From the perspective of Alison and I, the life of our Mom—or Saundra, or Sandy—is kind of a story of three parts. Friends and family might recall an entirely different story, but for 48 years of my life, and for 45 years of Alison’s, Sandy was the Mom, or the Mothership. Our memories of her feel boundless.

Sandy was high energy, perhaps the highest energy of our family, and she was always down for an adventure. She wasn’t the type of person to, ahem, sit in a recliner all day. Sandy was always moving. (A frustrating proposition if you wanted to get her to watch a show or a movie—more on that in a bit.)

*Forging ahead on snowshoes, Rocky Mountain National Park*

Sandy also had a spontaneous energy that led her on little adventures, a weekend drive, or a last-minute trip to a favorite restaurant. If prompted to go on an outing, Sandy was almost certain to say “c’mon, let’s just go!”

Sandy loved a good laugh. “You just gotta laugh!” was like a mantra to her. We believe she was the inventor of the LOL, or “lots of laughs” in Sandy-vernacular. And if Woody (Dad) or Ali got annoyed or fed up with her, she would usually look at me with a twinkle in her eye and a wry smile and say, “hey, don’t laugh, Zain!” and then, of course, she would almost collapse in a fit of laughter.

Sandy was incredibly stylish, and had an eye for color and palette. A small town gal from Missouri who was effortlessly chic. Sandy liked to be “put together” but never in a fussy or a strait-laced way.

Sandy loved live performances, plays, and to be out amongst people. Being indoors was a necessity, and by no means the rule. Invite her to a summer concert, a kids performance, live music and dining al fresco. She was a fan of classical music, jazz, and singer-songwriters. She loved a foreign film and loved an indie film and loved an indie movie theater. Among her all time faves were Fargo and Napoleon Dynamite. (Only a handful of shows or movies could hold that energy in check at home, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was one of them.)

Sandy loved chocolate and sweets, tiramisu was a go-to, and she was always up for sushi or mussels, but at heart she really enjoyed steak and potatoes. She also was down for either eating a big salad or making one for her company. Sandy’s breakfast of choice each morning was, without fail, tea and toast. While not a big drinker, she enjoyed the occasional tipple, especially if it was sangria or a margarita or an ice cold beer.

Sandy loved to read. She was a big fan of literature and loved a good story. The first bedtime novel we read together was The Hobbit, which turned out to be a defining piece of literature for both me and Ali. After The Hobbit, we tackled the Lord of the Rings trilogy — did we mention Sandy was ambitious?

When Sandy wasn’t reading, she was most likely gardening. While our family was living in Piedmont, CA, in the 1980s, she tore down a fence on our rental property, discovered two additional tiers to the backyard, and did some partial clearing and landscaping. (Needless to say, Woody was not pleased when the landlord bumped up our rent after that.) She built a Japanese-style garden in Fairfax, VA in between two major surgeries in the mid 1990s.

Sandy was an exceptionally resourceful and capable person in almost every arena, especially around the house. And it wasn’t that she was just handy, unlike our recliner-loving father, she loved to roll up her sleeves and get things done. Sandy liked mud, dirt, sweat, and didn’t care if she tired herself out.

Sandy felt a moral obligation to do things right and be a cooperative, upstanding member of society. She believed strongly in the social contract. She strived to be good to neighbors and to be kind. Being considerate was a driving principle in her life. She approached everyone with kindness and curiosity at the jump—but she wouldn’t want anyone to assume it was naïvety. She just said, “let’s not assume the worst, let’s assume the best.” This was probably the most pronounced during our travels overseas in the 1980s and 1990s. By no means was she intimidated by the idea of trying to adjust to another culture. A life of travel became a reference point by which she viewed and approached the world. Bring your manners and a good attitude with you, and the rest will follow.

Sandy was inclusive. She was always willing to bring anyone under the big family tent—provided you weren’t a jerk. There was always an extra seat at dinner, at a family barbecue, a big holiday like Thanksgiving. She thrived off the energy of hospitality and friends and friends of friends and me and my sister’s friends and family being together.

