One of Margaret Ann Sights’ friends says she was “every sweet description you could name.”
“I think she was perfect,” said her longtime friend, Sally Bird. “Loving. She was kind and generous and caring.”
Mrs. Sights, who family called “Dear,” died on Wednesday, Sept. 2. She was 84.
She led a life of volunteerism and activism, according to her obituary, and was active in numerous community organizations, serving as President of the Garden Club of Henderson with involvement in the League of Women Voters, Leadership Henderson, the Henderson Public Library, the Fine Arts Center Guild, Church Women United, the Nancy Eblen Circle, and the United Methodist Church. She also dedicated her time to the West Home for Girls and served as a Kids Hope Mentor, said the obituary.
Mrs. Sights was also involved with the recovery community after her husband, Dale, founded the Women’s Addiction Recovery Manor and served as its president and CEO.
Nicole Frields, who is the chief operating officer of the Women’s Addiction Recovery Manor, described Mrs. Sights as kind but fierce.
“She was such a sweet lady, but she didn’t take any crap off anybody,” Frields said.
Frields said that Sights did all the decorating for the WARM building when it first opened in 2007—including paint, rugs, lamps, everything. It was the very first recovery community in the state, Frields said, and “She did not want it to look like an institution. She wanted the building to look like home.”
Part of the design work involved research to make it just right. For instance, Sights learned that the color that provides comfort is light pink, so the first room that residents come to when they move into WARM is painted light pink, Frields said.
Mrs. Sights also decorated the Men’s Addiction Recovery Campus in Bowling Green, the Recovery Resource Center of Henderson on First Street and the Men’s Unity Lodge also on First Street.
“She’s a saint,” Frields said. “She really was a saint.”
Garrett Eblen said he knew Margaret Ann and Dale through both of his grandfathers and his parents. But they didn’t become a force in his life until Garrett overdosed in 2023 and Dale came to meet him in the hospital.
Through his recovery, he said that Mrs. Sights “had a remarkable way of taking the time to encourage me, prompt my best thinking, and help me see the best in myself. During my recovery, she helped restore a sense of confidence in me that I had lost.”
Further, she would always “re-instill I was worth it,” said Eblen, who is now a full-time employee, with roles of intake coordinator and SOS (Safe Off the Streets) coordinator at MARC.
“…her ability to love, encourage and care for others was truly a God-given gift—one she demonstrated through the way she lived,” Eblen said in a message.
Bird said the pair may have been friends, but “we call each other sisters actually.”
The most precious memories she’ll take with her about her “sister” were the innumerable Monday lunches they shared for more than 50 years.
“We had lunch every Monday we could,” Bird said. “Sometimes they would last three hours.”
The time wasn’t spent eating so much as it was talking about their lives, their families, their children.
“My favorite memory was our Mondays at lunch that we did for 55 years,” Bird said, adding that “we leaned on each other when we needed to.”
“God got a treasure when he got her,” Bird said.
Her children, Bart, Shara, Carrie and Susan wrote a tribute to their mother for this article:
“As her children, we were the luckiest to live in Dear’s light — she made each of us feel as if we were the most important and her grandchildren basked in her everlasting and forever love. We have been so grateful for the outpouring of kindness and love over the past six months — so many wonderful individuals who have reached out to her and to us to share how special and well loved she made them feel when they were in her presence. If you crossed her path, you were seen. Always. Her humility and pure intent to put others first will be our guidepost always.”
Read Margaret Ann Sights’ obituary here.
