Sarah Rachel Nazimova-Baum died on March 2, 2016, after an eight-month struggle with ovarian cancer, bringing to an untimely close 52 years of a life that fused creativity, spiritual discernment, intelligence, and caring service to others. Her love extended to a constellation of family and friends, and focused on the centers of her life: her husband, Mark, and her son, Raphael.
Sarah’s creative impulse was manifest in every facet of her life, from her accoutrements-homemade jewelry, a bag with her knitting-to the inviting posters she crafted for family occasions. Sarah’s affect was just as welcoming: warm, direct, with a wry sense of humor and a complete lack of pretention, like the home that she shared in Brooklyn Heights with Mark and Raphael.
A native Brooklynite, Sarah attended Stuyvesant High School and Wesleyan University, where she majored in art history and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Combining her interests in psychology and art, she earned a master’s degree in art therapy at NYU, and practiced at North Central Bronx Hospital and other programs in New York, often focusing on geriatric populations.
Sarah began to add an explicitly spiritual thread to her braid of creative arts and psychology, studying chaplaincy and interning as an interfaith hospital chaplain, before running the New York Intern Program, an AmeriCorps service program at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. There she supervised and mentored recent college graduates in a program combining social services, spiritual growth, and intentional community. One of her interns noted that Sarah “touched so many others. She encouraged, nurtured, challenged, and loved me at such a vulnerable and important time in my own life-and shaped me in ways that I’m sure I’ve yet to become aware of.” Later, at the time Sarah was diagnosed with cancer, she was counseling people experiencing life crises for LifeNet, at the Mental Health Association of NYC.
Sarah continued deepening her spiritual life, earning a second master’s-this time in spiritual direction-at the General Theological Seminary; becoming a spiritual director; and beginning the aptly named Spiritual Arts Practice with Lindsay Boyer, an enterprise cut short by her illness. Drawing upon many of her interests, the practice invited people to make art with prayer and to pray through making art.
For Sarah, creativity was a window onto the world and into God. Writing and drawing, like the silence she practiced at Quaker worship, when done with the right intention, could “open us to God broadly, deeply, and transformationally.”
Sarah is deeply mourned by her son Raphael, her husband Mark, her brother Mark and his partner Ghada, her mother Barbara, her in-laws Robert and Marian, Meg and Sandy, and Irwin, by the extended Baum, Nazimova, Goldberg, Wygod, Lessig, Scherer, Capich, and Nazimowitz families, by her Quaker community at the Brooklyn Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and by the Jewish community she and her family belonged to at Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.
Donations in Sarah’s memory can be made to the Mental Health Association of New York (www.mhaofnyc.org/donate).
Published on NYTimes.com from Mar. 3 to Mar. 4, 2016