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I worked with Sally Kennedy in her first clinical research job at Biogen. I was her manager and we became friends. It was a pleasure to know Sally and work with Sally as we both had the same type of sense of humor. She was a kind individual. I am sorry we did not have time to reconnect in our retirement years as our lives went in different directions over time.

Sally and I worked together during the last two to three years in a clinical trial. She was my counterpart for the sponsor of the study. Even though I never met Sally in person we quickly developed a relationship of mutual trust and understanding. She was the consummate professional and a very caring person. I will surely miss her.

"Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that of the river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." —George Eliot, Middlemarch

I think of Sally often. In our early teens, we shared the kind of friendship that creates its own world. It doesn’t take much to carry me back there… A neighbor walks her Springer spaniel, and Sally and I are once again romping along Sunset Road with the "wuppy" Holly, and coaxing dignified Joy to play along. My granddaughter tells me about her first middle school dance, with a shy and dreamy smile. Once more it’s Friday night at the Ashland Federated Church. The boys are studying the DJ, the girls are dancing with each other. When the last dance comes, the boys will choose their partners, and Sally and I will thrill about those choices for days to come. Any 60s song brings back our love of the transistor radio. It went everywhere with us—in the jeep ride to Maine, on the walks to the boat landing where we went to swim, in the alcove where we ate the things we baked after school, in the sewing room where we experimented with fabrics and Vogue patterns. My daughters used to play with a tape recorder, improvising plays and interviews—bringing back the many tape recordings Sally and I made together, and then laughed at, as if they were hilarious. A view of the Damariscotta River from Dodge Point takes me back to summers in Maine with Sally, swimming off the rocks or fishing from the rowboat in fine weather, reading a James Bond novel to each other or drawing cartoons when it rained, playing canasta at Gram’s house in the evening…and so much, much more. Sally’s family taught me to bring my own family to midcoast Maine for vacations. So as I said, I think of Sally often. When I find myself back in those days, I like to write to Sally, to share the savor of the memories. It saddens me that I can no longer do that. But the memories still live, and Sally does too, an endearing best friend of girlhood and a very precious gift to my life.

So sorry to hear about Sally. We worked together several years ago and I always enjoyed her company and dry sense of humor.