In Memory of Nathan Suter

Sometimes the death of someone you didn’t know well leaves you feeling gutted.

I met Nathan Suter in San Francisco in 2012; he’d flown west from Vermont to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Root Division, an arts nonprofit he’d co-founded a decade earlier. A decade later, Nathan and I served together on the board of another arts nonprofit, In Situ Polyculture Commons (ISPC). We were both invited to join the inaugural ISPC board because Nathan founded Root Division back in 2002. That is to say, the wonderful organization Nathan started in San Francisco brought artists and other creative folks together, and the co-founders of ISPC, Candace Jensen and Owen Schuh, were, like me, part of Root Division in the early teens; without RD, our paths would likely not have crossed. In 2020, when Candace and Owen were assembling a board for their brave and ambitious project in southeastern Vermont, Michelle Mansour, then the Executive Director of Root Division, suggested they connect with Nathan as a sounding board.

There was very little Nathan didn’t have keen insight about, but it wasn’t just his wealth of knowledge that so impressed me; he was always kind, compassionate, and thoughtful, moving ideas or projects forward with good questions and musings – nothing opaque, mind you; his perspective was always clear, but so…considerate.

Apparently (and not surprisingly), he had ties to a number of other nonprofit organizations, especially in northern Vermont (he lived in Montpelier). Youth coaching, food co-ops, film/screenwriting orgs, civic engagement, local parks, bike sharing – the list is long. Reading tributes from those who knew him well and/or worked with him, you see words like “mentor” often, but there was one description that jumped out at me because it seemed so succinct and right; another colleague described Nathan as “an irrepressible listener[, ] irrepressibly attentive[, a]nd irrepressibly kind.” He was the type of guy who, in the process of offering helpful advice about 501(c)3 housekeeping would say something I’d jot down in one of my sketchbooks to return to later, not in the context of board work, but something about what he’d said or how he said it inspired me to be a better, more present father, a better, more ambitious artist – just a better, more fully-realized human being.

This past week, Nathan went out for his standard morning trail run in Montpelier, suffered a heart attack, and didn’t make it home to his wife and kids. I learned of his death via a voicemail I listened to as my older son’s Little League team concluded a game on Saturday. As I distributed the team snack bags to the players and tracked down my younger son, I kept thinking about Nathan’s family and about all the people whose lives he touched in more direct and intimate ways than he did mine. Some deaths just hit harder. I keep getting choked up as I write this….and I’m just a guy who served on a board and attended Zoom meetings with Nathan. His memory will be a blessing, of course, for so, so many…but he had so much more attentive listening and kindness to spread ‘round.