“If you’re reading this, know that I am not around anymore. I have moved on.
However, who better to know about my life than me?
So, rather than have someone else try to make an attempt to tell something about me I have decided that someone should be me.
So here goes:
At 3:30 p.m. on a rainy Friday afternoon on April 23, 1948, a new cry could be heard down a long hallway at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. That was me making my first attempt to be heard.
The proud parents were Betty Lou and Dorwin Eugene Tedder. I was to be their one and only child. How lucky I was to be their one and only child, a daughter.”
This was as far as my mom got in writing her own obituary — a goal she had while in hospice, and one that I admired. As her daughter, and a writer, I suppose it’s fitting that I carry her words forward, just as I’ll carry her legacy forward.
So, here goes, Mom. I’ll do my best.
Sue Ann Tedder was, in fact, an incredibly lucky child. Born to two devoted and loving parents, she grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived in the same small, blue-shuttered house on Alice Street — a quiet cul-de-sac that wrapped around a small neighborhood playground — for her entire childhood.
She graduated from Ann Arbor Pioneer High School in 1966, where she’d had so much artistic talent that she was asked to design the program for her senior prom.
She was in student government as well as on the Hostess Committee where, “if we had someone visiting, we gave tours, and if there was any event where they needed people to serve food, we did that as well.”
A foreshadowing of the amazing event planner and hostess she would one day become.
Some of my favorite stories about her childhood include:
How my grandma once posed her in a haystack for a photo op, only to realize it was filled with red ants (we have the tearful photos of a young Sue to prove it); how she and her parents took road trips all over New England and to New Orleans; how she learned to cook dinners and make her famous English Toffee in 7th grade.
How she and a friend once went to the Detroit airport to greet the new British band, the Rolling Stones, and were only a handful of people there to meet them; how she went to a Beatles concert in Detroit, but the screaming fans were so loud she couldn’t hear a single song; how she’d dress up her pet bunny in doll clothes and take her down the playground’s slide.
And how her childhood terrier Jingles was so smart that when he’d get scolded by my grandmother he’d trot off in a huff to the park across the street and stay there glaring at their house, sharply turning his head away whenever my mom or grandma tried to call him back home.
After graduating high school, Sue attended Eastern Michigan University, where she studied English (she loved her Shakespeare class), and joined the Alpha Zi Delta sorority.
Throughout college she loved the camaraderie of living with her sorority sisters, and had the rare benefit of a mother who would come pick up her laundry once a week and then bring it back to her, neatly folded. As she said, she was a very lucky only child.
In her senior year of college, she met the man who would become her husband, Gerald Thomas DeRose. He was the oldest of 11 children, and as an only child herself, the prospect of suddenly having so many brothers and sisters was incredibly intriguing.
A year later, they married on March 20, 1971 at St. Andrews Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Sue and Jerry spent the early years of their marriage living in St. Joseph, Michigan, where they fixed up old houses, including an old Victorian on State Street, while Sue earned her Master’s Degree in education from Western Michigan University.
She taught first and second grades from 1971 to 1978 at a small country school with four other teachers, which she loved. She especially loved story time, when her students would gather around her to be read to, the girls all volunteering to comb her long dark hair.
Sue and Jerry eventually built their own home on a golf course in Saint Joseph, where they loved entertaining family and friends.
Sue was known for her cooking, and famous for making a dozen different kinds of Christmas cookies every year, an endeavor she began in October, freezing batches and collecting large coffee cans so that come December she could gift family and friends cans filled with an assortment of cookies.
Eventually, Sue and Jerry decided to have children, and on March 21, 1979 she gave birth to a daughter (me), Kimberly Ann DeRose. Sue quit teaching to stay home with me full-time, something she’d been eager to do, and enjoyed taking me to a nearby pond to feed ducks, outside to play in the piles of fall leaves on the deck, and into the front yard to make snowmen in the dead of winter.
A few years later, though, Sue and Jerry would decide to leave the cold snowy winters of Michigan for good, and move across country to Santa Barbara, California, where several of Jerry’s family members had already relocated.
