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Susan English Fetcho (Miller) January 22, 1953 – July 31, 2024

Susan English Fetcho (Miller) January 22, 1953 – July 31, 2024

Anyone touched by Susan Fetcho will miss her deeply. Her knowing smile, her thoughtful pauses, her regal presence, her pleasing voice—all her unique traits are remembered and recounted time and again by those she encountered along her epic, influential journey. Out of many amazing qualities, one rare gift that stands out to close friends and colleagues was her wisdom when conflicts surfaced. You could always count on Susan to listen intently and respond compassionately with a calming presence. Along the way, Susan cultivated a broad, grateful community of friends and artists, neighbors and gourmands with her soulmate, David. They filled the world by wholeheartedly sharing their music, wit, and light. They were so well paired that sometimes it is hard to find the thread where one begins and the other ends.
Susan entered the world in New York City on January 20th, 1953 as the first of three children born to Lois Edith (Reichhard) Miller and Ryland Duke Miller, starting life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She is descended from the Adam Miller family, who befriended Daniel Boone, as the first settlers to farm Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and erect a log cabin, which still stands.

The Millers moved to Deerfield, Illinois in 1958, where Susan excelled in gymnastics, dance, concert viola, snow skiing and horsemanship. She loved riding the family’s sturdy Belgian/quarter horse cross, Apollo, named to honor NASA’s moon missions, and skillfully competed in the arcane art of Barrel Racing (!) and other equestrian events. Susan graduated from Deerfield High School in 1971 and the University of Denver in 1975 after a year in Heidelberg, Germany, studying abroad and traveling extensively throughout Europe.

Throughout her life, Susan developed close friendships with all the family’s animals—especially the dogs—and picked up an encyclopedic appreciation for flowers, birds, and hummingbirds in particular. In recent years, Susan and David delighted in the antics and attitudes of their Belgian Tervurens, BeBop and Tango.

Susan married her soul mate David on June 25, 1977. Separating their efforts can be challenging, as they mentored each other for 45 years, distinct and yet conjoined in their efforts and intellect. Together, they gifted hundreds of individuals with their talents, wit, and warmth, combining their innate creativity and spiritual energies to countless and amazing projects as well as many earnest conversations, always driven by a passionate love for the arts and for truth. They eagerly shared their awe of the possibility of infinite creativity at arts conferences and workshops that took them from Oakland to Australia, New Zealand, Bali, Chile, and Oxford.

For over 25 years, Susan taught music, dance and art as a Performing Arts faculty member at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland, California, never ceasing to be surprised and delighted by the imaginations of her young students. The opportunity to open up a young person’s eyes to the joy that the arts can produce always drove her to put 200% of herself into teaching. Susan’s love for music wove a thread through her entire life, from elementary school to high school church choirs, to joyful participation right up to the end in Appalachian Shape-Note and Sacred Harp meetings around America and with a local Balkan Community Choir called Zele. In recent years, her foundation supported artists like Kitka, an Oakland-based women’s choir performing Balkan and Slavic music. Instruments, guitars, whistles, ocarinas, tambourines and keyboards were available for ready music making complimented a beautiful collection of original art work throughout the Fetcho home.

In the 1980s, Susan and David co-founded the New Berkeley Performance Consort, an intermedia and collaborative performance ensemble. They ultimately composed, produced, directed, and performed in more than a dozen original dance/music/theatre productions for theatrical, collegial, and liturgical venues over a fourteen-year period. As a dancer, Susan remained close friends with her beloved core group of dancers all her life. NBPC performed and taught in the greater San Francisco Bay area and internationally, by invitation. During the unwieldy age of film and non-digital media, NBPC incorporated original film, live acting, sculpture, recordings and video segments as integral creative components, collaborating with college students and professional artists. Such works intentionally challenged the creative status quo and the clichés that so often characterized in religious art at the time.

In the late ‘80s, the Fetchos founded BàCAN, the Bay Area Christians in the Arts Network, overseeing a fellowship of artists based at Berkeley’s First Presbyterian Church and New College Berkeley for more than a decade. They taught liturgical design at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and accepted invitations to lecture widely on issues pertaining to the need for spiritual expression in the contemporary arts and artistic expression in theological studies. Susan and David collaborated as liturgical designers/consultants with many churches and national organizations here and abroad. They strove to bridge the divide between theology and the arts during conference workshops for IMAGE: A Journal of the Arts and Religion (1992, 1993), New College Berkeley, CIVA/Christians In the Visual Arts (1995), and the C.S. Lewis Foundation (1998) in Oxford. Susan served as a trustee of Radix Magazine, a thoughtful and incisive interfaith publication, for years. They also co-produced many documentaries at great personal expense, eventually through Found LightTV, including Out of Bounds, a refreshing look at seven emerging Bay Area artists (1995); Los Dias de los Muertos for the Oakland Museum of California (2001); and I Can Feel Another Planet in My Soul, about the renowned outsider/visionary artist, Howard Finster, which debuted at Lehigh University (2008). Found Light TV also produced programs for educational, religious, non-profit and corporate markets.

