“I think I’d like to be a woodland creature,” Carver Sapp mused a few months before her death on September 12, 2025. Some might argue that she already was—trees (and all the wildlife who enjoy them) were perhaps her first love.
As a child, she recalled navigating the winding path of the creek in Raleigh’s Fallon Park and starting to believe her own fantastical narrative that she was a faerie princess, cursed by a wicked witch to live as a human for a while. Her primary recovery goal after a lobectomy last summer was “getting back to my nature walks”—rambles through the local greenway system supported by a cheerful pink flower-patterned cane, taking frequent pauses to photograph great blue herons, flowering azaleas, intricate spiderwebs, and intriguing clouds.
When Raleigh was buried under two feet of snow in the “Blizzard of 2000,” she spent most of her physical energy hauling several large bags of birdseed home in a wheelbarrow, concerned that the abundant local population might not survive without her usual support. Even when she no longer fed those birds actively, she always made sure her back deck was a safe space for a leisurely drink and a bath.
Mom never limited her awareness or compassion to human beings, in other words. In a sense, the natural world was her church—a sanctuary, but also a learning laboratory and a beloved community. She met my father, Bill Faucette, gardening behind the duplex they each rented half of, and he proposed on a rock in the middle of a stream in the North Carolina mountains. When she took on the moniker mean mad mama to write alternative folk songs in the early 90s, she described her lyrics as coming from “the cutting edge of compost.” And when she survived a harrowing experience with metastatic melanoma in the mid-2000s, Mom emerged with a passion for nature photography, starting a blog where she captured the quirky personalities backyard wildlife alongside drive-by shots of the North Carolina countryside and sweeping vistas of what became known to some as “Carver Clouds.”
I’m inspired by my mother’s tendency to such creative meanderings as I offer these words in her memory. Tradition would dictate that I share some basic facts about Mom with you in the third person, calling her “Ms. Sapp” as if we shared no particular relationship during her time on earth. But she was anything but a conformist, and that’s a value she instilled in her only child.
I credit Mom with the fact that when the “academically gifted” second-graders were encouraged to come up with our own political system in a hypothetical exercise where our small group was stranded on an island and had to start over from scratch, I accidentally invented (and somewhat convincingly argued for) socialism.
By the time I was thirteen, I had changed my tune and was begging Mom to let me be her business manager, bemoaning the fact that she kept giving away the new CD she’d worked so hard on for free, and at twenty-three I couldn’t help but wonder why she didn’t sell some of her photography to alleviate the financial stresses of surviving cancer within the US health care system. And yet at forty, having left my own stable job to attempt starting an anti-capitalist spiritual business, I understand it a lot more. There’s a beauty to seeing where a path takes you, whether on a walk in nature or pouring your heart out with the aid of an acoustic guitar. A creative vision rarely respects a business plan.
So in honor of Mom’s trademark non-conformity and somewhat quirky writing style, rather than publishing an obituary I’ve chosen to write about her in my own way, including some of her own photography. I hope you’ll appreciate, or at least pardon, this deviation, and consider sharing this piece with others Mom impacted, not all of whom I personally know. And I also hope you’ll forgive me for going a bit long here—as I commented as a child, others may talk in sentences but we have a tendency, in my family, to “talk in paragraphs.”
Since Mom’s death, I’ve noticed a kneejerk tendency to eulogize that probably can’t be helped. We come from a family that loves to tell a good story, but a narrative arc necessarily reduces a messy, complex human being through the details it excludes. I find myself wanting to share lessons she taught me, realizations I’ve made in this phase of our relationship, but she’d laugh at any attempt to put her on a posthumous pedestal or assemble a coherent narrative of the life she lived—those who know Mom are well aware of her tendency to ramble, writing and speaking in a kind of playful pastiche rather than carefully constructed prose.
That haphazardness, I think, is a big part of what others love about her. She has an ability to stay in the mess with you, to be present and say exactly what she’s thinking and feeling at any given time without the constraints of linearity. Her love of nature is a love of wildness—she used to dream of aging with a long silver braid down her back, and of having a house completely obscured from the street by trees as the already half-wild organic garden she once created was left to its own devices. I’m glad she got to experience the abundant, overspilling green of the latter, and while she wasn’t able to grow that braid I did very much enjoy giving her sparkly “faerie hair” in the final weeks of her life to highlight her natural grey. It seemed fitting, in my mind, that “her people” would have a way to identify her when the wicked witch’s curse was finally broken.
