Sarah Bennett

Memorial services are scheduled at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 24, at West Main Baptist Church for Sarah Lee Brown Bennett who died of cancer on April 21, 2004. She was 59 years old. She was born in Clovis, New Mexico in the late summer of 1944 to Luna Wiggins Brown and Charles Brown. Charles was in the Navy, and he was away at war when she was born. He did not meet her until she was a year old. The family later lived in San Diego, California, where Sarah's sister Linda was born, in Albuquerque, in Washington State, in Kansas, and then they returned to Portales, New Mexico where Sarah graduated from high school. She met and married Don Bennett thirty-nine years ago while they were students at Eastern New Mexico University. Tracy Lee Bennett was born in 1967, Michael in 1968, and Paul in 1972. Sarah and Don have four grandchildren, Bryce, Ryan, and Jenna Elkins, and Kellan Bennett. Sarah, Don, and their children moved to Artesia in 1980. Sarah taught special education at Zia Intermediate School, and previously in Hagerman, New Mexico. They were members of the West Main Baptist Church. Sarah was a wife, a mother, a mother-in-law, a grandmother, a daughter, a sister, a sister-in-law, an aunt, a teacher, and a friend. She had a dry wit, she was practical and disinterested in worldly possessions, honest and unpretentious; she said what she meant and she taught us how to live and how to die. She was exceptionally brave and she thought that if you said you believed something, you should act upon it. Therefore, when faced with cancer, she was not afraid. She assured her grandson Bryce that she would either get well, or go to see Jesus, and what was wrong with either of those The family desires that donations be made to Vista Care Hospice Organization in Carlsbad, or to the Artesia Public Schools' special education department.