The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

And so now we are to reflect on the life of a card playing, poetry writing, French speaking, winter sporting, gym bunny and art history enthusiast – and no this isn’t the wrong sermon, because Sarah was at various stages in her life all those things as well as the welcoming, cake making, kind and smiling, brave, unaffected, gentle and supportive ward sister, practice nurse and church warden we all loved so much. But as so often is the case, it is only at his or her funeral that we discover the unknown variety of someone’s life. And yet in Sarah’s case it may be that all the details that were known only to those who were closest to her are less important in comparison with the way in which we did know her.

Reading the comments which people have already written and will I hope go on writing in the Book of Memories which Harriet and Katie have provided I found that those comments refer most often to Sarah’s smile and to the generosity of her kindness and her lovely combination of gentleness and determination. And then there was her readiness to answer any request for help, her capacity to say yes; it is only in the next few weeks and months that we shall perhaps begin to realise quite how much she did in the background and not just making cakes but noticing sadness and quietly offering reassurance, as well as welcoming people through that door so that her smile was one of their first experiences of this Christian community. And of course as someone else commented, Who now is going to keep their head while all around are losing theirs?’ I would love to have been nursed by Sarah because of that combination of gentleness and strength, of knowing what to do and doing it with that reassuring smile.

The traditional prayers of the dead refer to the saints who welcome us into heaven and reflecting on which saint might be foremost in welcoming Sarah I was reminded of the patron saint of my former diocese, Richard of Chichester.
Medieval writers used to make a play on the Latin version of Richard’s name “Ricardus” by breaking it up into separate syllables ri-car-dus’, from which they derived the separate words to smile, a heart and strength. So Richard could be described as the strong man with the smiling heart or the smiling man with the strong heart which is why I imagine him wanting to welcome into heaven Sarah, the strong women with the smiling heart. The Latin word for strong is also the origin of our word to endure’ and Sarah had much to endure at the end of her life and yet such was the smiling grace with which she bore it all that we hardly knew she was ill. Alan Goodison’s words printed at the front of the order of service were important to her in those months, but not because she had to prepare herself for sudden and unexpected death which was the context for which Alan had to be prepared as an ambassador in Ireland. For Sarah those words, “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit” were to be learned slowly and gently so that she could be ready for the time when she had gently to slip away. She was blessed perhaps by being able to die as she had lived, resolutely but gently.

As Sarah and I began to plan this service in the last weeks of her life she commented on various suggestions that I had made that they might be too gloomy. It’s hard to include a wicked sense of humour in a funeral and yet that was also part of Sarah. As one comment in that book puts it, wherever there was laughter she was in the middle of it and part too of the best sort of gossip never malicious or indiscrete but revelling in tales around the parish pump.’ I have yet to find this pump, which is perhaps why I can’t give any particular examples of what made Sarah laugh, but it may have had something to do with what enabled her to turn her sofa, her deep freeze and junk mail into subjects for poetry.

And so we are perhaps left asking whether I have been describing a kind of parish saint? I think Sarah would hate that idea she might think it made her sound too serious, too difficult to live with, someone the rest of us could never hope to match up to. And of course there were for her, as for us, things that her faith had to wrestle behind the scenes, pain and tension and disappointment and this too early dying. And she responded to the difficulties and the grief in her life as we all have to with faith and trust and a surrender to what we hope for but cannot know for certain. And as we all have to, she must I suspect have had to put on that smiling face when inside she didn’t feel like that at all. But the thing I think that was special about Sarah was that the pretending for her went so deeply that for us it felt natural it became her second nature her Christ-like nature, which she learnt to put on through long practice. In her own special way she showed us what it could be like to put on Christ she showed us what it could be like for the spirit of Christ to act through one of his faithful servants even in running a stall at the Spring fair or refusing to bid one no trumps’. And such a servant will have nothing to fear at the final trump.
Amen