There’s an element of devotion to place, and with it to people, in how Mom lived her life that I’ve only recently been able to fully appreciate. She always reminded us that she never planned to stay in Raleigh, and certainly not to live in the same home for nearly 41 years. While her attempts to pronounce languages other than English sometimes made me giggle, she insisted on learning how to apologize for not speaking a language, never taking on a sense of superiority just because she happened to speak a global lingua franca. Mom loved Russian literature and British television, read Paolo Freire and the Book of Tao, and fondly remembered chanting the Nichiren Buddhist lotus sutra “nam myoho renge kyo” for world peace in the 1980s.
In a lot of ways, Mom embodied the pithy phrase that long decorated her car’s bumper: Think Global, Act Local.
Though Mom was technically a little young to be a hippie, she described herself as a proud “flower child” with grand hopes for the future, deep concerns about the present, and an enduring passion for human rights and environmental justice. She expressed her love and rage through songs about class disparity and educational inequity, challenging political leaders and reminding us that we are “members of the human race, all.”
While she did settle down a little after a rambunctious youth, Mom still enjoyed a small act of open rebellion every now and again—when I was in high school, I recall a gleeful vigilante moment when she got to drive the “getaway car” for a friend who wanted to protest local developers tearing down some nearby woods. The big, colorful signs they created to post up in the dead of night proclaimed, à la Joni Mitchell, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Of course, she was shaped by her lineage. Mom could never be anything but exactly who she was, as an individual, but she was also proud to be a daughter of Tharon Elizabeth Young, a beloved Wake County social worker, and Bruce Daniel Sapp, an Episcopal minister and amateur painter. Her parents were notable community figures, and while Grandpa might be more publicly known for his involvement in local desegregation efforts during the Civil Rights movement and subsequent efforts to support Raleigh’s underserved populations, Grandma was an equally (or even more) fierce defender of those who are overlooked or actively oppressed.
When I uncovered Grandma’s travel diary from a 1974 summer in England, Mom told me a great story obscured between the lines of its neatly scrawled pages. The incident occurred in a northern factory town where a 16-year-old Mom basically had to hold her own mother back from an altercation with local thugs who were harassing a young couple. My gleeful reaction was “oh my God, Grandma was a real-life Captain America!” but when I think about it, they weren’t so different in that way. Mom often had a hard time believing just how callous and hateful people could be, and insisted that if they could just see others’ pain, access broader perspectives and understand their shared humanity, they’d surely behave differently. She challenged my childish attempts to sort the world into “good people” and “bad people,” insisting that there are just people—no one is incapable of change.
As a nerdy, book-smart sort of kid, I often teased Mom for her famous malapropisms and facts she didn’t know or couldn’t remember, and she had the grace to laugh at herself along with me. But over time, I’ve been better able to appreciate the wisdom she gained from simply living life with open eyes and a flexible attitude. The impact she had on others tended to stem from a willingness to learn and to change, to be profoundly in the human experience of growing, creating, and evolving—screwing up sometimes, certainly, but then trying again. It was important to her to express her own truth, but also to allow others an opportunity to do the same.
We sometimes laughed about how she proved her own lyric, “I talk too much, but rarely about the weather,” wrong over time. But Mom’s obsession with the forecast wasn’t always trivial—she was concerned about climate change before it was a headline, but also about those who sleep in the open air, and whether the robins would have enough to drink. And from day to day, perhaps this focus on the weather also illustrates how affected she was by sensory details.
When I was a child we loved to splash in puddles during summer storms, and to make snow angels in the winter. Mom had a fascination bordering on obsession with clouds, taking thousands of photographs of the sky, and I’d often send her sky snapshots on my travels. While she didn’t have a natural technical aptitude for photography, she did have a unique way of seeing. It comes through in the subjects she chose to capture through a lens, but also in what she chose to document in her journals. An excerpt:
I doubt I’ve ever seen anything quite like the horizon southwest of my house five minutes ago. The top is gray and appears as an enormous blanket over a pale blue white strip with what looks like a blue mountain range beneath. The lacy tree limbs cross the pale portion and are barely visible on the blanket part. It wouldn’t be so amazing if there was a mountain range but this is an exquisite mirage at sunset.
March 9, 1998 6:50pm
When I think of Mom’s artistic sense, I also think of her delightfully hodgepodge, at times even theatrical wardrobe. I admittedly bemoaned her “tragic” fashion sense as a teenager—though I’m a non-binary adult, growing up I was the only one of the two of us who really conformed to any sartorial gender expectations. But perhaps to some extent, defying conventional femininity carried with it a particular freedom for someone who wasn’t allowed to wear pants in school until junior high, just as trying out makeup was a little rebellious for me at the same age.
Clothes were less about meticulous color-matching or trend-following for Mom than they were about joy, comfort, and creative expression. For a brief period, she made a living as a seamstress, and also went through a quilting phase. Most things in her house, and in her wardrobe, had a story.
