Susan Mikula has been by Rachel Maddow’s side for more than two decades.

A few years after graduating from Stanford University, Maddow met Mikula in Massachusetts. Maddow had been pursuing various jobs while writing her thesis for an advanced degree from Oxford, which led her to Mikula — who was searching for someone to help with yard work.

Maddow called their interaction “love at first sight” while recalling the moment to The New Yorker in 2017. “Bluebirds and comets and stars. It was absolutely 100 percent clear,” she said.

Mikula and Maddow, who have a fifteen year age gap, had their first date at an event hosted by the National Rifle Association called Ladies Day on the Range, per HuffPost. The pair have been going strong ever since, even navigating Mikula’s near-fatal battle with COVID-19.

During an episode of The Rachel Maddow Show in 2020, Maddow said she “would have moved mountains for it to have been me who was sick” instead of Mikula, whom she called “the center of my universe.”

Mikula Is an Artist

Mikula is a photographer who has had exhibitions in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Mikula opened up about her creative process during a 2009 interview with Artsake, saying that she tries to “get to know each camera so well that it becomes like a body part for me.”

“I think about a project for a long time before I start taking pictures — both the intellectual point of it all and the worldly mechanics — but then knowing the camera intuitively means that I can act quickly at the moment the shot is finally composed,” she explained. “It’s a long slow process that has a short, sharp, deliberate ending.”

Mikula shared on her website that her work can be found in private collections in the United States and Europe, as well as in the Permanent Collection of the US Embassy, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State.

[I’ll say], ‘I’d like you to take a look at these. Did I miss something?’” Mikula said during a 2019 interview at Sara Kay Gallery. “Sometimes she’ll say, ‘I think you missed … This one is great.’ And I will say, ‘I know that one is not going to print.’”

Mikula Experienced a Health Scare

Maddow revealed during an episode of her The Rachel Maddow Show in 2020 that Mikula had been sick with COVID-19. While Mikula battled the illness, Maddow said she “really thought” there was a “possibility” COVID-19 “might kill her.”

Maddow shared an encouraging health update about Mikula during a subsequent interview on The Late Show. “She is OK. She had a real case of it, and, like a lot of people who’ve had symptomatic cases, she’s got kinda the long tail of the symptoms, which is true for almost everybody that I know that had it,” Maddow said. “She’s got the fatigue and the headaches and the cough and stuff lingering, but she’s out of the woods in terms of us being scared that she could take a downturn. She’s going to be fine.”