Sarah Sottile Sudden Death & Survivor's Fund

Words simply fail in any capacity to capture the enormity of this event, this task at the end of it, and yet they must. I apologize in advance for my inability to capture stardust in a jar.

Early in the morning on May 29th of this year, in the dark hours of twilight, sometime before the dawn, Sarah Sottile took her own life. She was 36 years old. She had been battling depression most of her life, at least the 21 years I’d known her. She was an impossibly beloved daughter and family member, the best friend to ever be had by so many people she knew, and for over two decades she was the person closest in the world to me. We knew each other inside and out. She was my sister, and along with many of you who may be reading this, I will grieve her for the rest of my life. And if you don’t feel the same, you’re the worse for it, because you missed out. I can’t possibly explain what you missed out on, or how, but you don’t even know the loss that you’ve suffered at her passing from this world to whatever comes after.

She is survived directly by her mother, Trish Sottile, who I deeply admire for having raised the most curious, headstrong, beautiful, intelligent, barrier-breaking, genuine, loving, caring, and amazing person ever to walk upright. Trish raised Sarah to truly believe that she could do anything and prepared her to fight for what she believed in and for her own place in an unfair world. Follow your dreams. Choose your own adventure. Know that you are loved and supported. With that support and love, she went out to conquer the world, and she did. There should be no prouder mother of a daughter as Trish was, is, and always will be of Sarah. Above everything we should all be thankful to Trish for having been Sarah’s mother and raising her how she did. Sarah attributed her courage and strength of will to her mother’s inspiration. Trish didn’t just raise a daughter, she raised a woman that broke the mold, broke ceilings, created her own life as a piece of grand performance art, and did it with love, compassion, and understanding for everyone whose path she crossed. She raised an impossibly unique woman, more completely herself than anyone I’ve ever met, and anyone who met Sarah is lucky she did. I love you, Trish. Thank you for being one of my other moms.

Sarah has left behind her beloved cousin, Victoria Sottile, who in the aftermath of this tragedy has been someone that I have leaned on heavily. Victoria I know you’re reading this, and you have to know, Sarah held you in such magnificently high regard. There hasn’t been a thing you’ve done worth mentioning that she didn’t tell those closest to her about. She was so incredibly proud of you. The fact that you weren’t closer to all of us before this is one of the greatest crimes I can think of. You belong with her closest circle more than you know, and I will be proud to call you family for the rest of my life. I cannot thank you enough. I can never make up for what has left us, but I can offer you friendship like family.

She also leaves behind her precious little dog Beau, the world’s most amazing giant teacup Pomeranian, who has never wanted anything but to make friends with everyone and everything that he meets. Beau was Sarah’s child. She took him everywhere. He is now in the care of his grandma, Trish, and he will be treated just as he should be, like a little living monument, as a small furry king.

Her little grey and white cat Miss Kittums is at home with Trish living her most comfy kitty life, and her remaining cat, Kizzy Cheese, I have taken into my household, where she will be reunited with her birth mother, my cat Liberty.

Sarah is preceded in her passing by her younger brother Sam, who left the mortal coil in late 2016. He was a beautiful, gentle soul, and humorous young man. If you squinted they looked almost like twins. Tragedy upon tragedy has been heaped upon the family, friends, and everyone who knows or knew them. Left with no children Trish has little blood family left, a brother and his wife, Sarah’s cousin Victoria and her husband Josh, and Sarah’s circle of close friends and chosen family, none of whom could ever fill the hole left in the wake of Sarah and Sam’s passing.

The funerary proceedings were very private, the dust has settled, but there are still so many needs left. Sarah left no will. She had very limited savings, spending most of her money either to help her mother, to travel and gather more joyful experiences of which she would never deny herself and of late to pay towards more schooling, being back in academia, moving quickly through an MA program in clinical psychology. Her estate will remain closed for a year before it is able to go into probate, which will take another six months longer. Meanwhile, despite the collective grief, everyone I know is feeling, Trish needs our support. She is disabled, on disability and government assistance that barely covers bills, let alone anything else, and cannot work. She does beautiful crafts but not anything that she would ever monetize.

