For most of two decades, Susan Saint James was the person on television you’d most want to have lunch with. She was Sally McMillan, the sharp, nosy, impossible-to-shake wife of a San Francisco police commissioner on “McMillan & Wife.” Later she was Kate McArdle, the divorced mom sharing a Manhattan apartment and a life with Jane Curtin on “Kate & Allie.” That’s the career. The story is what she did when the lightness ran out.

“McMillan & Wife” premiered on NBC in 1971 as one spoke of the NBC Mystery Movie wheel, rotating with “Columbo” and “McCloud.” Rock Hudson played Commissioner Stewart McMillan; Saint James played Sally, who was forever stumbling into his cases and usually solving them before he did. Saint James, who’d already won an Emmy in 1969 for “The Name of the Game,” played Sally for five seasons, from 1971 to 1976, earning three Emmy nominations for the role. The series continued for a sixth season, renamed “McMillan,” after she left, running through 1977.

In 1984, CBS paired her with Jane Curtin, fresh off “Saturday Night Live,” in “Kate & Allie” — two divorced mothers sharing a New York apartment. It ran five seasons and became one of the great sitcom pairings of the decade. By the time it ended in 1989, Saint James was ready to step back. She’d married Dick Ebersol in 1981 — the two met when she hosted “Saturday Night Live,” which he was producing — and was raising a family in Litchfield, Connecticut. Ebersol would go on to run NBC Sports for more than a decade.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2004, Ebersol and two of their sons, Charlie and Teddy, boarded a chartered jet at the airport in Montrose, Colorado. It crashed on takeoff, according to TVInsider. Dick Ebersol was badly hurt; Charlie pulled his father out of the wreckage. Teddy, the youngest, was 14. He did not survive. Saint James was not on the plane.

What her children have said since she died, as reported by TVInsider and People, is this: in the weeks after the crash, Saint James wrote each surviving member of the family a personal, individual note — not one letter to all of them, but something written to that person, about that person, meant to help them heal. The notes were private; her children have kept the contents to themselves. The fact of them is enough.

Susan Saint James died on October 26, 2026, at 80, of pancreatic cancer, as Deadline first reported. She leaves her husband, Dick Ebersol, and her children — and, twenty-two years on, a handful of notes written for one reader each.