Claremont obituary honors Sheila Fay Smith, remembered for kindness
Stringer Funeral Home in Claremont held visitation for Sheila Fay Smith, 73, before burial at Mountain View Cemetery. Her family remembered her as a beacon of kindness and compassion.
Stringer Funeral Home in Claremont held visitation for Sheila Fay Smith on Thursday afternoon, June 25, at 146 Broad Street, followed by a 2 p.m. service. Burial was set for Saturday morning, June 27, at Mountain View Cemetery.
Smith died June 18 at age 73 after a courageous battle with cancer. Her obituary said she was born Sept. 11, 1952, in Keene, New Hampshire, to Lawrence Fair of Rochester and Beverly French of Keene.
The notice said both parents and two brothers had died before her. It also laid out the family she left behind: her children, Debra A. Neil and Ray L. Smith; Ray’s wife, Lori; Debra’s boyfriend, Henry; her siblings Sharon Labraney, Ronnie Fair and Timmy Fair; and her granddaughter, Rebecca Neil, whom she adored and shared a particularly close bond with.
Family described Smith as a beacon of kindness and compassion, a phrase that captured the personal role she played in the lives of relatives who gathered to mark her death. The obituary kept the focus on those ties, naming the people closest to her rather than offering a broad life summary.
Her burial at Mountain View Cemetery connected the farewell to one of Claremont’s oldest public places. The city’s Public Works Department maintains five municipal cemeteries covering more than 76 acres, and the history of those cemeteries dates back to the 1700s. In a city with an estimated population of 13,032 on July 1, 2025, and 12,949 at the 2020 census, a notice like Smith’s carries the weight of a community record as well as a family memorial.
Smith’s death also came against a broader cancer burden in Sullivan County. The National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s State Cancer Profiles database lists the county’s all-cancer incidence rate at 489.4 per 100,000 people for 2018 through 2022, with an average annual count of 333 cases. New Hampshire’s rate for the same period was 473.2 per 100,000, and the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services says the state cancer registry collects incidence data on cancer cases diagnosed or treated in the state.
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