Sarah cared greatly for her mother, loving her deeply enough to make sure at all costs the woman who raised her to be so amazing wanted for nothing. If it was in her power to help, Sarah did it. She was her mother’s greatest supporter of late, especially since Sammi’s sudden departure. As her mother had supported her to turn into the woman she was, she returned that support in kind. But Sarah is lost to us all now. Trish needs love and support, and unfortunately, you can’t buy bread with love and even the kindest words.

This GoFundMe in its entirety will be put into a special needs trust to help support Trish after suffering such tremendous loss. The trust will be managed professionally and hopefully, with enough donations it can help make her life just a little more comfortable for years to come. Her financial needs are immediate, pressing, and upcoming. As this GoFundMe fills I would like to be able to remove the end goal so that it can gain enough to make sure that Trish wants for little for as long as possible, which is not just what she deserves, but what Sarah, what Bear would have wanted for her. It’s not even that she wants for great or opulent things, not at all. She is humble, reluctant to take any help at all, and wants nothing more than to be able to continue to live simply. Sarah was a gift to us all. Surely keeping her mother from abject poverty on top of and following this unfathomably painful event is a noble cause.

This is what has happened, these are the circumstances, those are the needs and goals, and now I come to break our collective hearts.

Sarah Yvonne Sottile was born on July 23, 1986. She and her younger brother were raised mostly by her loving mother Trish. She was bright, dramatic in the best way, exuberant, intelligent, and precocious from the start.

She was by no means raised in wealth, lower middle class maybe, but her mother provided for her and her brother as best she could. The most important thing is that Trish raised her in preparation for a magnificent life.

Bull-headed and heterodox from the start, Sarah dropped out of Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and took the GED. Sarah was deliriously intelligent, truly one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She smashed the GED and was accepted as a freshman at Saint Louis University at 17 as a McNair Scholar, the first young woman in her family to attend college. She was also a Dean’s Scholar. Early on she was premed, but eventually drifted toward lab sciences. She took residence under her first real mentor in the hard sciences, Dr. Thomas Westfall, now professor emeritus of the physiology and pharmacology department at SLU. He took her in, and she worked on research regarding hypertension in his physiology lab sometimes off, but mostly on, for the next seven years. She grew attached to him and bench science and physiology after dropping from pre-med and had plans to hopefully be his final grad student. She took several semesters off and missed the chance though. He employed her in his physiology lab even when she was not enrolled in classes for a time.

When she did graduate, it was with an undergraduate degree of broad application: investigative medical sciences. Much like the way her mother had raised her, this gave her a broad array of directions and roads from which to choose to continue her education. She was always so at home in school or academia. It was absurd.

She went on to be accepted into a fully funded doctoral program at SIU Springfield, where she met her second mentor in the sciences, Dr. Donald Caspary. She moved to Springfield, Illinois, and split her time between an apartment and her graduate studies there, and St. Louis, driving back on the weekends to visit friends and see her mother and brother. As a neuroscientist and pharmacologist, she felt like a duck out of water sometimes in what was essentially an audiology lab, but she valued and admired Dr. Caspary, counted on him as a mentor and confidant, and also made fast friends of everyone in the lab she shared, along with meeting and befriending people all over Springfield. Sarah was magnetic like that. To be near her was to be near a great attractor. You couldn’t help but gravitate towards her. Often times she would speak of how much she loved living in Springfield.

She successfully defended her thesis on June 30th, 2017, and was awarded a PhD in neuroscience and pharmacology. I know of three printed copies of her thesis, one she gave to her mother, one she gave to me, and I think she kept the last. To say that she was smart is simply an understatement of such great magnitude I can’t rightly explain.

