I didn’t know it until yesterday, but Susan Buffett died last month.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/29/news/newsmakers/susanbuffett_obit/

She was an interesting woman, as I guess you’d have to be to be married to Warren. Susan was Warren’s sister’s roommate at Northwestern. She had wanted to marry someone else, but Warren convinced her father that he was the better man for her. She was jewish, and had wanted to marry a gentile. Warren, while not jewish, told her father “I’m jewish enough for you, and christian enough for her.”

In 1977, after her 3 kids were grown and out of the house, she told Warren she was moving to San Francisco to pursue a music career. She set Warren up on several dates to help him find a woman to take her place. They didn’t divorce or anything, just sort of went their separate ways but visited from time to time. Astrid Menks, the woman who eventually ended up living with Warren was quoted as saying “Living with Warren is the best job I ever had.”

At every annual meeting, you would see Susan and Astrid sitting next to each other chatting amiably.

If she had survived Warren, she would have become the second richest person in the United States, after Bill Gates.

She was a fierce social advocate, working on behalf of people with AIDS and other causes.

Not a wasted life, I don’t think.