Her story was not supposed to end this way. She was supposed to win, to vanquish her adversities, to ride the rising tide of her professional and personal success. She was not supposed to be taken out by some random tree. But here we are. Supposed-to-bes are not realities. Sarah's last text to me asked for my reassurance that she was strong enough and brave enough. I called her and told her she was the strongest bravest woman I know. My last text to Sarah told her I loved her and wished her a happy birthday, and included a photo of my brother and I hiking in Bell Canyon's deep snow. She answered with a red heart emoji. Sarah's last words in this life came astride a snowmobile on a mountain top, where she declared, "This is one of the best days of my life!" Just minutes later, she was gone. But it was, in fact, one of the best days of her life, perched high upon the planet with the cold clean air on her face and God's beauty all around. She loved her work at Draper Rehab, and she loved her coworkers and patients. She helped lift her facility to be one of the company's top performers. It took her months to win over the most reluctant, but she came to be adored and respected for her outsized strength and intelligence and tenacity, and her love. Her gift was to look into any person and to understand what she saw deep inside, and then to love them. These people included her sad and lonely big brother, her Black friends struggling in a white-slanted culture, her gay and queer and trans family whom she saw as beautiful champions of love and courage and integrity, her children whom she rightly bragged about for their intelligence and their insistence upon truth and their lovingkindness, her elderly and disabled patients who could not swallow or speak or use their faces or hands to communicate, but she heard them and understood them anyway. In my kitchen on Saturday January 14, Sarah and Steven and I talked for an hour about the complexities of life, and she declared to us how happy she was. After wading through 50 years of adversity, she had arrived at the point where she had no fear of the consequences of honesty, truth, accountability, and love. She would say her truth, come what may. She had arrived at a point where she had no tolerance for manipulation, anger, dysfunction, lies and half-truths, pride and territoriality. She had come to the point where her mind and spirit were perfectly aligned with her sense of truth and virtue, and nothing could move her from it. She had arrived. And then she was taken. And we are left broken and grieving. I have learned that "the way we deal with grief in our culture is broken…" We see grief "as a kind of malady," something to get over, to put behind us, something broken to be fixed, a sickness to be healed. But grief is none of these. Grief simply reveals the part of me that is hurting and wants to be tended and nurtured, to be held, showing me the new episode of life experience to be incorporated into my being. Our culture says that "the goal of grief support…is to get out of grief, to stop feeling pain." But "there is nothing wrong with grief." Grief "is a natural extension of love. It's a healthy and sane response to loss. Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others." Love for Sarah.
(All quotes are from It's OK that You're Not OK by Megan Devine.)
(Pictured: Yours truly with Sarah and little Gabe camping in June 2023 in the Uinta mountains of Utah.)
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