She moved back to St. Louis, took a short and unsatisfying Postdoctoral appointment at Washington University that left her jaded at the academic machine, and then devoted herself to the arts. Eventually, she started to devote herself to harm reduction, education, and de-stigmatization in relation to drug use. She was hired as the head scientist at MO Network, Missouri’s first needle exchange, where she didn’t only work as a scientist but also worked directly with drug users. She handed out clean needles and Narcan. She treated people that others looked down on like they were people because they were. To Sarah you could be a king or a junkie, rich or poor, she’d be more likely to kiss the feet of a heroin addict than a king. More likely to buy food for you or hand out cash that she always carried in her Mini Cooper’s center console to the homeless than to show any respect to someone just for having had money. She treated people kindly, with dignity and humanity, and if you were someone who couldn’t extend the same as that to your fellow man then she would be the first to shame you for it. This was how she came to know every person we passed on the street in St. Louis. Always a kind word, a clean rig, money for food, and do you need some Narcan? “Be safe.”

She wrote wonderful poetry, but she didn’t think so. She made friends easy. The joke was that everyone fell in love with Sarah, but it might have actually been true. She had a lovely and idiosyncratic sense of style, unmistakably hers. She was covered in tattoos from head to toe. She was the patron saint of the south side. Her mother’s nickname for her that those of us closest to her adopted was Bear. I still don’t remember why, and I feel bad writing this without being able to tell the story behind it. But she had as many names as she did anything else, Sarah Starcandy, Sarah Strattera, Eva, Eve, Eevee, Evelyn Milquetoast, Evelyn Grey. She was a talented visual artist, painter, sketch and doodle artist, and never ran into something she wasn’t willing to try her hand at. Her room and the entire upstairs of her house is filled with bright acrylic canvases, stacks of half-finished works, and sketchbooks filled to the brim. She was a prolific journal keeper, and better writer than she ever gave herself credit for. An amazing writer. Her handwriting was neat and beautiful, and anyone who has ever gotten a note, letter, or card from her will know exactly what I say when I say I will miss the way that she wrote her y’s, a distinctive sharp curl back from a vertical downstroke to them. At some point, she gained a penchant for stealing my pens, mostly pink ones, and after that she always had a Pilot Precise V5 Rolling ball close by. I still would leave out pink pens for her to “steal” even up to last month, when she walked out of my house and I found one missing and texted her that she was pretty slick.

She loved Starbucks, me working there for six years probably didn’t help with that. She loved tea and drank it every morning while doing crosswords or word games. She did aerial silks. She danced. She lived her life like art. We started a meme page together. She moderated a huge Facebook group. She would do livestreams that were hilarious. Sometimes they were just her eating and cracking jokes. She loved DDR, any rhythm game that wasn’t Guitar Hero, and Pokémon. Her favorite Pokémon was Eevee, because Eevee could be so many different things, in the best way, just like she was. She fought for the downtrodden and the underrepresented. She believed in things that were worth believing in. She was full of more love than anyone I’ve met. She forgave quickly even to her own detriment. She traveled the world. She did a semester or two stints in grad school in Spain and fell in love with Barcelona. She went to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Fest. She went to Spain for the Tomatilla. She went to Barcelona and saw Felix da Housecat spin live. She loved music. Sarah was a little candy raver, and we went to so many shows and festivals. We saw so many shows together that I couldn’t list them all, and I don’t even know all the other shows she saw. She loved New Orleans and wore a green dyed wedding gown with a second line following her down Bourbon Street to celebrate the anniversary of a divorce from a wedding that left her hurt. You could see her early on every week in the Riverfront Times as the model in the color advertisements for Cheap TRX. She loved Strawberry Lemonade from Mokabe’s, she loved South Grand. She loved Tower Grove Park and she felt most at home the past few years in Lafayette Square.

