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| View from Sarah's cabin |
So hard to blog after all that’s happened.
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| Young professional - 1960s |
It was a 3-day trip from Houston to Santa Rosa, CA. I arrived
close to noon on New Year’s Eve. She was asleep in her wheelchair when I first
peered into her room. Bent over, a crocheted cap protecting a chemo-balding
head, she looked startlingly aged and gaunt. It took me several minutes to wrap
around this image before greeting her. True, she’d weathered 28 years of rugged
mountain life, but she’d always been so strong and ageless, even after the first two
surgeries. This was surgery #3 and she was rehabbing in a nursing home.
The lung tumors were causing extreme shortness of breath.
She was weak, couldn’t get comfortable, and spoke in a pant. Nevertheless we
had 3 full days together, including her birthday Jan. 3,
before the nurse called me that morning at the garage saying she was
unresponsive and to please hurry. I didn’t make it.
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| Rights activist - 1970s |
Back home I continue to sort through the history brought
back from her cabin: research papers from grad school (she earned a Masters in Social Work) and ensuing
professional life, clever children’s stories based on our childhood in the
‘40s, and many rough-draft letters
written to family and friends over the years. There were meticulously kept
record books from two decades plus of minding grounds, crew, and equipment of
the vineyard where she lived. And there were many precious pictures documenting
her days from infancy through activist phase to young motherhood and up to the
mountains of Sonoma County – the place of her soul.
Nothing will ever fill the gap rent in my own soul: those
hours-long phone calls, letters that could run to 10 pages, emails with enough paragraphs
to crash her Mac. She was so wise, so natural. A mentor and a cheerleader. A
thinker, philosopher, great friend and neighbor. Most of all she was the big
sister I idolized and envied growing up. And I miss her.
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| Mountain woman, April 2012 |
