Suzanne Wood, 62, traveler, book seller

As soon as she set foot in Honduras, Suzanne Wood felt she’d found her calling.

She visited there with fellow church members and trekked deep into the mountains. There, doctors and dentists traveling with her mission group treated villagers, in some cases, for the first time in their lives. In all, Mrs. Wood visited Honduras 13 times, drawn back again and again by its needy orphans and destitute families.

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Suzanne Dalmé Wood made 13 mission trips to Honduras and fell in love with the people there.

“The first time we went, we saw poverty like nothing we’d ever dreamed of,” said her husband of 44 years, Paul Wood of Atlanta, who also took part in the trips.

Mrs. Wood kept returning until she was too ill to travel, her husband said.

“She was such a compassionate person and loved helping people,” he said. “We didn’t really speak much Spanish, but somehow she could just communicate with everyone there.”

Suzanne Dalmé Wood, 62, of Atlanta died of cancer Monday at Embracing Hospice in Cumming. The funeral will be 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Jude’s Episcopal Church in Marietta. H.M. Patterson and Son, Arlington Chapel, is in charge of arrangements.

The Natchitoches, La., native fell in love with her future husband when she was about 12 years old. They married when she was 17. They were so crazy about each other, he said, that it was all they could do not to elope before then.

“She always said she’d never kissed another man, and I think that probably was right,” he said.

Mrs. Wood was always enthralled with books, and from 1985 to 1997 she owned two Little Professor bookstores in Baton Rouge, La. She ran her business like an extended family, hired students from nearby Louisiana State University and brought in cakes on holidays.

“She loved to read and truly loved the book business,” her husband said. “But she quickly found out that it didn’t leave her any time to read.”

It did leave her plenty of opportunities to meet people, and she thrived on that personal contact with customers, he said.

After she settled with her family in Atlanta in 1997, she worked for a few years as a Keller Williams real estate agent.

“She took the courses and passed the real estate exam, and you would have thought she graduated from Harvard,” her husband said.

Anything that brought her into contact with people — from her mission trips to playing with her granddaughter — made Mrs. Wood happy, said her friend Rhoda Quarterman of Kennesaw.

“Her enthusiasm for anything she entered into was contagious,” she said. “She didn’t do anything that she wasn’t excited about and was such an energetic, loving person.”

In addition to her mission trips, Mrs. Wood spent two months in Mexico and went hiking and white-water rafting in Colorado.

Her most sentimental journey was a trip to see where her grandfather’s family had lived in Pezilla, France. Mrs. Wood and her husband both had French ancestry, and “her French heritage was very important to her,” he said. “That whole trip was one of the highlights of her life. When she landed, she called me that day crying on the phone that she’d finally made it there.”

Additional survivors include two sons, Christopher Marc Wood of Roswell, and Jason Paul Wood of Atlanta; a brother, John Richard Dalmé of Arcadia, La.; a sister, Patricia Lallande of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; and a granddaughter.