You could undoubtedly describe Mom as eccentric, original, and something of a dilettante. People are always a little shocked by the array of random things I know at least something about, but I come by it honestly. Along with the quilts Mom loved watercolor painting and creating collages from old magazines, and she was often taking up an unexpected craft project or some creative program. She grew up doing community theatre, took voice lessons for years, and when I was a kid she was in the chorus of a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar. She played guitar and piano, but also a little banjo and bowed psaltery. Her literary interests ranged from Chekhov and Dostoevsky to paperback crime novels to Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. This summer she expressed an interest, to my incredulity, in re-reading a biography of St. Francis of Assisi long enough to seem more appropriate as a doorstop.
Her journals express an array of goals at different times, from becoming a successful writer to graduate study in history or sociology to touring nationally with her music. She daydreamed about moving to upstate New York, Asheville, or Alaska before eventually admitting to herself that she had made peace with the fact that she no longer needed to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up.
Even so, she still set meaningful intentions for herself—walking to the grocery store to reduce environmental impact, regularly checking out new books at the library, keeping the computer shut down until noon on Saturdays to enjoy the birdsong and read the local paper, listening to at least one song a day. Her adaptations to chronic pain and illnesses, with an ability to find meaning in life even as its scope was significantly reduced, are something I personally hope to emulate.
Given all these interests and experiences, Carver Sapp is a hard person to summarize. I haven’t really attempted to do so in any comprehensive fashion—but before concluding, I did want to give others who loved her a chance to weigh in. I honestly expected everyone to use the same handful of words when describing Mom in the wake of her death (creative, original, eccentric). But in fact, I’ve heard a mélange, reminding me that who Mom was really depends on which relationship you’re viewing her through!
Last summer, a couple of nights before her lobectomy, I had a teeny bit of an emotional breakdown when we were watching Hamilton together that Mom generously comforted me through, despite the fact that it was her own mortality I was awkwardly freaking out about. It wasn’t so much the fact of her illness that had me upset, but the inadequacy I felt in not being able to “be there” for her in the way she often seemed to be for others. I’d asked her dozens of questions in an attempt to document her personal history for posterity, but didn’t really know how to “make the most” of this time. She reassured me that I was, in fact, doing the thing even if it didn’t feel like it, and confessed that she often felt the same kind of uncertainty.
The song that catalyzed my tears raises a question I often consider, and am especially sitting with now. In the final number of the show, Eliza Hamilton asks us to reflect—“who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
I’m putting my name on this one, in lieu of a more formal obituary, because Mom was rarely very formal, but also because she taught me that there’s always more than one story. And while my own fascination with personal histories and tendency towards documentation leads me to want to capture some of what I know about Mom that others might not, the fact is that you all have your own stories of her. There’s nothing I could tell you that would be as important as your own, personal memories, and I’ve been delighted and moved to hear some of those stories in the weeks since her death.
Whatever your belief system, if you’re missing your friend Carver I hope you’ll take comfort in the fact that energy, as she liked to put it, is neither created nor destroyed. I mix past and present tense in this piece because in many ways for me Mom is very much alive—in her music, in the antics of the birds currently playing out the little dramas she loved in our big old oak tree, and in the hope for seemingly-impossible large scale change she passed on to me.
While sadness is appropriate, I’m personally simply relieved and happy that the end of her life was as peaceful as anyone could hope for with a terminal illness. She surprised and delighted and made new friends out of the hospice staff, enjoyed a couple more good books with me and shows with Daddy, filled her life with friend visits and coloring books, and even retained her sweet tooth right up till the end. One of her favorite childhood anecdotes was about how she was once asked how many cookies she wanted, and she simply replied, “too many.” So I couldn’t help but laugh when I heard that her last action in life before slipping off for a final day of sleep was to eat a danish for breakfast. May we all be so blessed!
Mom did things her own way, and she’d encourage you to do the same. If you have any questions about her life, are looking for photos, or the like, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and ask. I’ve shared links below to her album, a playlist of music I’ll continue adding to that captures her spirit in different ways or ties to particular memories of Mom, and to her photo blog. If you’re moved to do something in her honor, I can recommend enjoying a plate of barbecue, a bowl of peel-and-eat-shrimp, a big green salad, or too many cookies.
Or if you’re inclined and able, you might consider a donation to an organization working for a cause near and dear to her heart such as racial, prison, environmental, or immigrant justice. Some she supported over the years include Amnesty International, the ACLU of North Carolina, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and PBS North Carolina. Another of my personal favorites is the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.
Links
- Layers by mean mad mama (album)
- Carver’s Photographic Journey (blog)
in loving memory of “my friend mama”
Carver Sapp
November 11, 1957 – September 12, 2025