A couple weeks after Sarah passed, I wrote a eulogy for her. I wrote it for myself, to organize some of my thoughts around my grief. I am sharing it here so our family and, specifically, the kids can have it to look back on. I miss her so terribly.
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What can I say about my beautiful sister? I was blessed to spend all thirty-five years of my life with her, and the years were filled with love, affection, silly arguments, and a deep, deep unbroken friendship.
Sarah was the quintessential big sister in a family of three girls, the natural leader of our little sister pack—and truly, the leader of our whole family of five. As the youngest, I looked up to her in about every way.
Sarah had a gravitational pull that drew so many of us in. My life often orbited around my sister’s: what she wore, I wore; what sports she played, I played; what music she listened to, I listened to.
As I grew older, I tried to resist this pull and differentiate myself a little. I didn’t want to become too enmeshed in her life. Sarah didn’t quite understand this and would say, “Rach—come on. Just do things with me, don’t overthink it.” And inevitably, I would find myself gravitating toward her again.
We chose similar career paths, worked at the same organization, and shared way too many memes with each other during meetings. We joined the same women’s soccer league, attended the same gym classes, and landed at the same church—one Sarah had suggested I visit almost nine years ago when I moved back to Tacoma. She and her family joined five years later, along with about 40 of their closest friends and family. Because Sarah’s gravitational pull influenced just about everyone who was close to her.
The orbit which led me back to my sister so many times often led me to the V home. At least once a week I’d find myself on their couch to be fed, loved on, and given rock-solid advice. I was part sister, part fourth child in the V family, part coworker, part teammate, and part best friend. The depth of this loss has left me breathless so many times. If I look further than the day ahead of me, I feel terrified of what a life without Sarah will look like. There are so many spaces that she filled.
To understand Sarah’s power and influence I have to go back in time a bit to describe the person that she was as a child and the person that she developed into as an adult.
One of my earliest memories of Sarah is from when our family lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Massachusetts. Even though the space was small, my parents were always entertaining friends and family. Whenever people were over, Sarah saw an opportunity for a captive audience. I have a distinct memory of a night Sarah decided to put on a play for my parent’s friends. She dressed my sister Heidi and me, and herself, as a pilgrim family. Sarah the husband, Heidi the wife, and me, always and forever, the baby. She told a story about our coming to America while Heidi and I silently acted out the lines. Sarah was constantly creating and performing, and Heidi and I were her little muses.
She spent hours teaching me dance routines to Michael W. Smith, inviting the neighbors over to watch herself direct and me perform "Seed to Sow" with a garage work lamp shining on me like a spotlight. For Sarah, these performances were serious. After the Winter Olympics, she transformed our garage into a skating rink, where we competed with our own figure skating routines. After the summer olympics, she built me a balance beam out of scrap wood and taught me to do tricks. Sarah trialed and errored every creative idea with me and Heidi as kids. I was her guinea pig, and she was living out a dream she eventually realized with her own three children—encouraging and motivating them to be performers and athletes.
When I became an adult, I would remind Sarah how she was the best big sister Heidi and I could have asked for. Despite our age gap, Sarah always included me—letting me tag along with her friends even when I was an awkward high school freshman and she was in college. She championed me. Her confidence and faith in my abilities way exceeded my actual talent, but her belief made me feel secure. To have Sarah in your corner makes you feel capable of just about anything. She was a natural coach and motivator, with a unique way of encouraging, pushing, and challenging people all at once. She pushed me to continue with college sports, even when I wanted to quit, and I’m forever grateful because it led to some of the best experiences of my life.
The night after Sarah passed, I laid down and cried with one of her children. They said, “Now that she’s gone, who is going to motivate me and push me to do things I didn’t think I could do?” I had no answer because that same ache they felt was one of the first aches I experienced from this loss. Sarah was central to so many of my decisions, and she had an ability to call me to be courageous and try new things without fear. It was her way - the way of courage.
Sarah had a kind of down-to-earth wisdom that settled anxiety and indecision. When I went to her for advice, I knew I would receive something real, compassionate, and maybe a little bit painfully truthful—but always delivered in love. Throughout this entire month, one comment has remained true: we all feel like we need Sarah to help us deal with the loss of Sarah.
Sarah also had a way of leading with confidence. She didn’t overthink things that terrified most people: public speaking, singing, dancing, performing, competition, taking a stand. She did it boldly and with assurance. She approached things with intensity—sometimes too much. When Sarah had her mind set on something, you could see it all over her face: eyes wide, eyebrows furrowed, locked in. It’s a family trait, the same look I've seen in my mom a thousand times.
Sarah wasn’t without her quirks or faults. Those who were close enough to casually come and go from her home without a formal invite can recognize the scene: open cabinets, drawers left ajar, milk containers without their caps, clothes draped on the floor. You could literally trace her entire path based on what she left behind. One of the biggest revelations in Sarah’s life was getting a formal ADHD diagnosis.
As a way to cope with ADHD, Sarah became the queen of “life hacks.” One of her favorites was when she discovered that you could place any leftover in a gallon-sized ziplock bag. She was like, “This is great, now I just thow it away when it goes bad,” which inevitably it always did. Sarah’s garbage was full of ziplock bags of old leftovers.
She also invented a creative way to multitask her cleaning routine. She called it, “wine cleans” where you pour yourself a glass of wine, pop in AirPods, turn on an episode of dateline, and clean your house. She eventually stopped doing wine cleans, and hired some extra help. Just as quickly as Sarah would implement a life hack, she’d forget it and move onto another.
