Susan Elizabeth Wise

Susan E. Wise, a Chicago resident for over 40 years, died on June 30, 2026 - just two weeks after being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. CJD is an extremely rare and fatal neurological disease. She died after six days of hospice care in her McKinley Park residence. She was 67. She leaves behind her husband, Kevin O’Neil of Chicago, her daughter, Moira O’Neil, and son-in-law, Evan Jenkins, of Ventura, CA, her brother, David Wise of Stockton, CA, her sister, Beth Wise Gruhn, of Bourbonnais, IL, her parents, Phillip and Joyce Wise, of Decatur, IL, and many cousins, nieces and nephews.

Susan was born in Highland, IL, on April 25th, 1959. Her father was a student at nearby Greenville College in Greenville, IL, and her mother was employed at a Pet Milk plant in St. Louis.

After her father’s graduation and subsequent employment as a bank examiner, her family finally landed in Decatur, IL. She went to four different grade schools and eventually graduated from Douglas MacArthur High School in 1977, just to ride the slow-moving wave of economic collapse that eventually inundated America’s manufacturing economy.

Susan delivered the oration at her class’s commencement. She attended Illinois State University in Normal, IL, where she whiled away many a pleasant hour working at the school newspaper, The Vidette, drinking, skipping class, arguing with the teachers in her major and meeting a lot of interesting people. She graduated in December, 1980, without honors, just days before the murder of John Lennon and weeks before the inauguration of the most socially and economically destructive president in U.S. history.

She followed her then-fiancé to Springfield, IL, where he’d been hired by the city’s daily newspaper, The State Journal-Register. The economy in Springfield being less than vibrant, Susan was unemployed for eleven months. She illustrated and designed on a freelance basis for various publications.

She went three, sometimes four times a week to the Senate Theatre in downtown Springfield, where she saw the films that formed the ironclad framework for her lifelong love of movies: Superman II, Videodrome, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, Cat People, The Hunger, The Long Good Friday, The Road Warrior, Starman, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Alien, This Is Spinal Tap.

At the end of 1981, she was hired to fill in for a page designer at an alternative newsweekly called The Illinois Times. The page designer made the colossal mistake of going on vacation right at this point in time. When she came back from vacation, the editor and publisher of The Illinois Times promptly fired her and hired Susan full time as a production assistant and in-house illustrator.

This is perhaps a testament to her youthful callousness that this series of unfortunate events troubled her very little. She worked at The Illinois Times, a job that proved to be both highly stressful and, curiously, boring, for three and a half years.

She left the publication and, the economy in Springfield being less than vibrant, she illustrated on a freelance basis for various government agencies, non-profits and publications.

She moved to Chicago in January of 1985 to try her luck as an illustrator. Living in an apartment nearly devoid of furniture in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, she plied her trade day and night. She soon realized that the earnest downstate journalists, lobbyists and agency workers who had made up her circle of friends (and, by extension, herself) were considered quaint and obsolete by the people she met in Chicago, who were preoccupied with acquiring designer clothing, going to clubs and following the antics of Leona Helmsley, Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Donald and Ivana Trump.

It was an interesting time. She met and married a Serbian national who had overstayed his tourist visa and was, unbeknownst to her, working under someone else’s Social Security number as an electrician. The marriage ended in divorce after two and a half years, by which time she was living in the less-than-“hot” northern lakefront neighborhood then known as East Rogers Park.

At about this time she began to take illustration assignments from American Medical News, the American Medical Association’s in-house newspaper. As she was in and out of the paper’s offices, delivering her jobs and picking up more, she naturally befriended many of the younger reporters on the staff, with whom she spent many a pleasant hour going to baseball games, bar-hopping and scandalizing the older AMNews staff members at parties.

She began lingering to talk to one editor, a 30-ish Pittsburgh transplant named Kevin O’Neil. They were married at City Hall on May 26th, 1989, and settled in Susan’s condominium in Rogers Park.

