My friend Sarah
/This week, my friend and co-worker Sarah Sand suddenly passed away. Sarah was an exceptional co-worker and a great human being. Her obituary is here, if you’d like to read it.
Sarah and I didn’t work on many projects together, and she certainly had many closer friends at work, but we spent time together outside of work as well. When our company instituted a new policy that gave us Friday afternoons free in the summer, she was part of a group of friends who would come to my house and eat pizza, play board games, have a couple drinks, and maybe blow off a bit of steam after a week at work. In February, we all decided to get together on a Saturday to play, as we didn’t want to wait for summer to come, and right now I’m really thankful we did that.
Sarah was smart, and she was extremely good at her job. Not just good at the technical work, but personally dedicated to building tools and processes that would help others succeed as well. When I needed help figuring out how to use a new tool she oversaw she was happy to spend half an hour showing me how to do it, with infinite patience in dealing with my gripes. Those qualities served her well when we’d play games together too, she’d often quietly be amassing the points necessary to win a game of Settlers of Catan, while several of us guys would be loudly taunting each other and not seeing her strategy until it was too late to stop her even when we would gang up against her.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Sarah was universally liked by all of us who worked with her. In IT, where egos and arguments and turf wars can often get in the way of progress, she was always agreeable, patient, and calm. She cared about her work, and one day at my house while waiting for others to arrive, she expressed some very real and raw exasperation at not being able to implement her plans for a work project, and then immediately apologized for it. I told her she had nothing to apologize for and that every one of us has had those moments, but what struck me was that her frustration wasn’t so much about not getting her way but that she felt it would hurt the users of the systems under her care.
Yesterday, while sharing a bit of mourning with a coworker, we both hit upon the same word that described her most of all. Kind. She would have kind words for those around her, every day. She was kind and supportive to complete strangers on the Internet. She had empathy at her core, and as someone who sometimes struggles to find that in myself, she awed me with her innate abilities.
In our February gaming session, I’d cobbled together a bag of random nerdy leftovers from various LootCrate boxes that I didn’t want or need, but thought others might, just to give us something to play for, as the winner of each game could pick something they wanted from the bag. She spied a particular item she wanted to win, a little paper notebook shaped like an original Star Trek communicator. I asked her if she liked it, and she said she really wanted to win it not for herself, but rather to give it to a coworker that she knew would love it.
That was Sarah. She was my friend, and I miss her.
