BOSTON, Mass. – Susan K. Cabot, 77, died on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023 in Boston, Mass., with her sons and stepsons by her side. The cause of death was complications of Parkinson’s disease. She was a resident of Harpswell, Maine and formerly a resident of Boston, and Chapel Row, Berkshire, United Kingdom.

A beloved wife, sister, daughter, mother, and grandmother, she leaves behind her two sons, James Eliot Cabot (Renée) of Portland, Maine, and Alexander Lee Cabot (Anne-Marie) of Santa Barbara, Calif.; three grandsons, Henry, John and George Cabot; three stepchildren, Elizabeth Lewis Cabot (Blake) of Salisbury, Conn., Edward Ogden Cabot of Chatham, NY and Timothy Pickering Cabot (Sara) of Cambridge, Mass.; six step-grandchildren, Nicholas, Samuel, Lettice, Imogen, Quincy, and John Cabot; her brother Richard Holmes Knight, Jr (Linda) of Nashville, Tenn., and her sister Jennifer Knight Fries of Bluffton, SC.

She was preceded in death by her parents, Captain Richard Holmes Knight (USN) and Frances Davis Knight, of Virginia Beach, Va; her brother-in-law Eric van Buskirk Fries of Old Lyme, Conn.; and her beloved husband Lewis Pickering Cabot, with whom she shared 41 years of marriage.

Susan was born on March 21, 1946 in Annapolis, Md. into a proud military family. Her father’s naval career necessitated frequent moves by her family. She attended eleven different schools in the United States and Brazil between kindergarten and high school and thus never described herself as having a specific hometown, although she remembered most fondly her two years in high school in Winchester, Massachusetts. She was a 1964 graduate of W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia and a 1968 graduate of The George Washington University with a degree in English Literature. She received a Master’s in Education from Harvard University in 1970. As an adult she completed a second Master’s of Arts from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom in 1995, with a final dissertation on the American artist Dodge MacKnight, whose watercolors she collected for 40 years.

After graduation from George Washington University, Susan worked for a year at the Library of Congress in Washington before moving to Boston to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She spent nearly ten years at MIT, primarily as a director of the Council for the Arts, which was a novel program founded in 1972 by then MIT President Jerome Wiesner. This was an institute-wide effort to promote artistic interest and achievement that was organized on the model of the National Endowment of the Arts. This position gave her an enormous sense of fulfillment, and Susan was instrumental in the success of the program in its early years.

In addition to her professional work, Susan also extensively volunteered her time to non-profit groups throughout the United States. In the 1980s she was an active supporter of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, developing its younger members’ donor support efforts and chairing a major section of the BSO’s Centennial Anniversary celebrations in 1981. She was a supporter of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University for many years as an organizer, patron and fund-raiser. She chaired the opening of the Arthur Sackler Museum at Harvard in 1985.

She was an active supporter of the Victoria Mansion, in Portland, Maine; Stratford Hall, in Stratford, Va.; and the Edith Wharton Restoration Project at The Mount in Lenox, Mass. For many years she served on the board of the Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C.

Alongside her husband Lewis, she was an active supporter of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston including serving for many years as a committee member of the museum’s principal lecture series. She and her husband were also active supporters of the Portland Museum of Art in Portland.

She was a member of the Chilton Club in Boston for nearly 40 years. She was also a member of the Jamestowne Society and of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America.

Her husband Lewis’s business activities brought Susan and Lewis to the United Kingdom in 1988, where they would live off and on until 1995. This was one of the great experiences of her life. She and her husband made many lifelong friendships in England. Additionally, she was an avid and adventurous traveler. She loved to travel to Europe with family and friends and – in addition to the United Kingdom – had a particular passion for France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Over the course of her life, she visited more than 100 countries on all seven continents (including Antarctica). She also visited all 50 of the United States and had a particular love for the national parks and for the American West.

Susan often said that in lieu of having a longer professional career, her most important life’s work was raising her two sons, James and Alex and supporting her husband and family, both immediate and extended. She opened her home in Maine every summer to family and myriad friends and colleagues from across the country and around the world. She was a tireless hostess and always worked assiduously to ensure that no one in her household wanted for anything.

A memorial service was held privately in early January.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her memory to the:

Susan Knight Cabot Library and Literacy Endowment Fund at North Yarmouth Academy in Yarmouth, Maine or to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research



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