KASILOF, Alaska — With her husband and two children at her bedside at a Seattle cancer hospital, four-time Iditarod champion Susan Butcher - a battler with singular toughness and spirit - realized it was finally time to let go. She died at 3:25 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 5, in Seattle. She was 51.
Husband David Monson and daughters, Tekla and Chisana, left the hospital that evening, made their way aboard a ferry to Bainbridge Island, and sat in a quiet place by the water where their mother loved to go. Then they looked up at the stars.
“Tekla wore her mother’s necklace and Chisana wore her rings. We sat silently near the shore and looked up,” Monson wrote in a Web diary that he has kept since his wife went in for treatment. “The sky was an explosion of stars. I asked Chisana which one she thought was her mom. She sat on my lap and studied the sky for a long time. Finally she pointed and said, ‘I think that one. But don’t worry she is not alone.’”
Susan Butcher was one of four mushers to be crowned Iditarod champion four times. But to say Butcher won the Iditarod four times is like saying Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president. There’s a lot more to the story. Butcher left her distinctive mark on the sport and the lifestyle surrounding it that far exceeds the boundaries of sled dog racing and the state of Alaska. After sequestering herself in the backcountry for years in her early 20s to learn more about dogs, sleds and winter survival, Butcher emerged as a contender in the early 1980s. It seemed like she was forever taking second place but never able to put together a win. Her first victory in 1986 was on her seventh relentless attempt, and she would go on to dominate the race for the remainder of the decade. Something about her drive and zest for life sparked interest in the race. She has fans worldwide.
She was such a timeless icon of distance sled dog racing that it came as a shock when she announced in December that she had leukemia and was seeking a bone marrow transplant.
Chemo treatments in Seattle knocked her back, but a fortuitous break allowed her to muscle up the energy to fly north one last time to see her favorite dog race in action. She and her family dropped in at Ruby, about halfway through the 2006 race, where her presence surprised and delighted longtime friends and former competitors such as DeeDee Jonrowe.
Winning didn’t come easy to Butcher. At least, not at first. It appeared she had a race-winning team in 1985, when she had the misfortune to encounter a crazed, starving moose that attacked her team. It killed two of her dogs and injured several others, forcing Butcher to do something that simply ran counter to her nature. She scratched.
In interviews, Butcher has pointed out that quitting was never in her list of options, but sometimes circumstances forced her into a corner from which she simply could not escape. The moose attack was one example. Another was in 1991, when Butcher led the Iditarod by an hour at White Mountain - typically an insurmountable lead with 77 miles to go. But the coastal storm that year was brutal. After struggling for six hours simply to find the right route in a blinding whiteout, she felt she owed it to the dogs to turn back to White Mountain and rest. Rick Swenson and Martin Buser literally staggered through the storm in front of their teams to finish first and second that year.
“She clearly had the superior team that year,” Buser recalled.
So even for a fierce competitor who didn’t know the word “quit,” there would come times when she would have to bow out. Back in 1985 when only men had won the race before, it wound up being another woman, Libby Riddles, to claim that particular first.
Butcher would become the second woman to win the race, in 1986. She then dominated the Iditarod like no other musher ever, for the remainder of the decade, with victories in 1987 and ‘88, then again in 1990. Her success behind leaders Granite and Tolstoy helped propel the race into the national spotlight.
She made the rest of the mushers better - they had to be if they wanted to compete at her level, Buser said. “In order to beat her, you had to muster up the same kind of courage, commitment, attention to detail and fortitude that she brought to the equation,” Buser said. “A lot of racers on the scene now never had the challenge, or the joy, or the job, to do that. To race with Rick (Swenson) and Susan at the top of their game, that sort of makes me one of a special few. It certainly shaped me.”
Butcher employed that extraordinary courage and tenacity in her battle with leukemia.
Since her brief vacation back to Alaska to witness the race as it passed through the friendly village of Ruby this year, the family went back down to Seattle for the marrow transplant and therapy.
Her fight with disease began three years ago, when doctors diagnosed Butcher with an uncommon condition that triggers bone marrow to make too many red-blood cells. Sometimes, it morphs into leukemia. Even though chemotherapy treatments knocked the leukemia back somewhat, Butcher knew the only cure would be a bone marrow transplant, and she went for it. But a complication emerged after the transplant. Her body waged war on the transplanted tissue, a condition known as graft-versus-host disease.
Doctors managed to beat that back, only to learn last week that the leukemia had returned. Butcher had begun preparing for a second transplant when the disease claimed her.
Apparently, Butcher and her family knew the final moment had arrived on Saturday afternoon. As it had happened in 1985 and 1991, the musher who didn’t know the word quit also knew when it was time to accept the inevitable. “It was peaceful. The rest after her greatest race,” Monson wrote. “We told her we would be OK. That she had made us strong enough to carry on. When she was sure that we were ready, she was gone.”
The same night, as her husband and daughters were looking up at the stars, pointing at the one they thought was their mother, and Chisana said her mother wouldn’t be alone, her father answered, “Neither are we. She will be guiding us from that star.”