Sarah Harriett Smith Keefer

Sarah Keefer was born as Sarah Harriett Larratt Smith in Montreal to Hamilton Larratt Smith and Harriett Frothingham May Matthias Smith on February 13, 1951. In 1975 she married the love of her life, Richard McKay Keefer, a man only six weeks her junior, and on February 25, 2025, Sarah left this life.

The facts as told can hardly do justice to the force of nature Sarah was. When she was a little girl, she was so afraid of Captain Hook in Peter Pan that she decided to become him, so she wouldn’t be afraid of him anymore. That was a hallmark of hers – to challenge whatever frightened her. At the age of fifteen she fell badly while caring for her horse Amber, and broke her femur, and spent six weeks in Montreal General. She turned to reading Lord of the Rings while lying in her hospital bed, and her appreciation for Tolkein completely changed her life. Sarah pursued first Greek and Latin, and later Old English, developing and honing a profound appreciation for Anglo-Saxon liturgical texts, though she always had an interest in exploring the whimsical and coming at ideas from innovative angles.

Sarah was a complex woman. She was beautiful enough to model, and was drawn by students at LCS when she taught there in a parody of a blonde bombshell teaching English Literature while reclining on a desk, but she was also deeply private and shy and immensely aware of decorum. She loved folk music, playing in coffee shops in Montreal on a six-string guitar she named ‘Archie,’ and she sang with verve and with joy but only in choirs at her church or in private at home. She loved to draw horses, but could never quite get the hooves right, and it became a private joke that her drawings always ended at the fetlocks. She tried her hand at writing fiction, working out gender swapping characters in the 1980s called Tasseon and Tasseia for her Cloudmarchers story, named after her daughter’s childhood nickname, but she never finished the manuscript or had the courage to publish it.

For her students she was a tireless advocate, enthusiastic and passionate, giving of herself to a staggering degree; Sarah would stop at nothing and go every extra mile to facilitate student success or to stand up for what was right. She brought that level of extreme commitment to almost every part of her life, dedicating herself body and soul to horses, dressage, dog obedience competitions, Keeshond rescue and more. Within the family it was something of a given that Sarah did not seem to have middle gears.

Sarah met her husband Richard at their mutual cousin’s wedding; their families had been interwoven since Richard’s aunt had married Sarah’s uncle. Anecdotally, Richard as an adolescent thought very little of “the girl in the mink stole” he was introduced to, but as they continued to move in the same social circles between Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, they ended up drawn together, first courting, then wildly in love. They were a striking pair; he with dark brown hair and dark blue eyes and she with long ash blond hair and sky blue eyes. They married on January 25, 1975 at St. Thomas Anglican Church in Toronto with almost 300 guests present in what was very much a social event for their circles. Sarah and Richard chose to step away from the expectations of their respective families and forge their own path together, and their deep tie and connection was the mainstay and bedrock of what was fifty years of devoted marriage. They welcomed two children – Matthew Richard Larratt on February 23, 1978, and Katrina Harriett Beatrice on March 12, 1981.

Sarah spoke often about the importance of celebration - of celebrating small wins or celebrating progress toward a goal. Given what a vibrant, passionate and strong-willed woman she was, there is a tragedy in how Sarah’s last few years were spent. After suffering from a serious stroke in 2020, Sarah survived sepsis which nearly took her life in 2022, but dementia claimed her piece by piece over the years that followed. She was cared for by her devoted husband in the final years of her life, and her departure from this world has been met with a bittersweet joy at her liberation from a body which was no longer a fit place for that indomitable spirit.

We remember and we celebrate Sarah as the complicated, loving, brilliant and authentic woman she was. We celebrate how she shaped the lives of so many people, and while her family grieves her loss, we invite those who knew her to celebrate as Sarah would have exhorted us all to, and to toast her riding her beloved horses and hugging her beloved dogs where she now dwells.