Susan Bello showed independent spirit

CHAPEL HILL -- In 1954, just as Hurricane Hazel roared through this state, a baby who had learned to walk suddenly no longer could. Susan Bello contracted polio at 20 months, part of the last major wave of children and adults struck by the much-feared disease.

When she was in the hospital in isolation, Jonas Salk announced the widespread debut of his polio vaccine, with mass inoculation of school children preventing polio in up to 70 percent of cases.

Bello's right leg was paralyzed from the hip down. A long leg brace helped her resume walking, and a fierce sense of independence and determination helped her earn two master's degrees and pursue a career as a university librarian.

As she got older, her leg grew weaker, and she relied upon crutches or a scooter. But it wasn't the aftereffects of polio that killed her. Susan Elizabeth Bello died of rapid-onset leukemia in July, after battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was 55.

Bello was born at Rex Hospital in 1952, the youngest of three children.

Perhaps because her body wasn't perfect, she made sure her grades were. She excelled in school, where she was elected president of the student body at Daniels Middle School in Raleigh.

A graduate of Broughton High School and Duke University, Bello earned a master of arts degree at the University of Virginia and a master's degree in library science from UNC-Chapel Hill. She worked as a librarian at MIT before returning to North Carolina in 1990. For six years, she worked in the Engish department at Duke. Since 1996, she had worked at UNC-CH's Davis Library.

Bello treasured her privacy, which is why many colleagues didn't know of her love for the outdoors and how she spent hours on her friend Carla Shuford's porch watching birds and butterflies and squirrels. Likewise, Shuford had no idea Bello had earned three academic degrees and worked at UNC-CH as a serials cataloger, meticulously organizing journal articles.

"She gave me her work number once," Shuford said. "I assumed she was a receptionist. There was a lot about Susan that people didn't know."

It could seem hard to get to know Bello, and that was probably in part because of a certain aloofness she cultivated. It was out of necessity.

"It was hard for her to deal with people who didn't know her looking at her, staring at her, not understanding why she couldn't run, why she wasn't like everyone else," her brother Gerry Bello said. "She just kept on her way."

Bello's brothers were athletes, and her father, Lou Bello, was a well-known ACC basketball referee, but polio meant that Bello's involvement in sports was limited. She took up swimming, which is how she met Shuford.

Shuford, an amputee, and Bello talked shop, swapping tips on the latest crutches and the most versatile scooters. On Saturdays, they'd sandwich in lunch after Shuford's morning swim and before Bello's afternoon dip. They'd chat of things orthopedic in nature, then move on to good books, spirituality, makeup and hair and clothes.

"We even talked about men, as much as any two middle-aged maidens would allow themselves," Shuford said at Bello's memorial service. "And we laughed a lot."

For Bello and Shuford, swimming was much more than physical activity. In the pool, they could glide through the water, unencumbered.

"It was a kind of equalizer for us," Shuford said. "It was a kind of freedom, and we both recognized that in each other."

Swimming was a metaphor for Bello's life.

"She swam against all obstacles, having polio, fighting for independence, fighting cancer," her brother Tom Bello said.

She expended so much energy proving to others that she could live alone, without assistance and without pity, that it likely cost her companionship.

Though Susan Bello dated, especially when she was younger, she struggled with not feeling as attractive as other women for whom walking was as natural as breathing.

Once, Tom Bello asked his sister whether she ever felt lonely.

Yes, she answered, but not as lonely as she'd feel if she woke up beside someone she didn't love.

"She never found the right fit," Tom Bello said. "It was more important for her to find her own sense of dignity."

In June, Bello attended a four-day cancer wellness retreat in the mountains of North Carolina, only a couple of miles from Shuford's birthplace.

When Shuford saw Bello after the retreat, she noticed her friend looked radiant and at peace and far healthier than she'd seemed in a long time.

"I am so very, very lucky," she told Shuford.

A week later and very unexpectedly, Bello died.

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Bello is survived by her mother, Jacqueline Harper, two brothers, a stepbrother and two stepsisters.

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