Excerpt of an email from Sarah’s aunt Snaige Sileika:
From: Snaige Sileika
Sarah was my bad-assed niece and I loved her.
She was a traveller and a musician. She had friends in every single city in this country although she called British Columbia her home.
At the end of July Sarah decided to come to Toronto to work with Safe Injection sites
and be part of a Peer Outreach Program for high risk kids. When I found out from Gint
that she was in town I texted her through Facebook to invite her for dinner. She said
that she had to busk for a few hours before coming to our place. I offered to pick her up
and made my way towards our local LCBO where Sarah was playing. Walking down
the street towards her I saw her siting on the sidewalk with her guitar. Her sign read "A
little helps a lot".
That evening Antanas, Sarah and I had a wonderful time talking about her job interview
that she had gone to that day. She was engaged, articulate, funny. Even Antanas who had work to do that evening and had planned to go to his study after dinner stayed with us to keep chatting with her.
Sarah passed away from a Fentanyl overdose on Monday, August 27th in Toronto at a
punk house called The Arcade.
Sarah's mom Karen and her sister Rena flew in from Nelson, BC. on Tuesday - and for
the next few days we basically clung to each other and wept. We kept hoping that
someone would call us and tell us that this was all a mistake - that Sarah was still alive.
But reality pushes forward and a funeral needed to be arranged. Through some of
Sarah's friends we reached out to her community of street kids and invited them to join
us in honouring Sarah.
And they all came - with their tattoos, their piercings, their dreadlocks and their
dogs. Some of them were barefoot. After the memorial service at the funeral home
Karen rented a venue nearby so that all of the street kids could gather with us. We
asked them to bring their instruments and after we all ate lunch together the kids with
banjos and the guitars started playing. Everyone was in tears. We sat for hours
listening to their amazing music.
.