The perfect name. That’s the gift Evan and Ruth DeMuth gave their only daughter when she was born in Vail 24 years ago.
“When you give a child a name, you have to think really hard: How can I not screw this up?” Ruth DeMuth told a crowd of hundreds on Saturday at Little Beach Park in Minturn. “They have to live with this label for the rest of their life. So, we thought about the Earth, and it spoke to us. It said Lily or Sage. But when she was born, she was a Lily Sage.”
Judging by the overflow crowd at her celebration of life, Lily Sage DeMuth lived up to her name while leaving her mark on the world.
Beautiful, elegant, and bursting with love — that was Lily. And wise beyond her years, just like her middle name suggested.
“Lily expanded everyone’s life,” said Kara Heide, a family friend. “She constantly lifted us up and challenged us to be our best selves. The way we treat others, that’s one way we can remember and honor Lily.”
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Live like Lily
Lily Sage DeMuth, who lived for travel and adventure, died on April 30 in a hospital room in Spain. She was taken off life support after suffering a ruptured aneurysm — determined to be congenital — while vacationing in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, with two of her best childhood friends.
For someone whose life was defined by helping others, Lily’s final act was fitting: Seven individuals awaiting transplants for vital organs and tissue received them from her.
“Lily was a true lover of life,” said Hanna Zivelongi, one of four childhood friends who spoke at Saturday’s gathering. “She knew when to work hard and when not to take herself too seriously. But most importantly, she embodied the universal law that kindness is always the answer.”
That, and spontaneous dancing. Living like Lily was a constant theme throughout Saturday’s tributes. While there were plenty of tears and hugs, there was also plenty of laughter and, in the end, joyous dancing and singing as ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” poured through the speakers at the amphitheater.
A natural leader, Lily’s classmates repeatedly picked her to be the class president or team captain while she attended Edwards Elementary, Berry Creek Middle School and Battle Mountain High School.
Zivelongi drew laughs when she told a story about when she clocked how long it took Lily to make her way from the high school’s parking lot to the bleachers for a football game.
“What should have been a five-minute walk turned into 40 minutes plus,” she joked. “A simple hi was never enough.”
Todd Huck, a teacher and coach at Berry Creek Middle School, first met Lily when she was a sixth grader. In a class full of strong personalities, Lily was the glue, he said.
“Lily not only navigated middle school, but she helped her peers navigate middle school,” Huck said. “Looking out for the needs of others, she cared so much and wanted to always make sure everyone was included. You should have seen her in action.”
After Lily graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder and returned to the valley, Huck hired her to coach the girls volleyball team and help with coaching girls basketball at her old middle school. He told a story about one player on the basketball team last season who struggled to keep her emotions in check in the heat of competition.
Lily took it upon herself to get to know the young woman and help her, Huck said.
“Many nights after practice, I would get a text message from Lily,” he said. “It always started: ‘Mr. Huck, I’ve got an idea.’ And it would go on and on and on. And I’d think to myself, ‘How can this girl write such long text messages?’ Lily was persistent. She was going to reach this girl and help her get through her frustrations.”
Which is exactly what she did. During a tense game, when things started to unravel, Huck recounted how Lily started yelling, “Kitty cat! Kitty cat!”
Huck, confused, asked what was going on, and Lily explained that it was a directive to the player to tell her to take deep breaths so she would calm down.
“It worked,” Huck said. “She finished the game, and she finished the season.”
Madeline Garrett said Lily was one of the first people she met at CU after moving across the country.
“As our friend Caroline once put it, meeting a friend like Lily is like finding the perfect peach in summer,” Garrett said. “I remember walking around campus with her in those first few days and thinking, ‘Wow, this girl is too cool to be my friend.’ And also, ‘How the heck does she know every single person at this school?’ I quickly learned that Lily would never think she was too cool to be friends with anyone, and that being friends with Lily is like being friends with the mayor. You will never go anywhere without running into someone who knows Lily.”
Garrett said her first skiing trip in Colorado was to Aspen, where the group took on Highland Bowl at Aspen Highlands.
“I didn’t know what this hiking or bowl meant, but of course, I said yes,” she said. “About 10 feet into the run, I realized I was in way over my head.”
While the others were long gone down the mountain, Lily stayed with her to make sure she made it down, Garrett said.
“Leaving someone behind was not in her vocabulary,” she said. “Over the many winters together, Lily would take me skiing, navigating seamlessly around Vail Mountain, helping me dig out my skis after I lost them on a deep powder day, always waiting for me at the bottom of runs. Lily didn’t know the concept that there are no friends on powder days.”
‘The very best of us’
Ruth DeMuth said trying to keep up with Lily during her adolescent years in middle school and high school was exhausting.
“One time I asked her when she was running through the door, ‘Don’t you have too much on your plate?'” Ruth recounted. “And she looked at me sideways with that grin and said, ‘Mom, if I’m not running with my hair on fire, I’m not busy enough yet.'”
There was a running joke among some of her daughter’s friends, Ruth said, that they had to schedule time to be with Lily.
And, yet, like Zivelongi’s story about the 40-minute walk that should’ve taken five, everyone felt like the most important person in Lily’s orbit when she interacted with them.
“When she did give you that time, you knew she would give you her whole heart and she would be present and listening,” Ruth said.
Sara Sullivan, a high school teammate and friend who was ahead of Lily by a year, recounted the time Lily visited her at Brown University during her freshman year. When she had to go to class, Sullivan said she worried about leaving Lily alone on campus.
Which, of course, was ridiculous, Sullivan said.
“When I came home from class a few hours later, I heard music and laughter coming from the lounge,” she said. “I round the corner to see Lily surrounded by some of my friends and even a few others I hadn’t met. Each person in the room locked into whatever she was saying.”
Sullivan added: “As we’ve heard many times today, Lily was the very best of us. Someone who cared so deeply for everyone in her life, someone who went out of her way to make each person around her feel included and heard. Someone who created communities wherever she went, regardless of how long she was there. Someone who can make your world feel as important and special to her as her own.”
“She was the type of person who had 1 million special best friends,” Garrett said. “And she somehow managed to make them all feel amazing and important.”
“Lily did not live an unlived life, quite the opposite,” Heide said. “Lily lived life to the fullest with joy and no regret. In 24 years, she did more than most people do in an entire lifetime.”
