Foreword: Remembering Sarah Lee

Sarah Lee Strand, January 13, 1963 - June 13, 1981

I never met my cousin Sarah. I never even saw her until she was three days dead and lying in a casket.  She was very short, like a child, so that only four pallbearers would be necessary; I was asked to be one of them, and with respect to my aunt and uncle I accepted the duty as a privilege.

She was the same age as I was, seventeen years old, but stunted to only three feet tall.  We had never known each other because for her whole life she had been mentally and physically removed; for half of my life I didn’t even know she existed.  She demanded constant care, eventually more than her family could provide, so they provide her to a remote state mental facility, all that the family could afford.

I never saw images of Sarah except for one infant picture that hung, and still hangs, above a couch in her family’s living room.  She is smiling there, like a normal baby might smile, but her cuteness seems a little out of place.  She contends with four other pictures of her older brothers and sisters, each capped and gowned and maturely grinning.  Theirs are studio photos, relatively recent and sharply colored and made to appear erudite; but Sarah’s is a snapshot, blown up and faded with time.  Her pink and blue gown seems too soft, and though her smile tries to be the biggest of them all, somehow it isn’t big enough to fit in with her surroundings.

Nor was it big enough, or real enough, to translate on the day of her funeral; that snapshot smile couldn’t fly through time and across the division of death.  I didn’t recognize her in the casket, but of course it wasn’t a typical viewing for anyone there.  Few people had actually visited Sarah in the hospital, and no one could say “She never did her hair that way,” or “They’ve made her look so alive,” or “That was her favorite dress.”  And there were less tears, and less anxiety about being too casual or saying the wrong thing, because no one knew Sarah.  Even her mother, who had come to the hospital often, seemed distant as she looked into the coffin.

“She doesn’t look retarded,” someone said, and I looked at my cousin and decided that it was true.  Her hair was combed and sprayed, and she wore make-up and clothes that made her look very smart.  Her mouth wasn’t dropped open, she wasn’t drooling and as far as I could see her eyes weren’t crossed.  And she lay serenely, which was not typical, her mother said.  Yes, the person’s comment was right: she didn’t look retarded at all, even though she had slowed to her final stop.

But it was an odd comment, as inane as any of the other comments would have been, because we all knew that it wasn’t really Sarah lying there anyway; even I knew that, and I had never met her.

They say that when we get to heaven we’ll see all the people we knew on earth.  I never knew Sarah Lee Strand, not as she was when she moved and breathed, but when I die and go to heaven I’d like to look for her anyway.  I have a feeling I’ll recognize her.  She won’t look retarded, but she’ll be animated, with a smile a little bigger than anyone else’s.  Other than that, she won’t seem out of place at all.  She’ll be full of color and sophistication, and she’ll be alive!