In Memory

for my friend

It’s a lot easier to convince my toddler that it’s time for bed once the sun has fully set.

The sun is Maverick’s great regulator. When he sees it streaming through our curtains in the morning, he triumphantly announces that it’s time to get out of bed because “the sun is awake.” And last night, after clearing my place from the table, I traipsed into my bathroom to find my 2-year-old squeezing toothpaste from the tube and onto his little Elmo toothbrush. “It’s night night time,” he informed me. “The sun went to bed.”

This is a mostly amazing arrangement for my life. I don’t know exactly how he came to embrace these as the rules, but I’m not complaining. When everything goes according to Maverick’s solar schedule, our lives are mostly peaceful.

But we had a hiccup last week at my daughter’s cross country meet. It was overcast and dreary that day with a significant amount of cloud cover, and Maverick panicked when he could not glance up at the sky and locate the sun. “Where did it go?” he bellowed. “Oh no!”

His little world was in shambles. It was clearly midday—NOT time for the evening routine, and yet his compass was nowhere to be found. It was profoundly dysregulating for him, and no one in his immediate tribe was allowed to rest until the problem had been satisfyingly fixed in his mind. So we sent Maverick off with his older brother on a scavenger hunt to find the sun, and eventually, it peeked out from behind the clouds just long enough to resolve his cognitive dissonance.

Maverick may look like a carbon copy of his father, but it’s moments like this that remind me that he is still, in many ways, his mother’s child, too. He’s at peace as long as his world makes total sense to him and on his timeline and all in the right order.

Last week my dear, kind, talented, and beautiful high school friend passed away unexpectedly after contracting a virulent infection, and I’ve been dysregulated and sort of flailing ever since. My mind is not at rest.

This is not the correct order of events. This is not how the script for life is supposed to go. We grow up. We go to college. We get married. We have kids and jobs and soccer practice and little league. We volunteer at church and sign up for snack duty at our life groups. We go shopping for our babies’ homecoming dresses and white knuckle our way through teaching them to drive. Then we’re supposed to launch our own kids out into the world and repeat the cycle until we’re old and wrinkled and gray—until we become the grandparents who tell the stories and share the wisdom and leave the legacies.

That’s the correct order of events. It has to be. Things go awry when we go messing with the timeline. Parents aren’t supposed to bury their babies. Little kids aren’t supposed to grow up without their mamas. And deviations from this order are supposed to be reserved for people who do meth or make terrible life choices or drive 100 mph down the freeway in the wrong direction after midnight. They aren’t supposed to happen to amazing, vibrant super moms who spend every day making the world a better place. (And yes, I realize this is ridiculous thinking and that the history of the world is cluttered with stories of tragic things that happened to great people for no obvious reason, but this general awareness hardly means we don’t secretly subscribe to the wishful thinking of the aforementioned formula.)

I don’t know if it’s even possible to accurately explain the intensity of the bonding that happens between individuals in a class of 29 people stuck in a lovely but oh-so-quirky private Christian high school environment. We were mostly a bunch of nerdy Presbyterian white kids who got thrust together in this fascinating world of poetry explication and Latin conjugation and madrigal choral pieces and Shakespeare. Oh so much Shakespeare. (We read “Merchant of Venice as part of our economics class.) We didn’t have dances; we had banquets. We didn’t have sports; we had fencing. We didn’t have sex ed; we had Elisabeth Elliott and a somewhat neurotic obsession with the 1500s. But we also had amazing, life-changing experiences like choir tours and PE at the YMCA and two-week historical tours of Great Britain. I mean, how many high schoolers do you know who get to sing in hidden catacombs of Canterbury Cathedral as part of their high school experience? Not many. But we did. And we did it all together. We were really tight knit nerds.

My kids will graduate alongside a bunch of people whose first names they don’t even know. But I can tell you about 1001 personal details about most of my classmates, and I can tell you even more about Sarah because I really, really liked her. In many ways, she was the best of us. That’s a super cliche thing to say, I know. People always and only seem to romanticize others this way after they’ve passed away, but in the case of Sarah, it’s just objectively true.

For one thing, she was an outsider, which means she wasn’t part of the Presbyterian church-to-high-school pipeline that populated half the school. In retrospect, I’ve come to think of the outsiders as the normal kids, and I’ve come to appreciate how much of a struggle it must have been for so many of them to acclimate to the heavily Reformed and oh-so-somber milieu. But Sarah wasn’t somber. In fact, I heard someone describe her as a “joy bomb,” and it’s just such a fitting description. She had her share of struggles, but she never allowed them to make her bitter, and when she walked into a room, it instantly brightened. You knew it was about to get fun.

