FORT COLLINS – Chances are, if you are of a certain age, you remember hearing about Tom Sutherland, the genial former Colorado State University professor, arts benefactor and occasional actor who was held hostage in Beirut for 6½ harrowing years. When he died in 2016, the world took necessary notice.

Attention now must be paid to his partner, co-author, and indefatigable champion. Jean Sutherland, his wife of 60 years, died Jan. 13 and was remembered last week at a celebration held, appropriately, at the Sutherland Community Garden on the CSU campus.   

All you need to know to really know Jean is that, back in 2009, she and a girlfriend traveled to Timbuktu (which is a very real place in northern Mali). They boated up the dangerous, hippo-infested waters of the Niger River, sleeping on the ground at night. All to get a look at the sacred Timbuktu Manuscripts – a collection of 700,000 Arabic documents about art, medicine, philosophy, science and religion.

The thing is, she was 75 at the time. And sleeping on a riverbed next to dangerous hippos was just her 75-year-old jam. So, too, was exploring the Galapagos Islands, the Alaskan coast, and the history and culture along the Mississippi River.

You know someone is cool when they die at 88 and their obituary quotes Hunter S. Thompson:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

Jean Sutherland’s passion for life, said her brother, John Murray, “was breathtaking.”

An adventurous Iowa beginning

Jean Murray Sutherland was a lifelong educator and student of life who truly put the “heart” in the heartland. She was born in 1934 in Ames, Iowa, to an adventurous mother who had taken flying lessons as a young woman – imagine that, in the 1920s! – and a father who was, importantly, a noted academic agricultural economist. Important given that, in 1956, she married a Scotsman who would serve as a professor of animal sciences at CSU for 26 years.

They met at Iowa State, where Tom earned his Ph.D. in animal breeding and Jean got her degree in English. They married in 1956, moved to Fort Collins and raised daughters Ann, Kit and Joan. Tom’s job afforded many travel and adventure opportunities, and they eagerly embraced them. They took a sabbatical year in Jouy-en-Josas, France, and lived for two years in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Daughter Ann Sutherland says her mother loved “the challenge of raising her young daughters in foreign countries and exploring the culture of her new homes.”

After the kids were grown, Jean earned her master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English Lit from the University of Colorado Boulder. She learned Latin and Greek while writing her dissertation on the influence of the Greek philosopher Seneca on Shakespeare’s tragedies.

She was teaching English at CSU and the Alternative Learning Center in Fort Collins in the fall of 1982 when her husband was named Dean of Agricultural and Food Sciences of the American University in Beirut. At the time, Lebanon was in the midst of a civil war that would drag on from 1975-90. So the job came with the unspoken understanding that this was an offer to be taken “at your own risk” (which later became the title of the book Tom and Jean co-authored). Tom, of course, accepted. In October 1983, Lebanese truck bombs killed 299 American and French service members at the U.S. Marines Corps barracks in Beirut.

“Did they turn tail and run back to the USA? No, they did not,” said Ann Sutherland. “They went down and offered help and immediately pitched in with the first response and later visited with injured service members in the hospital.” Two months later, university president Malcolm Kerr was assassinated in a coordinated campaign to coax the U.S. military out of the country’s civil war.

The Sutherlands chose to stay in Beirut – Tom running his university department under wartime conditions and Jean teaching English as a Second Language to Lebanese students through a local humanitarian program. Ann Sutherland remembers seeing a news report about the city being under intense shelling and calling her mother to check on her safety.

“When I got her on the phone, she was calm,” said Ann Sutherland. “She was like, ‘Yes, we’re down here in the basement sheltering. Why? Do you think we should evacuate?’ I was like, ‘Um, yes, mom … I do.’ But they didn’t.”

Jean never told the kids about another scary incident, when Jean surprised a prowler who hit her over the head with a gun, leaving her with a dent. Daughter Kit Sutherland said she only found out about it years later when she heard a hairdresser ask Jean, ‘Oh, what’s this? You have a head wound.’ ”  

Getting down to work

On June 9, 1985, Tom Sutherland was kidnapped at gunpoint by Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militia. “My mom did not cry. She did not complain. She was not bitter or angry about the kidnapping or the effect that it had on their lives,” Ann Sutherland said. “Instead, she said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do something about this,’ and she set about working. She stayed on in Beirut teaching while she was doing everything she could to try and secure my dad’s release.”

A total of 53 hostages from 12 countries, including 15 Americans, were kidnapped in Beirut in the 1980s. Six were killed and one died in captivity.

In September 1989, The U.S. closed its embassy in Beirut and urged all Americans to leave. “They told my mom that if she stayed on, she was doing so at her own risk, and she needed to be aware of that,” Ann Sutherland said.

There it is again: “At your own risk.”

“That was her attitude throughout all of this. She stayed there because she thought she could do something positive – and in fact, she could. She, in partnership with a Lebanese journalist, began to act as an emissary to promote negotiations between the Hezbollah and the Reagan and Bush governments for the release of the hostages. And she did this in the utmost secrecy. It was only much later that we found out that whenever she came back to the U.S. during the years that this was going on, her primary purpose was actually to meet with government people – not to visit us.”

Tom Sutherland spent most of his 2,354 days as a hostage chained to the floor. He was beaten once, moved often and struggled to keep up his trademark optimism. “The worst part for me,” Kit Sutherland said, “was when we heard he had tried to commit suicide.”

In a 2003 interview, Sutherland told me he actually tried three times. It was thoughts of Jean and the girls that stopped him.

“There were times when I thought of Jean and said, ‘Am I really married to that woman?’” Tom said. “God, how could I have been so lucky? It took me a long time to convince myself that I really was married to Jean.”

Jacques Rieux of Fort Collins, who edited the book “At Your Own Risk,” said that while Tom “suffered horribly” as a hostage, he really had few choices to make during his ordeal.

“Jean was the one who had choices to make,” he said. “The public image she presented showed dignity and courage. She refused to play the victim card. She showed no self-pity and expressed no bitterness. I was amazed at how she could maintain such composure. Ultimately, they won because they did not let the events in Beirut warp them. That would have been an irreparable loss.”

Sutherland was released on Nov. 18, 1991, and in the book, he described the moment he really felt free:

“The door began to open slowly, hesitatingly, and I looked to it. There was Kit, and there was Jean right behind her! Just beautiful! A tiny bit older … Kit more mature. But then impressions got lost in pure emotion. Ecstasy – here was the scene I had waited 6 1/2 years for.”

When the couple returned to Fort Collins, they didn’t sit still. Tom gave 150 speeches in the first six months after his return. Jean sought out more challenges and adventures. Together they decided to write their book, which tells the story of Tom’s captivity and Jean’s efforts to get him freed. It has been praised as an even-handed and compassionate primer on Middle Eastern culture and politics.

“We must face the realities of what we’re doing abroad – and what is being told to us by the reactions to us being there,” Jean told me in a 2011 interview.

The Sutherlands eventually received $35 million from frozen Iranian assets. Tom liked to joke that he was on “an extended vacation paid for by the Shah of Iran.” Their family’s support for local institutions spanned KUNC public radio to CSU to the Bas Bleu Theatre, home to the Tom Sutherland Stage. They are a blessing to the town,” said Rieux.

But they maintained their appreciation for the simple things to the end: A beautiful sunset, a glass of wine, time with friends. They never even moved out of their home. 

On the wall over the family computer is a sign that pretty much summed up all that Jean fully believed:

“Blessed are they who remember that what they now have – they once longed for.”