Sara Barnard Edwards

Sara (Sally) Barnard Edwards died at home surrounded by family in North Haven, CT on September 24 after two years of treatment for metastatic lung cancer.  Sally was born in New York City in 1940 to Edward Townsend Barnard and Charlotte Williams Barnard.  Her grandparents were Everett Larkin Barnard and Therina Townsend Barnard, and James Willard Williams and Charlotte Welles Williams.  Sally grew up in Westchester County and Guilford, CT and graduated from the Walnut Hill School.  She earned a BA from Wellesley College and a master’s degree from Yale.  She and her husband, Don, settled in Cranbury, NJ, and Sally taught ballet at the Princeton Ballet School while raising a family.  She then earned a second master’s degree cum laude from General Theological Seminary in New York and began a new career as a Pastoral Associate and Hospice Chaplain and served on the faculty of the Yale Summer Institute in Bioethics. 

Sally had many passions in life, including creating a welcoming home for loved ones and strangers alike, supporting dozens of non-profits from medicine to social justice to education and the arts, and doing needlework of all kinds.  After insisting that she and Don find a church home in the late 1970s, she became an enthusiastic contributor to the life of Episcopal parishes in New Jersey and Connecticut as lay leader, acolyte, choir “mum,” and flower arranger.  Sally’s lifelong love of gardening created beauty for everyone around her.  Her deep attachment to special places found its fullest expression at her family’s five-generation summer cottage, “Underoaks,” on Casco Bay in Yarmouth, Maine.  Her life exemplified the Wellesley motto: non ministrari sed ministrare, not to be ministered to, but to minister.

She is survived by her husband of 57 years; daughter Jeanette (Ricardo) Chavira of Hamden, CT; son David (Helen) of Bend, OR; and six devoted grandchildren.  She is also survived by a brother, David, and sister, Jeanette, both of Yarmouth, ME. 

A Memorial Choral Eucharist will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 29, at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, 830 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT.  In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her memory to the Wellesley Students’ Aid Society, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481, or online to Doctors Without Borders at www.donate.doctorswithoutborders.org.

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