Sandra Lee Wooster came to Vermont late in life. Born with an intellectual disability, Wooster’s mother in Claremont, New Hampshire, helped care for her throughout her adult years. That role later fell to Sandra’s daughter, Carol. “There were two different sides of my mother,” Carol said. When she and her sister were young, Sandra could be verbally abusive. But after the two left home, their mother softened. “She was more calm and loving. A totally different person.”
Carol Wooster: She’s like a child. She always has to have her dessert. She loves teddy bears. She loves going to the fair, going on the Ferris wheel, going on what she calls “the bumpy cars.” She didn’t say bumper; she said “bumpy.”
I think it’s from my grandmother. They both would put on their little smile, and you would melt looking at them. Like, “Can I please do this? Please do that?” She always wanted to give hugs. She used to like raising money for the blind because she was blind in one eye. She just had this big heart, always giving.
There was some guy that was paralyzed in a diving accident. So she stood on a street corner one day and raised money to help the family. She didn’t even know this family; she just read about it in the paper. There’s an image of my sister Tammy and I on the front page of the paper when I was 1 or 2 — and there’s Mom, standing there holding up the can of money that she just raised.
My dad died in ’99. And Mom was sort of laying around on a cot, not really doing anything. My grandmother would come and check on her because they lived in the same building. But then my grandmother died, and she just got worse. So we decided to move her from New Hampshire to Vermont.
There was one moment I’ll never forget when I went to visit her in New Hampshire. She was watching for me to come along from taking a walk downtown, and she came out and sat on the swings. And that’s the defining moment that I remember our relationship changed. Because to me, suddenly, it was like: “Oh, she was looking for me. She cares.”
We would sit in church. She would lean her head on me, and I would lean my head on her. And it was like the world was just shut out. It was just the two of us. We were adults.
Sandra lived with another family, then on her own, for several years. But as her health declined, she moved into Cathedral Square in Burlington. Last December, she spent a week in the hospital after contracting Covid-19. She survived the infection and returned home, but some of her symptoms persisted.
Carol Wooster: People are just thinking, “Oh, you get Covid, you’re fine. You’re going to get over it.” And it doesn’t happen that way. It affects people differently. I saw what it did to Mom. She was so energetic, and then it just sucked the life out of her, literally. We knew that Mom was dying from Covid. We just kept saying, “OK, this has not been the same since she got Covid. This is not Mom.”
It was “long haul” that she died from. Her stomach just got worse and worse. Eventually, she just stopped eating. She basically died of starvation from the effect the Covid had on her stomach.
I couldn’t even get her to eat dessert. Dessert was her favorite thing. She refused anything up until about two months before she died. Just sips of water, if that. So eventually we knew, this is it. Enjoy the time we have left.
We used to do Facebook Live because she wanted to talk to her grandchildren. A lot of times we liked to sing. Our favorite song is a Barney song. One of the last beautiful moments was singing with her, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…” I would pause, and she would look at me. And she turned her head and she said, “With a great big hug…” And she finished the words.
She was in the living room. There was a beautiful rainbow, and she had pointed to the rainbow. She knew that rainbow was there. She always told me that she wants to come back as a robin. And the song “Rockin’ Robin” came on. I got up and said, “Mom, our song’s on,” and I started dancing a little bit. And I heard her take a deep breath, like a final breath. And then I could tell she was gone.
Sandra Lee Wooster died at her home in Cathedral Square in Burlington on April 7, 2021. She was 78 years old.
—As told to Mike Dougherty
Read more remembrances of Vermonters lost to the coronavirus.
