My Year Of Letting Go

For Susan Sarandon, 2020 was a year of finding joy in simple pleasures and learning to say goodbye. From the loss of her mother to the birth of a new grandchild, she looks back with Samantha Trenoweth.

- Samantha Trenoweth

The sun dips behind the Manhattan skyline outside Susan Sarandon’s window. It’s a crisp winter evening in the last days of 2020, a year that has swept through her life bringing gusts of challenge and change.

There was lockdown in New York and the death of her much loved Maltese-Pomeranian, Penny – “curious and bright … ambassador of love, friend of 17 years,” she wrote. “You leave a hole in my heart. Travel on sweet girl, surrounded by our love”. Also last year, Susan sold the enormous Manhattan loft in which she and her long-time partner Tim Robbins raised their three children and where she lived for almost 30 years.

Then Susan’s mother, Lenora, passed away. She died peacefully in August, at the impressive age of 97, surrounded by family and friends in Susan’s sister Meredith’s home in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Susan’s relationship with her mother was grounded in love but it had been through ups and downs, perhaps because the pair were entirely contrary in some respects (most famously their politics) but disconcertingly similar in others.

“I think she was very opinionated,” says her outspoken actress-activist daughter now. “She was smart, but she grew up in a very unusual bubble.” Abandoned by her teenage mother, Lenora was raised in a convent by nuns. “She had a very isolating, cold childhood, with no mother.”