SuEllen Fried, who gave joy and stood with those in pain, said we can all change lives | Opinion

The last time the one-of-a-kind kindness advocate SuEllen Fried left her home in Prairie Village before her death on Oct. 3 , at age 92, it was to say goodbye to her incarcerated friends in Lansing Correctional Facility.

“I don’t even know how she did it, other than the power of her will,” because she was essentially never out of bed again, her oldest son Jeffrey Fried told me. But she said, ‘we’re going,’ put on some lipstick and went off to give every lifer one last hug. She died a week later, after a life spent bringing joy while standing heart-to-heart with those in pain.

A pioneer in dance therapy, she talked about mental illness in the 1960s and brought her anti-bullying message to more than 90,000 students across 37 states. Those sessions began this way: “I am so delighted to have this chance to learn from you about bullying.” But the kids heard her, too: “I sat in on some of those,” Jeffrey said, and saw some who had been the bully step up to acknowledge the harm they’d done.

In 1982, she and Greg Musselman, who was at the time serving a life sentence, put together what later became the inmate-led Reaching Out from Within self-help program in Lansing. It’s now used in every Kansas prison and in Missouri and North Carolina, too.

A few years later, in 1989, she co-founded the country’s first Alvin Ailey summer camp for urban kids, which has since spread to 10 other cities. “Alvin said, ‘I want an intensive dance program’ ’’ for middle-schoolers, said Bunni Copaken, who worked on the program’s first grant. And “SuEllen had the skills and lived experience to make it real. It meant a great deal to her to do something with dance for all children.”

The magnet on her fridge said, ‘Life begins once you get outside your comfort zone.’ But her life here began in 1951, when 19-year-old SuEllen Weissman of University City, Missouri, was dancing in the St. Louis Muny Opera and hoping to try her luck in New York. Then, though, she came to visit her best friend in Kansas City for a week and returned from a party announcing that she was in love with someone named Harvey Fried and was going to marry him. “I didn’t even know Harvey Fried!” her friend told me.

Fortunately for Harvey, their three children, seven grandchildren, SuEllen herself, of course, and who knows how many others whose lives have been so much better because of it, Miss Weissman did not go through with her audition for the Broadway musical, ‘ Top Banana ,’ by Johnny Mercer. And she never did move to New York.

For what she did instead, President Richard Nixon asked her to join his task force on mental health and President George H.W. Bush recognized her as one of his “ 1,000 points of light .” She appeared on “Today,” “Good Morning America,” and was shocked to learn that a giant mural of her petite self was going to be painted in the Kansas City Museum. At her 90th birthday party, she performed a song-and-dance number for her guests: Lerner and Loewe’s “ I Could Have Danced All Night .”

‘Anybody else would have been barred!’

How she changed the course of so many lives — or as she would have insisted, simply got to be a witness to those transformations — was “like magic, and I’m about to cry,” her formerly incarcerated friend Von Vonner said. “Whatever came upon her to want to go down in the depths of hell and actually touch you? There was a rule you couldn’t hug in prison, and that rule went right out the door with SuEllen. Anybody else would have been barred! Then you went back to that cell with something, looking at the patterns. She held me up until I could hold myself up.”

Other than having children, Von says that never wanting to betray SuEllen’s faith in her has been the greatest responsibility of her life. When Von had surgery a couple of years after her release, SuEllen brought muffins and served cocoa to everyone in her family. “She served my mom ,” Von said, as if she still can’t believe it.

“President or prisoner, she’d treat you the same,” said Brian Betts , “and when you’re the person who isn’t the president, and you’re used to being dehumanized and someone speaks so much positivity to you, it lifts you up and gives you strength.”

When I remarked to Brian that she not only seemed illuminated from the inside herself, but lit so many other people’s candles, he answered that those had been “candles that were discarded and were not meant to be lit again. She was bringing light to people trapped inside a dark tunnel” in a way that he, too, called “magic.”

But the magic that Von and Brian describe also involved decades of showing up and then being intently present. What she did required focus, ferocity and commitment. And singular as SuEllen was, I know she would want me to say that we can all practice kindness and then watch magic happen.

Cha-cha lessons at Osawatomie State Hospital

When I asked her family how SuEllen got to be SuEllen, I was kind of surprised that there actually is an answer. “Mom was who she was,” Jeffery said. “She got so many things accomplished because she was so comfortable with who she was.” Which was someone “just so touched by people” and keenly aware of what she saw as her responsibility to those who were not so comfortable. “Everything was about making things better for other people,” her youngest son Marc Fried said.

