BY SID CASSESE

She was a breast cancer advocate whose short adult life was about service to others and saving lives. But after 10 years, Sonia A. Saunders couldn’t beat the disease that strikes one in nine American women. Saunders, 41, died Saturday at the Beach Terrace Care center in Long Beach.

Saunders, who grew up in Freeport, had been a dietician, nutritionist, school teacher and librarian, and lived in North Babylon.

She was a strong advocate for breast cancer victims, serving as a member of the Sisters Network, an organization of black victims of the disease, in the Nassau and Suffolk chapters. And she was an active reach to Recovery volunteer for the American Cancer Association.

In a Newsday article Nov.19, 2000, on the politics of the disease, she said:” Breast cancer has not been politicized enough…Politicians need to talk about early detection and other issues involving breast cancer as often as possible.”

This past June she marched-in a wheelchair pushed by her husband-in the graduation ceremonies at the C.W.Post Campus of Long Island University to receive her second postgraduate degree, earning a master’s in library science.

“She was an outstanding teacher and person, one of the most positive people I’ve ever met,” said Carlton Brown, who was her principal at Bay Shore’s South Country Elementary School, which she joined in 1999, teaching for two years. “She always came to work upbeat and always did her best for students.”
Saunders attended Baldwin High School and served as a candy striper at Mercy Hospital in 1981 and ’82. She went on to Howard University, where she was briefly married to and divorced from Mark Wingfield of Washington, D.C., in 1987, the year of her graduation.

With her bachelor’s degree in medical dietetics, she went to work for the district’s Commission on Mental Health Services as a clinical dietician for a year. For the next 18 months, she served as dietician for the Marriott corp. in Washington. The following year she worked as a nutrition education specialist for the Washington, D.C., schools.

In June 1991, Saunders returned to Long Island, residing in Hempstead and working with the Nassau County Health Department as a public health nutritionist for its WIC program. In 1995, she enrolled in the master’s program in education at the New York Institute of technology in Old Westbury. That was the year that she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“But she kept right on plugging away,” said her mother, Ann France of Freeport.

Saunders would do some teaching in the Hempstead School district and later at the Loudon County School District in Virginia before receiving her master’s in 1998.

She met Keith Saunders while at NYIT. They were married in 1999 and moved to North Babylon. Both were active in Belmont Lake Civic association, for which she worked on the youth committee.

“She became an inspiration to all she came in contact with, and she never stopped smiling and never stopped fighting,” her husband said.
That year, she began a two year stint at Bay Shore’s South Country Elementary School.

But teaching became too stressful for her, her mother said, and she resigned in 2001.

Saunders was an active member of the Congregational Church of South Hempstead. “She inspired me and everyone else, because she really knew how to live. She never let her illness rule her life,” said her pastor, the Rev. Patrick Duggan.

Besides her mother and husband, she is survived by her son, Mark Wingfield Jr. of Dover, Del; her father, Simuel Grace of Freeport, a brother, Dexter France of Freeport, and a sister, Patricia Jordan of Auburn, Ala.

Viewing will be from 3 to 9 PM today at the Congregational Church of South Hempstead. The funeral will be there at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Burial will follow at Greenfield Cemetery in Uniondale.