She was delighted when she got a new book on Dante, delighted when a new Mariah Carey record came out and delighted to tell her snobby music critics how wrong they were about Mariah Carey. Ever since last spring, when she began treatment for lymphoma, the writers who worked for her have taken turns keeping her chair warm, certain that she’d beat this thing and come back to us. She was a tough lady, right? Or did such an earnest imitation of one that you had to believe it. And she always relished a righteous battle.
Sarah was just 25 when she cofounded Out, which had become the nation’s largest gay and lesbian magazine by the time she left. (She’d had one of her righteous battles with its new management.) When NEWSWEEK hired her, the Arts section–like all magazine arts sections, a zoo full of mood-swinging misfits–couldn’t quite believe it: a fellow freak was now their boss at this mainstream magazine? But that was the point. Sarah was both a quixotic outsider and a savvy professional, with the impossible–yet sometimes possible–vision of reconciling the avant-garde and the establishment, high culture and pop culture, what ought to be and what is. We loved her chin-out pugnacity: when she fought for more space so we could write about some weird-ball painter or gold-toothed rapper, she was the heroine on a white horse we computer jockeys wished we were. We loved how she could laugh about it. And we came to see the compassion beneath her passions. Sarah cared: about her writers, about the arts, about the nation and the world. She wanted to live where DeLillo readers didn’t look down their noses at DMX fans, where Oprah watchers weren’t scared to be operagoers–and, while we’re at it, where gays and straights, blacks and whites, whoever and whoever, weren’t at each other’s throats. Measuring the world against such ideals would make anyone testy. But you should have heard her laugh.
And she worked hard to make it all come true. Too late at night, you’d be kneeling by Sarah’s side as she sat at her computer, brainstorming with her over some sentence, some word, that wasn’t absolutely clear. At the morning editorial meetings, she’d be protesting any rightward deviationism in NEWSWEEK’s political coverage–and campaigning for extra pages in Arts. A couple of years ago, she stayed up nights and weekends plotting a wholesale redesign of the magazine; she even got her way about some of it. During the past year, she might call from the hospital: why was Eminem not on the cover? This was his moment. It was a no-brainer. At one point in her chemo, she felt well enough for a brief visit (her last, it turned out) to the office; she ended up outstaying everybody. She said it was the happiest day of her life. But toward the last, she was in another place entirely. What mattered was her friends and loved ones–not that she made that distinction. She gave thought to her life and to her death. (Being Sarah Pettit, she left behind detailed instructions for her own memorial service, and even specified who was to write this obituary.) She prayed. If there’s any justice, she found some way to be at peace with what was happening to her, and to understand that hers had been a full and complete life after all, not a life randomly, cruelly, interrupted. Those of us who loved Sarah just aren’t there yet.
