Susan's Place Transgender Resources

Robyn Marie Walters
June 6th, 1937 – November 11th, 2025

There are people who pass through a place, and there are people who become part of its weather. Robyn was the second kind. For nearly twenty years she was simply here, and Susan's Place feels colder now in the way a house feels colder when someone who always kept the kettle on has gone.

Robyn came to us in 2006 and made her first act a welcome — and made it her last act, too, eighteen years later, still meeting newcomers at the door. In between she wrote hundreds of those welcomes, and if you arrived here frightened, there's a fair chance Robyn was the first human voice that told you your name was a good one and you'd found the right place. She believed that work mattered more than any title she held, and she held a few — administrator, moderator, the keeper of the links, and in her last years a moderator on Discord. That move surprised no one who knew her, because Robyn had been reaching across distances her whole life: a lifelong ham radio operator who could raise a voice on the far side of the world, she'd simply always found the frequency where the people were. The room moved. Robyn moved with it.

You couldn't talk to her for five minutes without bumping into one of her three lives. There was the Navy — a retired commander, Annapolis class of 1960, who'd salute her way onto the boards and report for duty like she'd never quite left the service. There was the spirit — a Reiki master who closed her doors with Namaste and meant it. And there was the engineer, an MIT doctorate in naval architecture, who could explain the hardest things in the plainest words. Robyn contained multitudes, and she was funny about all of them, aiming most of her wit squarely at herself.

But the thing about Robyn that mattered most was the arithmetic she carried around like a gift to hand out. She had her surgery at sixty-three. She lived more than two more decades after that as completely herself — a wife, a grandmother, a woman who finally got her feet in the Pacific she'd always promised herself. And not just her feet: she sailed it, dove beneath it, and gave her hours to its humpback whales as a sanctuary volunteer, good enough at it to be named the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation's Volunteer of the Year in 2014. Beside her the whole way was her husband, the great steady fact of her life. So when someone wandered in convinced they'd left it all too late, Robyn was the living rebuttal. Look at me, she'd as good as say. I had years on you, and look. She never let anyone believe the surgery was the finish line, either. There was no finish line, Robyn insisted. There was only the journey, and the journey was good — even the white water, especially the white water.

She had a soft spot for the people the world tends to overlook: the spouses trying to survive a transition rather than flee it, the elders who thought their chance had passed, the veterans owed care and made to fight for it. Robyn gathered them. She ran her lists for them, she sat with them in the hard threads, she fed them at her own table year after year — a whole found family of strays who were never strays to her. They were her crew. And she could sit with anyone's grief without flinching because she knew it from the inside; she had outlived a daughter and grandchildren of her own, and carried that the way she carried everything, without making the rest of us look at the weight of it.

Robyn's signature was a line of Patrick Overton's, about walking to the edge of all the light you have and stepping into the dark, trusting that you'll find solid ground or be taught to fly. She lived that line at sixty-three, when she stepped off into a new life with no guarantee of where she'd land. The ground held. And now she's walked to that edge once more, and gone over it the way she did everything — chin up, unafraid, faintly amused at all the fuss.

And if Robyn could have turned around at that edge to say one last thing to us, we know more or less how it would have gone. She'd have told us not to be frightened, because she wasn't — she'd done this once already, with far less certainty, and the ground held every time. She'd have told the ones just arriving to look at the dates on her posts and do the arithmetic, because it was not too late for her and it is not too late for them. She'd have thanked her crew for letting an old sailor mother them, and she'd have meant her husband first and most of all. And then she'd have told us, gently and without room for argument, to stop making a fuss over her and go welcome the next frightened soul who wanders in — because that work doesn't stop, and she was counting on us to take the watch.

So that's what we'll do. Wherever the step took her — solid ground, or the wings they promised — we trust she's well. Robyn would want us certain of it.

She crossed on the eleventh of November — Veterans Day — which is the kind of timing no one would dare invent for a Navy commander. Goodbye, Robyn. Goodbye, you irreverent, big-hearted, unsinkable old sailor. Robyn the elder, your watch is relieved.

Namaste. Fair winds.

Please post your memories of Robyn as replies to this thread.

This thread is hers now, and yours. If Robyn welcomed you when you were new, if she sat with you through a hard stretch, if she made you laugh when you badly needed to, or if she was simply a steady light you counted on being there — tell us. Share the memory, the moment, the line of hers you never forgot. We'd like to fill this place with her the way she filled it for us, and there is no better tribute to a woman who spent twenty years making room for other people's stories than to spend a little while telling hers.

Post a photo if you have one she'd have liked. Post the small thing as readily as the large one — Robyn was made of small kindnesses as much as grand gestures. And if all you can manage right now is thank you, Robyn, that's enough. She'd understand. She always did.

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Robyn's life was celebrated at Maui Veterans Cemetery on December 4th, 2025, in the islands she'd made her home — a commander honored among veterans, beneath the Pacific sky she loved. Her family received condolences through Norman's Mortuary in Wailuku, and the book stays open there for anyone who still wishes to sign it: www.normansmortuary.com (https://www.normansmortuary.com/).

She is survived by her husband, Emery; her daughters Theresa, Kimberly, and Michelle; eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren — and by all of us, the crew she gathered here, who will keep the watch she set down.

It sadden me to say that we lost a member of our community recently.

Former administer Robyn passed away on the 11 November 2025 following health issues. She would have been 90 this year and leaves behind a husband (who has to eat his own cooking now) and adult children.

Her volunteer work, not just here at Susan's Pace, touched many people in Hawaii and we wish she be remembered for that, and not the time of passing.

(This is a repost due to an error)
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/wailuku-hi/robyn-walters-12612503 (https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/wailuku-hi/robyn-walters-12612503)

    R.I.P.  Robyn - You will be very much missed.

Robyn's profile  
https://www.susans.org/index.php?action=profile;area=summary;u=1087   

In February 2018 I came to Susan's Place and to Discord and
found a welcoming and kind woman from Hawaii named Robyn ....  on Discord she
was on the Chat Staff as a Moderator and was known as  "Robyn, the Elder"

HUGS, Danielle [Northern Star Girl]
The Forum Administrator

What a beautiful eulogy Susan, she sounds like she was a lovely and interesting woman. I think my life is all the worse for never having met her. Rest in Peace Robyn.

Sarah xx

Robyn was someone I didn't meet tell I made my move to also be in irc, which has been replaced by Discord. She was someone who I shared some of my health struggles especially with how my kidneys were doing. It was common ground that we both understood.She always would come in and say hi to everyone who was on. It was always such a gift when she did come on for a short bit before she would head of to appointments or volunteering. Hugs
Mariah

Such sad news. 😥 Robyn was a friend and mentor to me when I was a newbie moderator. Farewell, Robyn.

Hugs, Devlyn