Susan Darlene Sutherland was born on June 20, 1947, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona to parents James and Arlene Sutherland. Growing up in Phoenix, she attended Balsz and Crockett elementary schools and Phoenix Union High School. After her family moved to Tempe in 1963, she graduated from Tempe High School in 1964 at age 16. Twenty years later, she entered Mesa Community College as an evening/summer student and received an Associate’s degree in English in 1988. She later attended Phoenix College and received Legal Assistant certification in 1995.
Susan’s only career goal was to be a secretary. In high school, she received awards for her shorthand and typing skills. At age 17, she began her clerical career at Phoenix Title & Trust Co. in downtown Phoenix.
Susan married Joseph Jensen in Mesa in 1971. The sunshine of her life, daughter Lori Jolene Jensen, was born in Tucson in 1974. After living and working at varied places during her married life, she and Lori relocated to Mesa in 1979, and Susan began work as a secretary for Mesa Public Schools, where she stayed for 30 years until her retirement in 2009. She raised Lori in Mesa, and proudly saw her attend colleges in California, culminating in Lori’s doctorate from the University of Southern California. Susan felt a special affinity for that degree, having helped Lori in a small way by using her secretarial skills to type Lori’s dissertation.
A lifelong learner, Susan kept busy in her retirement by taking various exercise classes at the senior center, attending a weekly bible study group, and a monthly book club that broadened her reading horizons. She volunteered weekly at the Tempe Historical Museum, using her clerical skills to transcribe recorded oral histories of noted Tempeans. Daily online games and puzzles kept her mind challenged. Susan made her first overseas trip in 2018 to Oman in the Arab Gulf, to visit her daughter who was living there—and where she also encountered her first camel.
Susan died peacefully on May 11, 2023, and is survived by her beloved daughter Lori of Muscat, Oman, her brother Richard and wife Gayle of Tempe, and several nieces and nephews. Cremation and inurnment will take place at Mountain View Memorial Gardens in Mesa.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.
