Skapi's Porch

Not a usual celebration for me, as I celebrate Samhain. But Sarah was Catholic, kinda sorta Celtic Catholic. So Today is more fitting to write their obituary. She used she/they pronouns, so I'm going to alternate what I use for them. Sorry if it's confusing.

Sarah Joan Hersha was born 6/1951 and died 7/2025. She was 74, and died after nearly 2 years of fighting the cancer - leiomyosarcoma - that ultimately took their life. Her first degree relatives - parents and brothers - all predeceased them. While she has nieces and nephews somewhere, their older half brothers had divorces and whatnot, and they all lost touch. Her parents were Basil and Sharoo Hersha, and yes, their mother's name is Sharoo, not Sharon. I met them both, and I swear her mother knew we were a couple before we really did.

Sarah went by SJ, for a multitude of reasons. Both of us worked in tech, which was, and still is, a very male dominated field. She at first got into databases, but when a piece of garbage called Access drive Paradox out of the market, they pivoted to doing macro development for small businesses People didn't want to hire an older female full time, even those she could work rings around the younger punks. Still, they loved computers, and tech, and she had lots of gadgets to play with. They also sewed, tried her hand at weaving, and enjoyed storytelling in a shared universe.

SJ also collected things like filk CDs, various other music CDs and DVDs, and books. Near the end, they read mostly on her tablet, but we still had a prodigious library together. Their tastes were eclectic, from things like Danny Kaye to Hu. She like Celtic Rock, Elvis, the Beatles, Viking Metal, Yanni, The Village People, Classical, Country, and a bunch of other stuff I've probably forgotten. About the only thing they didn't have a taste for was rap and other edge cases.

After the first chemo failed, and put her in the hospital for ten days, she was too weak to withstand the second best option chemo, and they knew it. We sought second opinions, and they all said the same thing - chemo to "shrink" the tumor, then surgery. But the tumor didn't shrink. Sarah elected to have home hospice, and live longer, than be killed by a longshot chemo that would realistically shorten her live and probably not succeed. So we had a year and a couple months to say goodbye. While cancer treatment has come a long way in the decades since her mother died of cancer in 1993, it hadn't come far enough. Sarah started treatment at over 200 pounds, and was maybe 125 when they died - a skeleton with a big lump in the abdomen. But at least she wasn't in any real pain - the hospice people made sure they had all the pain relief she wanted, which actually wasn't much.

Needless to say, I miss my spouse. They were a complicated person, with depths and dimensions that I can't even begin to touch here, but she was loved and cherished, even if only for a little while. They officially moved in with me in 1990, we got a DP in 2011, and got officially married in 2013.