And speaking of friends, Sandy was very loyal to a handful of dear people whom she met over the course of many years going all the way back to her childhood. She could hold a phone conversation with these dear friends for hours. And she was the type of friend who, even if you hadn't talked to her in a while, was always eager to catch up like no time had passed at all.

*Spartacus the cat and a well-tended garden — the joys of life!*

Sandy was perpetually late for everything for several decades of her life, but she got better as she aged!

Sandy had been recycling glass and aluminum since the 1970s. She was not a fan of plastic.

Sandy was born a Cancer (sensitivity, loyalty, and intuition) and she loved to dabble and have fun with astrology. She had charts made for me and Alison in 1982.

Sandy loved all animals, from her first cat Snowball to a series of dogs she owned in the 1960s and 1970s. In the last decade of her life, she and Alison adopted an adorable Maine Coon cat named Spartacus. Remember those laughs from a few paragraphs above? Sparty (or “Little Boy” as she used to often call him) was a major source of those. Sparty was her main squeeze, her shadow, and her best friend up until the very end.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Sandy in the kitchen of her home in Sarasota, and she told me one of the greatest joys of her life was being a mom. She loved having me and Alison around, she loved our adventures, and she loved watching us grow up. One of her main goals was for us to thrive and for us to enjoy our lives the way we wanted to enjoy them. She also acknowledged that raising children was hard and that it wasn’t necessarily for everyone. She never gave us trips about getting married or having kids or wanting grandkids of her own. Her goal was simply for us to be happy and for us to discover our own paths in life.

Sandy was born Saundra Mae Springsted on July 16, 1939, in St. Joseph, MO to Jessie Springsted (née Pyles) and Barent Springsted, Jr. Her brother, Barent Springsted III, was born a few years later in 1942. A lot of Sandy’s formative years were captured on photographs, in particular family vacations in the form of road trips to places like Colorado and the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park. (Sandy restarted this tradition when Ali and I arrived on the scene, and those trips became core memories for us growing up, too.)

A few moments stand out from the seldom occasions when she recalled her childhood and early teen years. She remembered her mother’s ration stamp book during World War 2. She remembered those aforementioned trips to Colorado—staying in a cabin with no running water. And she remembers when Lillian Bundy arrived to work for my grandparents as a housekeeper. Lillian was a kind-hearted and no-nonsense kind of soul, and not much older than Sandy at the time. The two became dear friends and stayed that way until Lillian’s death in 2015.

There is a movie that neatly captured how Sandy grew up: American Graffiti by George Lucas. She used to say, “watch that movie and that sums up my teenage years.” Sandy graduated from Central High School in 1957, and went on to attend Lindenwood College for Women, ostensibly on a two-year associate’s degree track but in reality she was, in her words, “sent there to get her “MRS.” Ironically, she said she was kicked out of Lindenwood because snuck out of her dorm and went on an unauthorized date.

Her father pulled her back home, and a series of similar misadventures led her from St. Joseph to Omaha, NE and then across the country to California. She first lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and eventually ended up in San Francisco, where she met dear friends while working at the UCSF reading clinic. She had her own apartment on Nob Hill off Jones Street right behind Grace Cathedral — a young person trying things out in the world and enjoying her freedom from the Midwest. She loved the oasis of her city life and her walkable hood and her dog.

In 1974, a fateful trip took Sandy and her parents to Pakistan to visit her brother Barent while he was based in Karachi with Bank of America. Sandy wasn’t a diarist, but she did keep a log of her travels on that trip. The details include, among many things, meeting a man through her brother Barent named Woody Iqbal. A short dalliance ensued where they partied like crazy, often until past 3am, including lots of “nitecaps” — her word. A year later, they married at her parents house in St. Joseph.

