LONDON – Sarah Everard, like so many others, had a difficult year in 2020. A long-term relationship fell apart and she lost her job when the company she worked for hit the rocks.
Yet she remained positive and active, throwing herself into online exercise classes and remaining a steadfast supporter of friends who were struggling through an equally difficult time. The girlfriends have been saying lately that things are looking up and that she would eagerly anticipate the post-pandemic life.
She saw someone new and was eager to travel again, to see family in her hometown of York in the North of England and to reconnect with friends. She has just started a new job.
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So when Everard did not come home on March 3, a Wednesday night, they knew something was wrong. She made a call to her new boyfriend when she walked away from a friend’s house, and then she disappeared. It was 9:30 p.m.
Later last week, when Everard’s death was confirmed and a police officer charged with the crime, her name became a conspiracy for a broad movement to combat widespread, prolonged violence against women in Britain – a symbol of all who attacked, so many of whose cases have largely gone unnoticed.
Amid the national attention, it was left to her friends and family to mourn a woman, just 33, privately taken far too soon. They described someone of cordiality and empathy, always ready to listen to a friend’s problems and offer support.
“She was sunshine and light, and made you feel warm and good and safe,” said Holly Morgan, who met Everard in London years ago. “I also feel angry about it, but my biggest anger is that it happened to her.”
News of Everard’s disappearing quickly spread online, first among friends and family – a network that stretched from her hometown near York to a web of friends from her years of study and colleagues in London. They were collectively concerned about her and stepped up calls for information. Many desperately wondered how this would happen to their Sarah.
“Today, more than ever before, we miss our strong, beautiful girlfriend,” Kayleigh Bryan, a friend of the school, wrote in a post on International Women’s Day last week.
When the news came that a police officer had been arrested in her death, the messages changed to memorials, and her story grew from personal pain to national reckoning. As flowers pile up at a tape stand in Clapham Common in south London, near where she disappeared, and protesters in fists pile up outside government buildings in memory of Everard, those closest to her are still trying to make sense of things.
For many, transforming their friend into a national symbol has hampered their own raw feelings of sadness.
‘In the uproar of what Sarah’s death represents,’ as one friend, India Rose, described it, she struggled to find words to pay tribute to a woman she knew as’ candid, honest ‘and’ expose’. in her ability to listen and have empathy. ”
“We shared a lot, and I was never in doubt about her discretion or sincerity in her support and kindness,” Rose said on Facebook.
While Everard’s family and many of her friends remained intensely private during the painful days since her death – with the gleam of international attention that intensified the pain for some – an image of an extremely loyal, compassionate and dedicated woman after came forward.
Everard grew up in the Heslington area of York, where her family still lives. Her father, Jeremy, is a professor and her mother, Sue, works for a charity. She was the baby of the family, with two older siblings.
In a statement issued by police, the only comment the family has made since Everard’s death, her parents and siblings remember her as ‘bright and beautiful – a wonderful daughter and sister’, and reflect her thoughtful and reliable disposition.
“She always put others first and had the most amazing sense of humor,” they said. “She was strong and principled and an excellent example for all of us.”
Everard attended Fulford School in York, where staff remember how much she loved teaching, in a tribute held over the weekend. Principal Steve Lewis said her family and friends are a valued part of the community and describe Everard as bright, lively and caring.
“Her joy, intelligence and positive spirit shone in the school,” he said in a statement.
After graduating in 2005, Everard studied at Durham University, where she studied geography. In a statement, Vice Chancellor Stuart Corbridge said the community was devastated. Everard was a “popular and vibrant” student who retained a large group of friends after her graduation in 2008.
Rose Woollard, a good friend who met Everard at the University of Durham, spoke to the BBC when she went missing for the first time and described her as an ‘extraordinary friend, who dropped everything to be there to to support her friends whenever they need her. ‘
Everard moved to London shortly after college and began marketing and PR, where she found success thanks to her collegiality and a zealous intelligence she rarely attributed, friends and former colleagues said.
In a news release for a sporting event she worked on in 2019, Everard said her organization is “determined to find as many opportunities as possible to tell the fantastic stories of pioneering women over the past century.”
On Everard’s Facebook page, photos offer a glimpse of distant travels and of London, the city she has made home in recent years. In one photo were the tattered and windswept prayer flags of the Himalayas. In another was the unmistakable skyline of London, the River Thames at sunset. Images from an unfinished life.
She was an introvert who could still approach others because of her rare ability to listen, but she could also be stupid and respectful, friends said. She was curious, active and adventurous, but also humble and private.
“There are those moments where it’s like love at first sight, but with a friend,” Morgan said of the first time she met Everard. “You meet a fellow woman and go, ‘I love you, and I do not know you well yet, but I know I’m going to love you. “And that was one of the things. ”
Everard had friends in the field in the marketing world in London after a decade in the field, and many were among the first to pay attention to her disappearance. The one, Helena Reason, described her on Facebook as a ‘smart, talented marketer’ who got along with even the toughest people she encountered.
“Sometimes you meet a person with a beautiful soul and it shines through,” she wrote.
Another former collaborator, Peter McCormack, shared a photo from an evening out at a party in the 1980s with Everard. “Joke at karaoke, brilliant in everything,” he wrote in the Facebook post.
“Our customers loved her, the team loved her, everyone loved Sarah,” he wrote. “For the moment she came into our lives, she made it better.”
Morgan said it was hard to comprehend the national uproar that caused her friend’s death, but the immediate outpouring of love was heartwarming.
“Everyone has a Sarah in their life,” she said, describing the magnetism of women who are smart, determined and humble. “That’s why there was such a constant tide of pain and anger, because other people feel like they knew her, without knowing her.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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