Patience & Sarah has remained in print in the US and numerous foreign-language editions – Norwegian, Japanese, French, and Italian among them – as well as being adapted for the stage in London. She published three more books with Naiad Press: The Love of Good Women (1986), Side by Side (1990), and A Dooryard Full of Flowers (1993). The day before her death, an opera based on Patience & Sarah by Wende Persons and Paula Kimper was performed at Trinity Church in Manhattan.
She is survived by her companion, Julie Weber, and the four children of her early marriage: Natalie, Joyce, Charlotte, and Louise.
Zan Knudson, the late May Swenson’s partner, pronounced what I think is an appropriate epitaph. “Since May’s death,” she told me, “Alma is the only person to have died who May would want to be with her in heaven.”
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