Volume 5, Entry 29: A Guiding Light

A tragic accident. Then a happy one.

In the early 2000s, books routinely went viral.

At least, it seemed that way to me. An author would go on Good Morning America or Oprah during a publicity tour, and soon everyone from neighbors to classmates would rave about some book until reading it became necessary to stay in the conversation. We still had a local Borders bookstore then; the viral titles always sat prominently and conveniently on a stand as you entered the store.

In 2003, two titles followed this trajectory. The first was Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, the escapist page-turner that eventually became a Tom Hanks movie. Featuring several surprising claims about Christianity, the book rode its inherent controversy into the mainstream, where its pulpy readability took over.

Like so much of the country, I read The DaVinci Code in 2003. As I am a sheeple and the book spent almost half the year atop the New York Times bestseller list, there’s not much surprise here. But Brown’s race-across-Europe thriller isn’t the bestseller that stayed with me.

That would be The Five People You Meet in Heaven by sports columnist Mitch Albom. Like The DaVinci Code, The Five People You Meet in Heaven became a trendy talking point, topping the bestseller list for five weeks late in 2003 and becoming the “Have you read _______?” sentence-completer du jour of the holiday season.

If you feel like you know its subject matter just from its title, prepare to not be surprised. The Five People You Meet in Heaven centers on Eddie, a wounded Vietnam veteran who works at a carnival. Early on, Eddie dies when a ride malfunctions, and in death, he learns the logistics of entry into the good place: he will first meet five people who either influenced his life or whose lives he influenced.

Albom’s novel is every bit the tearjerker its synopsis suggests. Eddie’s journey is technically over within a few chapters, but the story details a different journey: Eddie’s understanding of connection has evolved by its conclusion.

That’s because the five people he meets in Heaven aren’t the ones he expects. Sure, Eddie meets his late and loving wife and his combat casualty army captain, respectively, but the other three identities mark total surprises. He does not remember any of them at 83 years old; each person’s appearance initially befuddles him.

I bring up Albom’s novel because it planted a powerful idea about intersection in my head. The first of Eddie’s five visitors is the Blue Man, a circus performer who died in an accident Eddie unwittingly caused as a little boy. The message from that interaction rang loud and clear to me at seventeen: you might not realize how dramatically your life affects another person’s. Short-lived connections don’t preclude profound impressions. Entire lives can be changed because of situations far outside their scope.

Albom’s lesson came through loud and clear to many readers, especially one high school senior who read the novel in bed the day after Christmas. That morning, he began wondering which random connections he might one day meet in Heaven.

Seven months later, one of his spots seemingly locked in.

*****

On July 8, 2003, I received an email from my friend Cristina. We’d had Richmond’s Honors Pre-Calculus class together, sitting next to one another in the back row. We talked about school via AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) regularly. We were friends.

Cristina’s email invited me to participate in a blogging community she’d joined one month prior. This was early enough that I didn’t know the word “blog” and had to search for its meaning online, but I came to understand it through how my friend used hers. Cristina wrote and posted about her life online, inviting others, including me, to read and respond. Cristina’s invitation gave me the same opportunity.

I had diaries as a kid, but I tore out and shredded every single page I wrote every single time. Looking back at old versions of myself made me cringe, and I purged the evidence nearly as quickly as I wrote it. Posting on a digital platform meant I didn’t need a working shredder—deletion was always one click away—but Cristina’s accessibility overrode my inclination. She could read what I wrote; what would deleting an entry accomplish if she remembered what I’d shared?

Over the months that followed, writing there became a regular part of my life. I wrote short entries about situations that would seem frivolous months later, but the once-small community kept growing as more classmates joined the platform. We all used it the same way, which meant I got to know them all far better, if not for the first time; some became close friends almost exclusively through that platform.

During the summer after my senior year, I posted almost every day. Outside of tenth-grade Vocal Ensemble, Cristina’s platform had provided the strongest sense of belonging I’d felt during high school. It marked my first time knowing people, and I clung to it, afraid of losing that connection.

