad studying medieval architecture (mostly to get her  away from her Irish American boyfriend). There she learned to ski in the Austrian Alps but came back to marry her boyfriend anyway after he finished his active duty. They moved into Greenwich Village during the 60's. She continued working as a nurse while supporting her artist husband who was spending a lot of time hanging out with Andy Wharhol and Basquat at Max's Kansas City. They had one son, David Buckley, before the marriage fell apart. David later became a Bull Rider and champion wrestler in High School. Her husband, Alan, went on to artistic success and has work hanging in the Met.

Susan left New York to study Psychology at Florida International and join the Public Health Service. She worked in the Florida migrant camps and later on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation among the Lakota. It was there, she met and married a Vietnam Vet Lakota, AIM activist and later tribal attorney, Robert Gay. She also started teaching nursing at community colleges in Kansas and Nebraska. They also had a son, Michael Gay, before that marriage ended. Michael later joined the army and was a Tank Turret Mechanic for the Forth Infantry Division in Iraq and later re-upped to become a Biomedical Tech. He came back to get his Law Degree and become a public defender for Bernalillo County.

Susan took both boys and all their possessions from Kansas and over Raton Pass (at night) to work at the Albuquerque VA hospital as an ICU nurse where she worked for over 10 years. She was also a shopsteward who won several unfair labor cases and Union President of the Nurses Union. She retired out on disability in '98' from a spinal injury after lifting a 350 lb. patient (she was only 105 lbs)

I met her at another Nurse's party in Rio Rancho in '91' and found her to be both well-read and articulate as well as beautiful and an excellent skier. We moved into Placitas and I married her a year later and we bought a home in Albuquerque's Victory Hills neighborhood.

We canvased and donated to get out the vote for over 30 years and worked to preserve entitlements and voting rights. Susan was a life-long Democrat and very proud of her national service and her father's as well of all three of her husbands as well as that of her sons. She also loved and was very proud of her three grandchildren, Gwendolyn, James and Aria. She was also very proud of her younger sister, Dr. Judy Wieland, geneticist and her nephew Derek Wieland musical director of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, or TSO.

Together, we raised three sons, losing David to mental illness and death in 2014. Now one of them, Erick Druva, is a Santa Fe public school STEM teacher with frightened minority students in Santa Fe and the other, Michael Gay, is an Iraq War Veteran and a Public Defender in Bernalillo County and who has several undocumented clients afraid for their lives.

Susanna loved our animals, dogs, cats, birds and even a ferret many of them from the neighborhood or shelters. However, as her mother said “Susan, other people adopt stray animals, you take in stray people.” and it was true. I have lost track of all the people she took in, some just guests or travelers but some were her legal labor cases or women seeking shelter from abusive husbands or people who had no where else to stay. The last person to stay with us was our son's ex-mother-in-law until she could get housing. 

Susanna also loved art and architecture as well as interior decoration. She was teaching herself to draw and paint and threw herself into her artwork with all the passion that she devoted to everything else in her life.

On Monday 14APR25, Susanna died after working all night on one of her many paintings. She wanted to find someway to express her frustration and desire to stop the march of Fascism in this country.