In what in hindsight seems like a shockingly short time, they conceived a child, went on a trip to the Republic of Ireland and moved into a rundown, barn-like Victorian duplex at the corner of Farwell and Greenview Avenues. This floridly eccentric house was where, in July of 1990, Susan and Kevin brought their beautiful, intelligent and highly indignant baby daughter Moira to begin their lives as a family.

Thus followed the usual tornado of activity that all new parents will recognize: Job. Baby. House. House. Baby. Job. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Unable to concentrate, make deadlines or troll for new clients, Susan gave up her work as an illustrator, hoping she could resume once life was less devouring.

To her dismay, this expected break never materialized. When she saw that no relief was forthcoming, she dedicated herself to caring for her husband and child to the best of her ability. She also saw to the maintenance and cleaning of a mortgaged property in a less-than-“hot” Chicago location. (You’ve been mercifully spared the ugly scenes that led to this decision.)

And so it proceeded, both bumpy and smooth, for roughly 30 years. Deviations from this path (a.k.a. “jobs”) included a stint at a cozy family bakery in Evanston and one in the rental department of a legendary Chicago business—Fantasy Costume.

Their daughter grew up, became an artist and moved out of the Victorian barn. She met a young man from Ventura, CA, who was working the photo equipment cage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His name was Evan Jenkins and he would become the love of her life. History would eventually reveal that Moira’s decision to move out was a lucky one.

The lazy, mentally ill neighbors that came with the townhome on Farwell Avenue and shared a very thick common wall with Susan and Kevin never maintained their rapidly decaying property. In the early morning hours of January 30th, 2013, their basement ceiling caught fire and nearly burned down the whole house.

Kevin and Susan spent almost all of 2013 in an apartment in the “hot” Lakeview neighborhood waiting for their smoke-stained Victorian monstrosity to be rehabbed. They had only settled back into their house for a few months when Kevin’s awesome, universally adored mother, Jeanne O’Neil, died from injuries and complications from a fall on icy pavement outside her apartment.

Then, just as they were seemingly recovering from that blow, Kevin lost a job he’d performed admirably for 29 years. He gained another, much more hectic, position as the Chief of Staff to then-49th Ward Alderman Joseph Moore. He was Joe’s right-hand man until Joe lost an election.

In 2019, Kevin reasoned that this would be a sensible time to retire.

In 2020, just days before a national lockdown in response to a deadly global pandemic that would eventually kill over a million Americans alone, Susan, Kevin, Moira, Evan and two beloved friends and tenants, Christina Song and Matt McWilliams, pulled up stakes and moved into a massive greystone four-flat in the placid South Side neighborhood of McKinley Park. They all referred to the hulking limestone edifice as “Grey Gardens,” after the famous Maysles Brothers documentary.

Moira and Evan worked hard to make a life for themselves in the arts. Susan admired this very much. They were married in September of 2021. Matt and Christina were married in October of 2024.

In the spring of 2026, Susan began experiencing dizziness, and was diagnosed with vertigo. But it did not go away with physical therapy, as vertigo usually does. Her dizziness worsened, and she began suffering other symptoms, such as memory loss, and lack of gait coordination. After a second hospitalization in late May, she was discharged with a walker to get around.

Symptoms of what was finally diagnosed as CJD reared their ugly head - hallucinations, agitation, dementia. During her final nine-day stay at Rush Hospital the CJD diagnosis was confirmed.

On June 25, she was released to home hospice care, where she deteriorated quickly, but with her family by her side. She was visited by her parents, and her sister and brother-in-law. She passed away at 3:30 p.m. on June 30, with Kevin, Moira and Evan by her side and holding her hands.

A memorial party will be held on Friday, Aug. 7, at Susan and Kevin’s McKinley Park home. Friday is Susan’s favorite day of the week.

She was cremated, and her ashes will sit happily among all her art work and art books.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Obituary revised and completed by Susan Wise – 11/17/2024

Edited by Kevin O’Neil - 07/01/2026