Sarah Regina Petersen

"I won't agree to an operation"...she said..."I'm ready to check out. I've had a full life. It's time for you two to carry on"...Such were my mother's final "instructions" to both my sister, Vicki, and me.

This past November, my mother, Sarah Regina Sharpe-Ballard-Petersen, left this vale of tears at the age of 88, after what she herself called a "full life". She is survived by her daughter, Vicki Dauer, myself, James ("Rick") Ballard, one grandchild, three nieces (in California and Pennsylvania), and multiple friends, including Aggie Lindemann, Lynne Griffin, Louise Bensinger and Pat Blank; otherwise too numerous to list.

In her final weekend, November 14th through the 16th, she was compromised into making a decision about an acute medical condition that would end her life.

Considering all the tension and conflicts during the last half of the 20th century, she did her best to build a family home. She taught me, her first born, to read at the age of 3, laying the foundation for my father, James Kenneth Ballard, who taught me scientific methodology and critical thinking skills. Long before my sister Vicki was born, I was exposed to the classics by both my mother and father. In the 1950s and early 60s, our young family lived together and traveled cross-country many times, North and South, and across the Atlantic, first to Asia Minor (Turkey), then to Taranto, Italy. No matter where we lived, our mother made every birthday, and every holiday, a festive and memorable occasion for all members of the family.

In the late summer of 1963 we had finally settled here in Huntsville, but in little more than a decade later, (in 1977), our younger brother, John Robert Ballard, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and he died in the Spring of '78, at the age of 20. Our father, James Kenneth Ballard, also diagnosed with cancer, died six years after my brother, at the age of 57, in the late summer of '84.

In 1988, our mother married a second husband, Charles (Chuck) Petersen, a humble soul from Michigan who, as such things can happen, had been my father's best friend all the way through high school, in the 30s and 40s. Chuck died in 2005 from chronic heart failure. My mother and Chuck embraced their retired life and enjoyed each day they lived and traveled together...for nearly 18 years.

During her life, my mother started out as a cheer leader at Red Bank High, in Chattanooga, Tennessee...At the tender age of 15, still in high school, she became a dental assistant, then later, a model (in Detroit, Michigan). She was an athletic skater in Detroit's roller-skating rinks, and here in Huntsville, she was an assistant at our local convention center, a Red Cross volunteer and frequent sales rep. for Avon products.

She also studied and developed a great sense of interior decorating. Neighbors and friends would want to imitate her "museum" standards. All of her friends could easily testify that her decorating skills glowed in our home, and made a very warm, welcoming environment.

Her proudest accomplishment, however, was her family home garden in Huntsville, created by her with love and skill, and nourished for over half a century. In Spring, Summer and Fall, the home garden bloomed in such beautiful proportions that strangers would often drive by, stop and get out of their car, simply to take a picture with their amateur Kodak "Instamatics". Neighbors would always want to know how she grew this or that, and oft time she helped them with their own garden.

In the final years, my mother suffered from multiple serious medical issues. She bore her rheumatoid arthritis with stoicism, often trying to hide her pain when we played a simple game of cards with her. Her severe osteoporosis nearly crippled her with frequent back pains; again she remained stoic. She had a heart valve prolapse and a severely advanced hiatal hernia, so advanced that she could eat only the smallest portions of a meal. Basil cell carcinoma had also set in, but, ironically, skin cancer was the least of her troubles. One could easily say that our entire family became the poster family for cancer; that's what at least one doctor had told us. But most devastating of all, in the Summer of 2012, she began showing signs of onset Alzheimer's. During the following 2 1/2 years, I became her sole caregiver. She had never responded well to the so-called "treatments" she was given. Her life had become a nightmare, plagued with the resulting side effects from drugs that had never really shown clinical proof for the "treatment" of Alzheimer's. So by late Spring, 2014, her memory, both short and long term, began to decline rapidly.

The sad truth is that our dear mother had come to the inevitable point when she was most happy to take leave of her earthly vessel. While the doctors, nurses, my sister and I all stood around her hospital emergency bed, burdened by the heaviest of hearts, my mother smiled the whole time, following the doctors' detailed explanations of her medical condition.

After a long life she was ready to go. And no one was going to stop her.

Would that we all tend our gardens as well as my mother tended hers.

June 6th, 1926 - November 17th, 2014

-"Rick" Ballard

August, 2015

[Please send any donations to the Alzheimer's Association, here in Huntsville, Alabama ]