They spent the first few years in Santa Barbara as they had their early years in St. Joseph — fixing up and selling homes. But eventually they settled into a small, ranch-style home on Ferrara Way, where they planted citrus trees and a small yellow rose bush in the front yard; hosted large Christmas gatherings every year; and eventually, on Aug. 7, 1984, greeted their son Geoffrey Allen DeRose.
In addition to mothering her two children, and doing the administrative work for the family business, Sun Coast Realty (where she had a talent for befriending anyone who called in on the phone or dropped into the office), Sue became well known for her warm and loving hostess skills.
Over the years she threw countless children’s parties, baby showers, Christmas gatherings, dinner parties, and weddings for both family and friends.
The childhood birthday parties she threw for my brother and me were always creative — be it cake-decorating contests, pirate themes, fancy tea parties, original art projects, or improv games — and were a testament to what a great teacher she had been (and, frankly, continued to be).
She loved entertaining, and once she and our family moved into Sue & Jerry’s home on the Upper East Side — a historic Spanish-style house that they spent years lovingly turning into a truly beautiful space — she regularly opened it up for parties, open houses, and celebrations.
Sue and Jerry attended St. Anthony’s Catholic Church for many years, but early on Sue also joined a bible study at Montecito Covenant, the church that became her spiritual home.
Sue was very involved in church life, and made incredibly close, dear friends, including the members of her bible study and her Grateful Heart Group. Sue was also a member of Family’s Anonymous for over 22 years, where she experienced deep fellowship and made incredibly close friends.
Sue was the grandmother to three grandchildren — Graham DeRose-Sample, age 12, Francesca DeRose-Sample, 7, and Scarlet DeRose, 3, — all who she absolutely adored, and with whom she loved to read books, bake cookies, squeeze fresh orange juice, surprise with chocolate rocks buried in the backyard, and shower with way too many gifts.
She was also the mother-in-law to Brad Sample, whom she loved to joke around with and tease; and the sister-in-law to Louise Hill, whom she considered her best friend.
Sue and Jerry enjoyed traveling with family and dear friends, visiting Italy several times (Sue especially loved the Amalfi coast), as well as Argentina, Uruguay, Hawaii, Siesta Key, Key West, Michigan, and New York.
Though Sue was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in April 2025, and went into hospice care in August 2025, she spent the final months of her life living precisely how she wanted:
Eating the things she loved (she was a big fan of sour gummy candies, chocolate, cinnamon rolls, lattes, and Cheetos); spending time with family and friends; enjoying her grandchildren; painting with water colors; watching her favorite ’80s and ’90s rom-coms, indulging in HGTV shows and dog shows (she was a huge fan of “Sitting With Dogs” with pet rescue advocate Rocky Kanaka on YouTube); and running the family’s dinner schedule — she bought several Ina Garten cookbooks while in Hospice and loved trying out new recipes.
In fact, during the 2025 holidays she made no less than eight kinds of Christmas cookies with her caregivers’ help, along with fresh bread, sticky buns, and cinnamon rolls, and taught me how to make her famous English Toffee, insisting we make three batches (after I talked her down from four).
She will be remembered by so many people who loved her laughter, her deep kindness, her ability to create beauty all around her, and her warmth; and I have no doubt that her memory will be carried forward by each and every one.
One of her favorite sayings, which I think sums up her approach to life quite well, was, “Be serious about your life, but don’t take life too seriously.” Something we could all stand to live by.
Sue’s ashes will be scattered in several locations, including the prayer garden at St. Andrews Church in Ann Arbor where her parents’ ashes are interned. A memorial for her will be held by our family in Santa Barbara, as well as in Ann Arbor.
In the meantime, we ask that if you would like to honor her memory, you take a little extra time to be kind to a stranger, and that you make a donation to either the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, or to Flip Coffee, Rocky Kanaka’s Coffee Farm, which raises pet rescue and rehabilitation funds.