She ran the streets, she owned the town, she had a smirk that spoke of secret mischief, a smile radiant enough to light up a moonless night, and when she dressed up, she could stun an entire room to complete silence. She was brilliant. Years out of academia her knowledge of the science she had devoted herself to was still nearly encyclopedic. The Queen of in-jokes. The trips to Starbucks. Christmas Eve and her mom’s cheeseball and especially lasagna every year was a celebration. New Year's Eve with our friends. She collected experiences and joys like precious treasures, never denying herself a chance to collect a joy. She hoarded trinkets, and at some point, when she decided she liked Tokidoki unicorns I took it upon myself to shower her with them every chance I got. She visited friends in other states. She holed up in her room and ate like a six-year-old, she bought the most expensive charcuterie board on the menu. She was so perfectly high class and so perfectly lowbrow that it was hard to comprehend. She had friends, and friends, and friends, a sea of you who might be reading this, and I wish I knew every single one of you. We were all so lucky.

She loved Father John Misty, seeing him, three, four times? I can’t remember. Once she saw him at the top of a mountain in California, in Sonoma County, and she bought a rat finger puppet and held it up and wiggled it at Father John Misty from the front rows the entire show. She gave me the finger puppet and said it had seen the show for me. She promised me that we would see Father John Misty together, and we never will. I’m so glad for all the gifts, the art, the letters, the postcards, the thousands and thousands of photos, brunch club, family dinners, holidays, birthdays, trips, and everything we ever did together. She loved Fight Club and Trainspotting. And she called me Cornelius and I called her Marla. Amelia in New Orleans, Joel in Minnesota, Stephanie and running Cherokee, The Japanese festival with me and mom, Silky Sundays with Mariel and anyone else, trips to Ikea just to lay on furniture and take silly photos, trips to Starbucks, playing Pokémon GO in a tornado watch with the skies swirling green, exploring abandoned houses, dancing at warehouse parties, rocking the crazy train straight to the looney bin, and everyone that I don't even know to mention or what to mention about your relationships to her. There isn’t a part of me that she didn’t influence from the day that we met. Our conversation started one day and went on for 21 years. This is the longest I’ve ever gone without talking to her, I can’t imagine what it’s like for her mother. I can’t imagine what it's like for so many of us. There was so much she gave, and so much of her to go around, may everyone have their memory, their story, their trinket, their postcard, letter, photo, their cherished something of this boundless entity that was contained with us in flesh and blood on the very same terra firma upon which we tread.

I looked up to her for what she had accomplished, the sort of person that she was.

I know how loved she was. I know how loved she is. I know I can only say so much. I know that this is too long. But she was brilliant. She was sharp. She was beautiful. She was so much more than the sum of three thousand words. If she was a novel she would have been as thick and densely packed and witty and complex as Infinite Jest. And she loved David Foster Wallace too. It was one of the first things that we bonded over, literature.

If she was a celestial body, she would be the whole sky and every star in it.

If she was still here, she would make fun of me for all this.

She was more than the sum of everything that we will collectively ever be able to say about her. And she loved everyone she knew in one way or another. That’s the thing, she was so much. How can it be possible to explain in a GoFundMe?

If you knew her, no matter how or how long, know that she loved you.

If you didn’t know her, you will never understand what has left us.

And the rest of us have no choice but to go on without her.

And this love and this pain will last forever.

“I did so many amazing things” – Sarah Sottile date unknown.

And goddammit Sarah, you did.

There will never be another.

We love you so much.

We misshu.

Please contribute. Please share. Thank you for reading if you read the whole thing. Excuse all the weeping on the page. Please excuse my attempt at capturing the essence of the impossible, the ineffable, and the sublime. Sarah, the elephant to my teapot, I’m sorry this was so long. You always said you wanted me to give your eulogy, and I never got the chance. Having written this, I know you were giving me an impossible task anyway.

Omnia perditi. Nihil perditi.

In collective memoriam, in our collective grief, from all of us to all of us, with endless love,

-Robert Cole, Jun 24, 2023