IN MEMORIAM: Sally Edwards ‘93
Sally Edwards, Class of 1993, died on September 24 in North Haven, CT after two years of treatment for metastatic lung cancer. She was 82.
A graduate of Wellesley College, she earned a master’s degree from Yale then moved to Princeton, NJ with her husband, Don, who was a student at Princeton Seminary. She was a 50-year resident of Cranbury, New Jersey and taught at the Stuart Country Day School, and after the birth of their first child, began a 26-year career on the faculty of the Princeton Ballet School, where she annually prepared the soldiers for “The Nutcracker.”
Edwards served on the Vestry of Trinity Church in Princeton and was the “choir mum’ to its Choir of Men, Boys and Girls. She earned a master’s degree cum laude from General and served as Pastoral Associate at Christ Church in New Brunswick and as a hospice chaplain and taught in the Yale Summer Institute in Bioethics. She was a member of the Institutional Review Board of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. In retirement, she worked as a volunteer chaplain at Monroe Village.
Edwards 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 and flower arranger. Edwards’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.
From an obituary published in Home News Tribune and posted online at mycentraljersey.com September 28, 2022