Susan is survived by her brother Craig Montgomery Miller (Judy Danskin) of Alexandria, Ontario, Canada; her cousins Penny Payne Olson (Michael) of Port Washington and Greenport, NY and Holly English-Payne of Proctor, Vermont; John Miller of Evanston, Illinois; Liz Miller Leonard of Wilmette, Illinois; and Laura Miller Bala of Cleveland, Ohio; her niece Cassady Rebecca Johnson Einglett (Bradd) of Hohenwald, Tennessee; and great-nephew Adam Johnson (Ashley) and their daughters in Columbus, Georgia.

Over the past decade, Susan bravely met the medical challenges of her life with courage, grace and a great sense of humor. A devoted researcher, Susan and her close-knit circle of friends quickly determined diet and exercise regimens to improve her prognosis. Her first bout with cancer came and went more than a decade ago, and life went on for years afterwards. Facing her own mortality during this time, she bravely elected to travel, to sing, to perform, and to live life even more fully. As she wrote in the East Bay Times:
My brother is a professional harmonica player. From him I’ve learned that the instrument is animated by two actions: blowing and sucking. Sounds rude, but it’s true. Inhale and exhale. Ebb and flow. Yin and yang. Life’s all about balance. When cancer shows up, you realize that yours has become—as in the film Koyaanisqatsi—a life out of balance, a microcosm of our planet’s crisis.
Learning that her first cancer treatment had been successful, she reflected:
You resolve to excise the phrase ‘sometime we should’ from your vocabulary. You pray for deliverance from the demon of multi-tasking, discipling yourself to your Zen-master dogs and your kindergarten students who practice presence in the now. You keep gratitude lists: artichokes, Bebop, bees, David, family, friends, pesto, Tango, zydeco. You become an omnivore, a slow-food flexitarian, each colorful fruit and vegetable, grain and legume bringing unique cancer-blocking phytochemicals to the healing potluck. You sing your heart out, your attention so completely absorbed that time disappears. Ellington and Elvis. Balkan women’s music and sacred harp. You sail past Angel Island into the sunset and back to Berkeley under a sky full of stars, your gaze rising to meet the curved embrace of their flickering benediction. You give thanks for the ecology of kindness that has sustained you, and hope that the pursuit of balance, of work and rest, passion and play, mission and creativity might just save your life. You remember to breathe. Out and in. In and out.

In February 2021, David unexpectedly passed away, and shortly after this shocking loss, cancer challenged a different area of Susan’s body, requiring surgery and a protracted and difficult chemo management protocol. Friends were relieved when this regimen extended her life once more, enabling joyful reunions and travel to Mendocino (a favorite getaway with David), Spain, and the Northwest USA. Susan also rejoiced that the treatment somehow resulted in ‘the best haircut’ of her life—so good that she could retire her trademark hats, essential in the past for corralling her wild and wayward hair. Silver linings indeed.

Susan mentored hundreds of children as the Fetchos responded to their inability to have their own by gathering a vibrant village of ‘multi-talented artists and good people’, as Susan would put it, who benefited from their companionship immeasurably. All who knew her are thankful for this community of helpers and advisors, who contributed with all their hearts during Susan’s efforts to coordinate David’s memorial, and the last days that followed. We are thankful that Susan now knows where we go in the hereafter that she sang and danced and wrote about so beautifully, in anticipation.

From “The Farthest Field” by David Dodson, selected by Susan for David’s memorial service:
​There is a land high on a hill
​Where I am going, there is a voice that calls to me…
​…The fragrant flowers, the days and hours
​Will not be counted, and peaceful songs will fill the air
Walk with me and we will see the mystery revealed
​​When one day we wend our way up to the farthest field.
Oh my dear friends, I truly love
​To hear your voices a-lifted up in radiant song
​Though through the years, we all have made
​Our separate choices, we’ve ended here where we belong.



If you would like to learn more about our services, please contact Fernwood Cemetery and Funeral Home at: 415-383-7100 or through the form on our Contact page.

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