Sarah Kramer’s superpowers were energy and enthusiasm, and the Victoria author and entrepreneur appeared to have an endless reserve of both.
Kramer was an early adopter of everything from veganism and DIY fashion to self-publishing, resulting in a string of bestselling vegan cookbooks and Victoria business ventures.
According to wife Geri Kramer, 52, Kramer’s partner of more than 30 years, they wore sticktoitiveness like a coat of armour.
“Whenever Sarah accomplished something, they would look at it and think: ‘What’s next?’ They really loved the creation process, the daydream part.”
Sarah Kramer died May 3 after a seven-week battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. They were 56, but their vibrancy and vitality made them seem years younger.
Photos posted online by friends during the lead-up to and days following the death show someone with style to spare, whose enthusiasm practically jumps off the screen. But there was also an underlying darkness at times, Geri said, some of which can be attributed to the sudden death of Sarah’s mother in 1978.
Sue Kramer died when Sarah was 10 — just six weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Sarah was an open book, and wrote about being robbed at gunpoint, automobile accidents, depression, abusive boyfriends, breast cancer, eating disorders and toxic friendships. But their mother’s loss was a constant presence.
“Ever since they were 10 years old, Sarah had been expecting to get a death-by-cancer diagnosis. They were always ready for it.”
Decades of therapy helped Sarah successfully manage their mental health, Geri said. “They experienced so much trauma, but they always found ways to overcome it.”
At the time of Sue’s death, the family was living in Regina, where Sarah was born. Their parents co-founded and ran The Globe Theatre, a performing arts school, theatre company and venue, with Sarah always nearby, or on the stage, watching it all unfold.
If Regina is where Sarah’s emerging veganism and flair for the dramatic was born, Victoria — where they landed in 1988 — is where it bloomed. Geri had a front-row seat, after the couple met at a punk show in 1993.
The connection was immediate, Geri recalled, but they remained just acquaintances for the better part of a year.
Their chemistry was undeniable, though unconventional. “I don’t think both of us really recognized exactly how queer we were at the time,” Geri said.
As time went on, the couple’s pansexual, trans, non-binary identities, as Sarah once described them, would be an ongoing and open discussion. With no roadmap for the journey, discussions about it didn’t go well at first, Geri admitted.
It was too much to take on originally, and neither had all the answers. (Sarah didn’t make the switch from she/her pronouns to they/them until five weeks before their death.)
Eventually, Geri would have gender reassignment surgery, and identify as a woman, while Sarah would receive a neurodivergent diagnosis, and identify as queer. But the couple remained committed, and rarely spent time apart, their personal and professional lives intertwined.
“Sarah and Geri were just finding themselves at the end,” said Victoria artist and musician Timothy Wilson Hoey, a friend to both for more than 30 years. “When I found out that Sarah had passed, that is what made me cry the most. They were reaching such a perfect point in their lives and their relationship.”
Sarah was a good photographer — and one of the few people to shoot future superstars Green Day in 1991 when the then-unknown band played a free show at Beacon Hill Park — which eventually led to an interest in graphic design.
The Kramers were given some money as a wedding present, following their nuptials at Las Vegas’s Graceland Wedding Chapel in 1996, and with that seed money bought their first computer.
Sarah used the equipment to make a self-published, hand-bound zine featuring vegan recipes, which both Geri and Sarah sold at punk shows up and down the West Coast. The success of that venture (Geri figures they sold around 600 or 700 copies) was the precursor to Sarah’s first official cookbook, 1999’s How it All Vegan, co-authored with friend Tanya Barnard.
“Up until then, especially in the vegan community, cookbooks had been very dry, and hadn’t changed much since the 70s,” Geri said. “But it was a big thing in some parts of the punk community. When this brightly coloured book, with these cute girls on the front, came along, it really appealed to people.”
Hoey said Sarah’s innovation was respected in the local punk community. “Sarah was always taking things on that bucked the Victoria trend. They did stuff, where a lot of people in town talked about doing stuff. Which are two very different things.”
In 2011, they opened Sarah’s Place, a vegan-themed curiosity shop, out of which sprang the Victoria Vegan Festival.
Both were shuttered permanently in 2013, following Sarah’s breast-cancer diagnosis.
There were other ventures to come for the couple — an iTunes app called Go Vegan! With Sarah Kramer, a website at govegan.net, a popular podcast called Meet the Kramers and Tattoo Zoo, the province’s oldest trans/queer-owned tattoo shop.
Their blog at was one of Sarah’s many self-help outlets, and all things great and small were poured onto the website, Geri said. “After their breast cancer diagnosis, Sarah was always thinking, ‘What can I do with this that will help me feel better about it, and also help other people feel better about it?’ So they wrote about it.”
Sarah was a well-established writer by this point, having either authored or co-authored (with Barnard) a series of smash-hit cookbooks that became unofficial bibles of the vegan community. How it All Vegan, The Garden of Vegan (2002), and La Dolce Vegan (2005) sold more than 250,000 copies combined, according to their publisher.
Their rise in popularity led the media to make bold proclamations (“What Mick Jagger is to rock ‘n’ roll, Sarah Kramer is to the vegan lifestyle,” wrote Bust magazine) and create unofficial titles (“The World’s Coolest Vegan,” according to Herbivore magazine), which elevated their cultural cachet. But the person behind the personality never changed.
“Lots of people write books and become semi-famous, and then they become inaccessible,” Geri said. “But anybody could email Sarah, and feel like they were their friend. Sarah had a number of really close friends who were people they had never met in person.”
News of the death spread well beyond Vancouver Island, drawing tributes from Juno-nominated rocker Bif Naked and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s. Sarah and the latter were close, with the Go-Go’s superfan serving as a social media and online content creator for the group at one point.
An online fundraiser in Sarah’s honour has raised $123,301, and is still receiving donations weeks after their death.
“I don’t think I realized how much Sarah impacted people — just how much support was out there,” Geri said. “We were both really shocked by it. We were hoping to get a couple of weeks’ reprieve from bills, and it turns out I have the space to grieve as long as I need.”
Sarah had organized a medically assisted death after the terminal diagnosis. “They knew what chemotherapy is like, knew what radiation is like. And they didn’t want to do it,” Geri said.
On May 4, the day after the death, Geri posted Sarah’s final blog entry.
“My last wish for all of you is that you find all the ingredients to make your life the most joyful delicious recipe for yourself, but please don’t forget to taste your dish every once in a while to make sure the ingredients work together and that everything is to your liking. The best part of a recipe gone bad is you can always just toss it in the bin and start again from scratch.”
It was a perfectly fitting send-off, according to Hoey. “No matter how deep we might have had a conversation, Sarah was never not smiling when they left. Even if they were sad, they didn’t want to leave you that way.”
