My "speech"
In three days we'll be celebrating Sarah's life and being forced to move on with ours. I'll be speaking at the tribute and I wanted to post what I'm going to say. Many thanks to Nita and Arthur for the edits and re-edits.In grade nine, Sarah and I did an entrepreneurship project with our social studies teacher, Mme Smith. We chose to do our project on Jim Hensen. Sarah’s favourite factoid about Hensen was that he specifically requested that no one wear black during his funeral because it didn't reflect who he was. A lot of us here today aren't wearing black because, like Hensen, the colour doesn’t represent Sarah's character. During our last sleepover, Sarah and I talked straight into the morning. She told me about how much she admired her parents, and how after years of picking on her brothers, the inevitable happened and now they were both big enough to pick on her. We pulled out our favourite stories and retold them even though we both knew them inside out. She told me about the games she and Kathleen used to play and we remembered the time we sang "see my vest" on the bus in France so many times to the point where everyone was ready to happily kick us out into the rain.We did the silliest and sometimes stupidest things together but those are the things that are the most vivid for me. When we were together, we were flighty. At best. There was the time when we baked cookies but forgot to add flour – we actually tricked David into eating one of them and he can attest to how bad they were. While in Germany we had a seemingly intelligent conversation about how "Ausfart" must be such a major city because you could access it from any road, in the end, however, we found out that "Ausfart" actually means "exit’. And then there were times that she would be driving and when we reached a red light, right before it changed, she would forget if she had turned the car on and try to turn it on again.We also reminisced about a very important milestone that we reached when I went to visit her. With Australia as the backdrop, Sarah and I carefully chose the names we would give to our respective first-borns. Sarah decided that the name of her first born was to be Turbocharger Lopaschuk the Third, CEO. My last name being Yu, my child was to be named AEIO YU – un-hyphenated, per Sarah's request. We talked about our favourite things, and I brought one of Sarah's with me that I want to share with you. It's a chapter from her favourite book, the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, which completely encompasses her sense of humour.
"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and had been widely regarded as a very bad move. Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel. However, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought. For instance, a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact 42, and so another, even bigger computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet- especially by the strange ape like beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program."
For Sarah, the meaning of life was just to live it. Whenever I would spaz out over something, which I am apt to do, she would always laugh, and say, "Oh Joycie, it's not that bad." She was always right. I had a lot of time to think this week and I thought about how Sarah lived her life without any regrets. We get caught up in so many entanglements and insecurities, worries, obsessions and petty arguments while life races right by us shaking its head at how seriously we take ourselves. She understood and recognised our mortality and that in the end none of it truly mattered. This is something that we can all learn from. I'm heartbroken that her adventures had to end so soon and that so many people will go untouched by her joy, her beauty and her love. I think of her friends and her family and the sadness that has enveloped all of us but we've all been comforted by the fact that Sarah led an amazing life. She lived more than a lot of people who have years on her because she recognized that life is about quality, not quantity.
There are so many more stories and memories of Sarah that I'd love to share with you, when there is more time. I hope everyone remembers Sarah by her laughter, those space-cadet-like tendencies, and of course, her kindness.
posted by Joyce @ 12:08 AM
2 Comments:
It still says "contest to how bad they were." ;-p
oh bother, i love you joycie. it sounds good. elle
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