Woody’s work took them to New York, where they lived near 70th and Lexington on the Upper East Side—Sandy’s love affair with cities, continued. Then back to San Francisco where I arrived in September of 1977. From San Francisco to Seattle in the late 70s until Alison arrived in December of 1980.

I recently stumbled upon two messages that Sandy kept: a handwritten airmail congratulating her on my arrival and later a telegram for Alison’s birth. Both were sent to Sandy by our Pakistani grandfather Muhammad “Big Daddy” Iqbal. Sandy said he was the nicest man she had ever met.

A stint in Piedmont where Woody was still trying to break into the restaurant business meant for lots of time for us kids and Sandy. Weekends spent flying kites on the Marina Green or eating pizza at O’ Sole Mio on Chestnut and Fillmore or hanging out with Sandy’s friends in the city. Sandy took me to my first baseball game in the early 1980s at the Oakland Coliseum. I was so excited I developed a mild fever, but we went anyway (much to the objections of Woody).

When Woody started a new career as a foreign service officer, Sandy rallied to make the absolute most of our overseas experiences. Life in our first post in Lagos, Nigeria, saw Sandy eschewing the comforts of the embassy’s commissary for the excitement of haggling at local markets. If the embassy organized an outing, Sandy was there: beach trips, weekend excursions, and a memorable float down the Ethiope River where Sandy recalled she had Alison’s lifejacket ready to go when she heard a splash—my sister (who was probably no more than 7 at the time) was already in a tube and heading downstream waving back at us. What did Sandy do after she gasped? She laughed, of course.

From Lagos it was back to DC, then to Brazil, where Sandy formed bonds with a handful of fellow embassy folk and other expats whom she would call lifelong friends. Unlikely friendships that developed in the relative isolation of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. She also brought a rewarding tutoring practice she started up in Nigeria to Brazil, and spent a lot of time helping non-native English speaking students from our school develop their language skills.

Back to the DC Metro area meant four years of suburban life in Virginia until Woody was posted again, but this time it was to The Hague, in the Netherlands—Sandy’s dream of Europe. While us kids were teens at the time and less interested in dealing with parents, Sandy jaunted around the continent and over to the UK. (The Netherlands was also safe—no teens driving cars, far less violence, and a group of students who looked after one-another—so Sandy felt very comfortable allowing us lots of freedom while enjoying Europe herself.) A trip to Italy with Woody that was one of the highlights of her travel experience. Christmas markets in Heidelberg. Mussels in Brussels. Museum-hopping in Paris. Family visits in England…

…and then back to Virginia where Woody took an early retirement because of his slowly advancing Parkinson’s disease.

It’s hard to define the last act without talking about Sandy’s role as a caregiver. It involves some of those traits I mentioned above: sensitivity and loyalty, intuition and devotion, all while dealing with a man who wasn’t always the easiest customer. Sandy was hard-working and tenacious and believed it was her responsibility, as Woody’s spouse, to be by his side. And she was by his side, and sometimes even dragging him along by the collar of his Japanese robe, from Fairfax, VA to Ocean View, DE, and later to Estes Park, CO and finally to Sarasota, FL until the end of his life and the end of hers.

Throughout it all, Sandy remained committed to the things that buoyed her, most of all me and Alison. She was a committed cheerleader to all of our adventures, and helped keep us afloat when times were rough. She was always up for a long conversation about what we did over a weekend, what we were doing, and what we had planned next week.

And almost always, Sandy had a catchphrase at the end of each call or each conversation we had in person. “Good enough!” It was a kind of her other mantra, along with “you gotta laugh!” It meant a lot of things including, I think, “good job” or “I’m proud of you” or “you’re doing the best you can” or “I love you.”

It’s a mantra to help us remember the remarkable life of Saundra “Sandy” Iqbal. A life that was filled with laughter, love, and joy and was just good enough for all of us.

Farewell to the Mothership

Saundra “Sandy” Mae Iqbal (née Springsted) 1939-2026

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