She also started a breast cancer support group at Benedictine Hospital (now part of HealthAlliance) in 1994, which was soon expanded to all oncology patients. The group obtained a house on Mary’s Avenue for its activities. It was, and remains, a model program: from 2000 to 2005, Sarah was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense in evaluating proposals for funding innovative breast cancer treatments. In 2004, she won the New York State Governor’s Award for Innovation in Breast Cancer Research and Education, and in 2007, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.
After unsuccessfully running for the Ulster County Legislature in 1994, her life took another turn. “Instead of going to the victory party I went to an activists conference in Philadelphia and met Marty Laforse,” a professor of American studies, jazz expert, baseball fan, and all around polymath who became her husband. The couple lived in a house in Kingston near the Hudson River. (Laforse died in 2007. An annual scholarship has been established for a Kingston High School graduate in his memory through the Kingston Library; Laforse had served on the board.)
Sarah became a devotee of two forms of “Buddhist-influenced, Japanese psychology” after attending a lecture and workshop in 1988 and served as the first president of the Todo Institute, based in Vermont. The teaching “is practical about living in the moment and doing what you need to do, rather than letting how you feel run your life,” she said. “It’s the basis of the Oncology Support Program at Health Alliance and has helped thousands of people.” She also started a Healing Circle Improv Group, whose members did improv theater exercises and visited patients at their bedside. “We let people tell their stories, and that’s how my interest in people dying started.”
The Circle of Friends of the Dying is sponsoring a talk on June 3 and 4 by Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, at HealthAlliance’s Mary’s Avenue Campus. “We live in a death-phobic society and we don’t know how to die well,” Sarah said. “We dope them up or keep then in the ICU when it’s not necessary or desired.” Jenkinson will present an alternative vision.
Sarah also teaches a weekly class, “Perspectives at the End of Life,” at the Lifetime Learning Institute at Bard College (open to people over age 55).
How does Sarah herself cope with the prospect of death? “I live my life, I celebrate my life, I wake up in the morning and say, ‘How can I help the world today?’ It nourishes me.”
During the summer, she is the page turner for the pianists performing at the Maverick Concerts. She’s also a participant in the End the New Jim Crow campaign, which was inspired by Michelle Alexander’s book documenting the extraordinary percentage of black men in the prison system and the racist policies and practice underlying those numbers. “More young black people are proportionately in prison in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world,” she said. She is working with the group at Jewish Congregation in Woodstock, which is developing strategies for helping released inmates find a job and place to live.
Three years ago, during a visit to the state prison at Fishkill, she met an inmate who had no family or visitors and has been regularly corresponding with him ever since. Despite serving 25 years and being “an exemplary citizen, a Muslim, a model prisoner who’s gotten his bachelor’s degree, and a mentor to other prisoners,” he still has not been released and was recently transferred to Cape Vincent, near the Canadian border. “There’s this passage in the Torah, ‘if you help one person it’s as if you saved the world.’ We talk regularly on the phone. I’m the link to the outer world for this man.
“I’m planning to get him transferred back to Fishkill and once he’s in the area, I’m encouraging friends and colleagues to visit him. I went to a meeting at Temple Emanuel and met three Muslim men who would be contacts for him when he gets out. He’s very religious and sent me a book of Rumi’s poetry.
“My mother had a sign in our kitchen, ‘I shall pass through this world but once, so any good or kindness I can show, let me do it now for I shall not pass this way again.’
This quotation has been my guide for living a meaningful life.”
I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this honor than Barbara Sarah. I had the pleasure of working with Barbara when I was the marketing director at Benedictine Hospital. Her boundless enthusiasm, creativity, kindness and passion for helping others were truly remarkable. Barbara, you have touched so many lives and continue to do so. You make our world a better place and I am a better person for having known you.