She was a baby full of light, always. Her eyes truly sparkled with delight in everything and everyone she encountered. I had known dozens of babies by the time I met Sarah, when she was 6 months old and I was 27, but she was the first I fell head-over-heels in love with. She was so responsive: she looked at adults who talked to her as though she understood what they were saying and who they were. She paid so much attention to the world. And smiling seemed to be her default state.
(Cue Hall & Oates)

She came with her mom and dad to visit me in Fairfax, the little town in northern California where I lived (they were on their way back to Arizona from Oregon). We went to Great America, the amusement park in Santa Clara. She hung out in a front-pack on her mom or dad and laughed with the rest of us or slept, the ideal companion. There aren’t many 6-month-old babies who put up with all that noise and sun and heat and color easily. She did. After that visit, whenever I’d hear Stevie Wonder sing, “Isn’t She Lovely?” I’d cry a little, thinking about Sarah.

A year later, when the family visited Fairfax again, we went for a day at the beach in Del Valle Regional Park in Livermore. By then, Sarah was walking and talking and singing. We sang songs all the way to the park and back. She called her mom, “Honey,” her own combination of “Connie” and “Hon,” names she heard others using for her mom. It sounded like the sweetest endearment ever.

Sarah lived a life that was much too short, dying at 34. The reasons her path turned dark are beyond all of us, but right from the start and all throughout her growing years, she was bright: she shone in intelligence and musicality and the ability to engage other people. She was so pretty. Most little girls are pretty in their own way. Sarah was objectively pretty. It was just a fact.

I was lucky that my work brought me to Phoenix a lot in the 1980s, so I got to see Sarah often–and later, her sisters, who I loved just as much. I loved hearing about her life at school, and listening to her developing skill on the violin. She was a talker, and could chat about trivial topics and serious ones. Her mind was fast, and she liked staying a step ahead of everybody else. It seemed clear that she was ambitious to know everything.

In the early 1990s, as she entered her teens, something changed, and while her light didn’t dim, it became scattered and sometimes she threw a protective blanket over it. By the time of her freshman year at college, she had adopted a Goth look and attitude, and when she dropped out, it wasn’t a surprise. Like her mom and dad, I was pained, but I was also sure she would one day soon get back on a path toward the productive life her talents had always promised.

When, in the summer of 1998, I’d come to Phoenix for Sarah’s and her cousin Gary’s high-school graduation ceremonies, I had a rare difficult exchange with her. I said something about this being a milestone for her, and she angrily replied that this was not a milestone, this was just high school. That’s how sure she was that she would accomplish much more than graduating from McClintock High School.

And so she did, in one important particular. She gave birth to her son Stefen ten years after that graduation. She was so proud of him, and he was beautiful in the way she was: eyes full of light. It’s so good that Stefen carries Sarah within him, and that his children and theirs will likewise extend the light that was Sarah Elizabeth long into the future.

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