I spoke at my best friend’s Memorial Service. She passed away - at 31 years old - on July 17, 2025. Liver cancer overtook her, and her fight was tough as nails, and she didn’t want to die, but she did feel peace. She told me that.

It’s surreal.

Scanning these words I’ve written feels like: what the actual heck?

Death is shocking, even as it forms slow and inevitable on the horizon -

Cancer, YOU ARE THE WORST. If you know someone suffering from it, or if you’ve lost someone to it, I wish to embrace you.

oof.

There’s also bittersweet warmth, potent memories, and a strange type of humor. (I’ve laughed so hard with friends who loved her, with her husband, over the weirdest of things because … again … what the actual heck?)

Friday, August 15th, at 3PM, we celebrated Sarah’s life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at a sprawling church (the size of a college campus) flanked by cornfields with 6-foot stalks.

Here is what I wrote till 1AM the night before…

It’s only 1 thing. I hope to say more about her for all my life. She held abundance, and she was imperfect, and she was wonderful.

Letter to Sarah, read at her Memorial Service:

Dearest Sarah,

Someone asked me once in LA if I’ve trained professionally in improv comedy…

So…

I called you and thanked you for professionally training me in improv comedy.

During 13 years of friendship, we managed to do unintentional sketch comedy in the Dubai airport, on an elephant in Thailand, waiting out a 14-hour layover in Kunming, China, and huddled under a blanket on a roof at the border between Syria and Jordan watching 1997’s Cinderella, starring Whitney Houston and Brandy.

I feel the exuberance of your laughter now, here, you singular woman with your springboard mind, your warmth, your wit, your specific twinkle toes dance, and your eternal willingness to receive my roller coaster heart. You sheltered me 1,000 times in shame storms, in honest confessions, on redeye flights in middle seats surrounded by the Ethiopian National Men’s soccer team,

you…

so vivid,
lit bright,
my very best friend,
losing you feels like darkness, like a fist, like night.

I’m terrible at grieving, or maybe I just want you to be near while I grieve, to talk about it, even now I want to read this aloud to you and hear what you think and link arms as you’d cup these faces I see before me, beloved of so many, Sarah, we adore you, we still do. Look at this garden you grew, these exquisite lives you cherished, you knit together, you knew…

How terribly it hurts to say goodbye to you.

I want to shake you gently and clutch you tight and say that you lived the most astonishing gorgeous life.

You’d remind me again and again:
“Em, let’s stay soft-hearted… willing… open…”

And my God, you did.

A friend who met you just once wept over you:
“Emily,” she said, “some lives are so big.”

So… Sarah Elizabeth, where do we begin?

With your heart (and lungs) open wide: you gave us a glimpse of Joy in this life, Joy beyond the walls of the world poignant as this grief.

And I feel something I can’t yet see… the freshness, the beauty of what you believed. That you are held, and so are we, and you were an optimist, and you were honest, and you did not ignore what happens in the center of the pain, facing the cusp of night, you discovered a Hand clutching yours, mine,

a few words - vivid, soft - are left to be said:

“Joy is inevitable,
belly laughter will come again.
You can weep, dear heart.
This is not the end.”