We hit it off instantly: We both loved music, were both athletic and scrappy and competitive, both chronically disorganized smart girls who probably underperformed a bit in the classroom because of our undiagnosed ADHD. When I think of her, she’s always sitting at a piano with an iced coffee at hand. She had this way of checking out of conversations that were uselessly dramatic. Girls would be crying and gossiping and carrying on, and Sarah would just sit there plunking out chords of worship songs and quietly signaling her disinterest while pointing the guilty back toward heaven.

I’ll never forget the year our high school choir performed “South Pacific.” I was thrilled to get the solo for one of the most popular songs, but I remember thinking Sarah’s solo stole the show because she was just so stinking good that I couldn’t even be jealous of her. Her star always just shone brightly, but you never walked away from her light feeling eclipsed. You walked away from it feeling inspired. She didn’t operate from a place of ego. She was just confident in her own skin, and it gave others permission to relax a bit and take themselves less seriously, too.

Sarah was raw and discerning and real just like me, and I laugh when I look at this picture of us before our school Christmas banquet because I remember exactly what was happening as we posed for it. There we were, covered neck to ankle in fabric, but we were both lamenting how closely we were flirting with a dress code violation. The straps on her dress were technically a tad too thin to meet the standard, and my dress didn’t have any straps at all, so one slip of the shrug, and I could get the boot. This was the nature of our shared rebellion. Only her rebellion mostly ended there, and mine would take me off the deep end for at least a decade before coming back to truth north.

But Sarah was solid that way. And she never judged. When I got knocked up out of wedlock, she would come to visit me at work and make sure I was okay. I have a picture of her affectionately patting my very pregnant belly in some of the spiritually darkest days of my life. But there she was, undaunted by my demons. I never scared or intimidated Sarah, and it was always such a balm to not have to shrink to fit her capacity to enjoy me.

Sarah and I often bonded over silliness like dress codes and cute boys, but as the years went on, we bonded over real stuff too: abuse patterns in the church, caring for the wounded, pursuing justice, and confronting perverse power in high places. She had a tremendous sense of integrity and intention in the way she made her choices and drew her lines and lived her life.

Life moves people in different directions, and we didn’t keep in steady contact, but I would hear from her every few months when she would share an article or I would comment on how stunningly gorgeous her children are. The last time I talked to her was in April, when she messaged me to check in on a former classmate. Her heart was always so moved with compassion for those she perceived to be struggling.

I Facebook stalked her page just a few short weeks ago and thought to myself how truly beautiful she had become, how settled, how vibrant, how inspiring.

And now she’s gone, and I haven’t been able to think about much else. I was talking to a friend about this—about how you don’t actually realize how engrained a person can become in the tapestry of your own life until someone pulls their thread out and you realize what a huge piece is missing.

And then there’s the guilt I feel over even categorizing what I’m processing as “grief.” I don’t deserve peoples’ pity or condolences when I share these thoughts, and it feels gross and exploitive to field them. My heart is absolutely shattered for her children and her husband and her loving sisters and her poor sweet mama who taught my high school Spanish class. These are the ones who need and deserve all the compassion this universe has to offer right now.

But I’m coming to terms with the reality that I’m allowed to grieve, too. Because I did love her, and it is a loss, and there’s nothing selfish about naming it as such. I want to be like my toddler in these moments. I want to insist on pausing the entire world so everyone can help me relocate the sun. I want to see it peering through the clouds so I can regain my breath and say, “Oh there you are. Now I can go about my day because Sarah is still here, and everything is once again as it ought to be.”

But that’s not an option that’s available to grown-ups.

For the life of me I cannot fathom why God would allow Sarah’s light to be snuffed out so very soon. She had young children and so much left to do, see, and give. It may not ever make sense to me this side of heaven. I’m probably going to have to wrestle this out in my prayer time for quite a while. There are not easy answers here, and quite frankly, we aren’t owed complete understanding.

But Sarah was a worshiper to the core, and if there’s one thing about which I am absolutely confident, it’s the reality that from where she’s seated right now, she is not agonizing over those questions. She’s not wringing her hands about her family’s future without her. She’s probably rocking her little Taya, and she’s singing with angels in the presence of the One who has the whole world in His hands. She’s tasting and seeing that her Lord is good. Her perspective isn’t veiled like mine. She sees Him face to face. Her world is in order. And she wouldn’t change a thing.

That’s no small comfort.

To donate to a fund that blesses Sarah’s family, click here.