She was a mama bear, protective to the core. She knew every crime in Tacoma and tracked everyone’s flight in and out of SeaTac on an airplane app. I remember one time when I was flying home from Reno my plane circled three times before landing and Sarah immediately texted me, “Why is it taking you so long to land? Why are you circling?” I hadn’t even noticed.
Sometimes I got annoyed at her hypervigilance over me. Recently, I sent her a text telling her to chill out a bit because I am a grown woman who can take care of myself. She texted me back saying she couldn’t do that, she said “I care about you like I care about my own CHILD!” And it’s true, she really did.
Sarah was extroverted, lively, and a hilarious storyteller—a director of activities and fun. She loved her family and friends, sharing life freely. But, maybe lesser known, Sarah was slow to reveal her inner life. She was a great storyteller, but she was also pretty careful about who she let in. I felt so grateful and special when she trusted me with those thoughts. Often, she would start a serious conversation with, “I don’t tell anybody this but…” and then she’d share something that seemed pretty benign and normal to me. I always thought it was funny the things she kept in. But I also felt honored to be trusted with her hopes, fears, and insecurities.
Sarah was confident, but also sensitive. Those closest to her knew she was hard to correct because one criticism could send her spiraling. She never wanted to hurt, offend, or have others dislike her, and she worried about it a lot. Many of us have received apology texts from Sarah when she felt like she accidentally took a joke too far (which sometimes she did) or said something out of line. She didn’t believe in leaving discord in relationships and she valued direct communication. I admired her for that—she always sought reconciliation and connection. She was a woman capable of incredible forgiveness.
Sarah was a lover of her family. She truly adored her husband, Miguel and would talk about it often. When she had a moment alone without him to share her true thoughts, what spilled out of Sarah was true love and affection for her husband.
Sarah also loved her kids and championed them in everything. Sarah was the first to say she was proud. She believed in them, and half of our family text threads were pictures of their awards, videos of their soccer goals, clips of their at-home family music performances. She was proud of her kids and knew them all individually and specifically. Sarah used to say to me, a lesson she learned from our parents growing up was that the most important thing in raising children is to maintain a close and personal relationship with them. To really get to know who they are and their own individual wants, needs, desires, strengths, and weaknesses and to walk them through that in a way that fit their own personalities. And she did. One of the hardest things about this loss is thinking of my nephews and niece who Sarah not only loved deeply but she also knew deeply. No one can replace Sarah’s specific kind of love and relationship towards them but I am confident that it set a foundation of attachment and connection that cannot be lost.
Lastly and most importantly, Sarah loved the Lord in a way that put me to shame. She faced her fair share of trials in life but I can say confidently that none of it shook her faith. She knew, deep in her heart, that God was good and life was often hard, and she never saw those two things as mutually exclusive. She didn’t put God on trial when prayers weren’t answered in the way she expected or when she experienced pain. Sarah worshiped her way through life. Worshiping the Lord with her whole heart because she truly loved Jesus with her whole heart.
Sarah and my relationship with the Lord and our journey of faith was different in this way. I struggle more with the realities of worshiping God in the midst of the hard. When I sat in the hospital room after Sarah was pronounced dead, I didn’t worship. I felt separated from God in those specific moments. I wondered where God was - if he was there at all. Did he hear us? Did he care?
I was asking the Lord to show up in one and only one way - I was asking him to show up as a healer for my sister here on earth. When Sarah wasn’t healed in the way I wanted, I had to face such a harsh and cold reality. I was going to live the rest of my life without my sister and my best friend.
I felt in those early moments a long-known truth that I hadn’t yet experienced first hand, we weren’t made to grieve like this. We were not originally created to suffer the pains and trials of this world and to be separated from each other in grief. I felt so intensely the pain of a world that was not the way it should be that night in the hospital, and it was truly excruciating.
However, I had to grapple with the same two truths that Sarah already knew: God is good and life is often hard. I had to wrestle with the reality that I also believe in a Lord who says we are not hopeless grievers.
It says in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, 13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.
In the day that followed that scene in the hospital, a flood of prayers came in for my family and myself and I felt the powers of those prayers through a slow warming in my heart. My heart began to be encouraged. My tears for my sister being gone from this world were accompanied by a quiet, daring hope that I serve Jesus, a king who said that death will not have the final word.
I serve a God who says there is a great reconciliation for us. And he has made a way to the end of our suffering. He, a man of sorrows himself, is making things right with the world again.
My favorite verse John 16:33 documents the words that Jesus himself spoke to his disciples, and it says , “In this world you may have troubles, but take heart! I have overcome the world.”
Sarah experienced a healing on the other side of eternity which far surpassed any healing she would have received from this particular brutal illness. Sarah knew that she served a God who came down to earth in the form of a man and took on the suffering of this world. Taking on sin and death, Jesus said - it’s true, this is not the way things are supposed to be and I have come to make things new again. Thank you God for making Sarah new again. Thank you for keeping her in your perfect, loving care.
Sarah is worshiping at the feet of a Savior who she only knew in part but now she sees face to face. And I have the opportunity to worship with her here, though I am still seeing through a glass dimly.
Sarah, I can’t wait to see you for an epic reunion in heaven but I will continue to feel the pain and loss of this earthly separation until that day. I love you so so much and I miss you so so terribly. One day we will hug each other again, I will think of you and remember you every day until that reunion.
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