How to go about that, though? As a young mom, “she was not sure what she was going to do with herself,” her daughter Paula Fried said. Until, when Paula was in grade school, SuEllen was asked if she would come to Osawatomie State Hospital and give the psychiatric patients there some cha-cha lessons.

“She didn’t know the cha-cha, but she went, and Mom thought it went terribly. The volunteer director said, ‘That was amazing.’ ’’ Wait, it was? Yes, because “you treated every person with dignity.”

That day led to her 17 years of groundbreaking work in the hospital, her dogged advocacy for those with a mental illness and her charter membership in the American Dance Therapy Association.

Likewise, her anti-bullying work started the day that Paula, then in college and working during the summer with pediatric cancer patients, invited a dying 10-year-old and her mother over for lunch. As they were all chatting, the girl said that yes, she was looking forward to starting fifth grade, but was worried about recess, because some of the kids thought it was funny to pull her wig off and then stand around pointing and laughing at her.

“I have never recovered from that conversation,” SuEllen told The Star in 2012. “I have never been able to put out of my mind a 10-year-old little girl who was trying to figure out how she was going to die and let go of her life, and her biggest problem was kids making fun of her because she was bald because of cancer.”

‘She didn’t care about credit’

She got into her prison work after receiving an inmate newsletter in 1978 that said that 80% of the Lansing lifers who had participated in a survey said they had been abused as children. Right away, she got in touch with Terry McClain, the inmate who’d written the newsletter. He invited her to visit him and the others in Lansing, which is where she met her Reaching Out from Within co-founder Greg Musselman , who was later paroled and has since died.

He told her all of the things inmates wanted to learn so much more about — abuse and anger and addictions. So she rounded up experts who came to Lansing and gave presentations on all of those topics, which then became the basis of the 400-page “Blue Book” that looks at the roots and results of violence, and is the basis of Reaching Out from Within.

Retired journalist and longtime Topeka women’s prison volunteer Dave Ranney saw both what SuEllen did for inmates and how she did it. “She would come to all of the Reaching Out from Within groups every quarter, and before the group would start, she’d go around and meet everybody — like, 20 people. And then, standing in the middle, she’d say, ‘Well, Mary,’ and ‘Well, Jane,’ and repeat everybody’s name. I had to have name tags and she’s 90! The point was, you are special and you are worthy and I appreciate being with you. Incarcerated women have never gotten a participation trophy, and here comes SuEllen Fried.”

In the Jewish faith, someone who dies on or around the new year, Rosh Hashanah, is considered “tzaddik,” a person of great righteousness, held back by God until the year just past is over because they were so needed here. SuEllen died on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

The other night when I went to her home, where her family was sitting shiva, I walked in with a gentleman carrying a gift that his nephew, Michael Yardley , had made for them in the Larned State Correctional Facility. It was a bouquet of the most delicate flowers fashioned out – what, air? No, masking tape, feathers, things he’d found and made into something new. Which to me was the perfect representation of what SuEllen herself did, and helped so many others see that they could do, too.

“That was my angel,” MIchael told me, weeping, when he called me from Larned later to talk about “the ripple effect of her infectious spirit” and how, the next day after burying her husband Harvey, she’d testified at a hearing on his behalf. “She didn’t care about credit,” he said. “She’d be so embarrassed now.”

Signature ‘Power of Kindness’ buttons

Obviously, her willingness to stand close to pain was extraordinary. But so much of what she did we can do as well: Her rules to live by included always stopping at lemonade stands and always being the one who offers to take photos of others who look like they’d like that. “As a mom and a grandma, she was always present,” Jeffery said. That is a huge thing, but those who knew her talk about how she also did small things that added up to so much.

Every day, she handed out her signature green “Power of Kindness” buttons to anyone she caught doing something good, and then asked them to pay it forward by passing it on. Jeffery said he did that in an airport the other day, to someone who had watched his suitcase for a minute, “and the man started crying.” We all want to be seen, and we all want to be asked.

What I think SuEllen would most want me to pass on to you would not fit on a button, or work particularly well as a slogan if it did. But it’s that you do not even have to know how to cha-cha to help others dance.

SuEllen asked that any contributions in her memory be made to the following organizations:

Reaching Out From Within, 630 Minnesota Ave., Kansas City, KS 66101 rofw.org/donate

Prevent Child Abuse America, 33 N. Dearborn St., Suite 2300, Chicago, IL 60602 preventchildabuse.org/donate

Uncornered Inc., 218 Adams Street, PO Box 220605, Dorchester MA 02122 uncornered.org/donate/