In July of 2004, my best friend Matt joined the community. This meant I could write to my oldest friend the same way I did to these new people I’d grown close to. This felt akin to sliding a final jigsaw puzzle piece into place. My digital world seemed complete.

It wasn’t.

Two weeks later, it would be.

On July 15, I wrote and posted about a local news story. Four days later, a username I didn’t know commented on my post.

This is how I met Eliza*.

Hers was just a single comment, but everything snowballed from there. We subscribed to one another’s blogs, commented back and forth on one another’s posts, and began communicating directly via AIM. For several years, we only crossed paths in the wild once or twice, but we knew everything about one another. We were apparent strangers who were anything but.

In a way, my friendship with Eliza was precisely what I needed. When you hate yourself, taking up space in the world feels wrong. Every ounce of volume I encompassed was too much; I was ugly, I was awkward, and I was angry. But Eliza didn’t see me, which meant that she could see me. This wasn’t a “reinvent myself” situation where I cobbled together a new identity for someone who couldn’t know differently; I was the purest form of myself to her, my entire iceberg made visible. Talking to Eliza offered an out-of-body experience, a purely emotional and intellectual bond. To her, I existed in words—my best form.

No matter what, Eliza was there. She knew the real me because I offered it to her as readily as I did to Matt. Cristina’s platform became the portal between us, two people who had never shared a physical room until the digital world brought us together. My friendship with her diverged from all my others because we didn’t know each other in real life. I was more open with her than anyone else.

That felt freeing, particularly when my life shifted as I started teaching and assuming greater responsibility. From 2009 through 2016, I posted something almost every day, writing hundreds of thousands of words every year.

All of which went to Eliza. There was no “Dear Eliza” at the top, but I definitely wrote to her almost every time. To this day, my authorial voice still narrates to Eliza. I conceive of myself, internally, as I would be seen, in text, by her. Eliza was my stalwart, my champion, my last line of defense against the rotten feeling of worthlessness and the squeeze of lonesomeness. If she who had no reason to care about me cared about me, then I had proof that I mattered. I felt that close to her.

I still feel that close to Eliza. A full twenty years after my post and her comment jumpstarted one of my two defining friendships, I still know—and I don’t choose that word “know” lightly—that I can reach out to her. When we see each other, we pick up right where we’ve left off with best friend fluidity because we know one another with a level of depth that should be impossible for two people with an almost wholly digital relationship.

I count that post and comment exchange with Eliza as one of the most fortunate events of my life. Across twenty years, her digital proximity got me through rough nights to mornings a staggering number of times. Her intersection with my life was a gift from the universe. I’m not sure I’ll ever receive a greater one.

This has almost always been my way of reporting our friendship’s origins. When I talk about how I met those I’m closest to, I talk about an alphabetical seating chart in first grade with Matt and a nascent blogging platform with Eliza. With her, the quirky online meet-cute carries our story, letting listeners lap up the serendipity of Web 2.0 bringing friends together. It’s a beautiful story, isn’t it?

But this is an incomplete telling of one of my foundational tales. Everything I’ve written is the truth, but I’ve omitted the fulcrum, the key, the impetus for all of it. I said that when I wrote and she responded, that exchange launched our treasured friendship. But I didn’t acknowledge what we were talking about in that exchange.

I skipped the part about the girl who brought us together.

By dying.

*****

During the first quarter of my senior year, my lunch period aligned with several friends’ schedules. I'd known two of those friends, Abe and David, since third grade; another, Derek, I’d met in PE as a freshman. We ate in the spot we called Gas Leak Corner, next to an abandoned vending machine alcove. I had a great time during that lunch; it was the only lunch I could say that about during my final year of high school.

Because it was quarter one, Derek was in the midst of Cross-Country season. We gave him lots of grief when he complained about the minimal attention his sport received, suggesting helpful tips for ratcheting up its watchability, like releasing rabid bears. We were helpful that way.

We also gave him lots of grief about the teammates that visited him. Walking over, locked arm-in-arm, four girls from the squad joined us in Gas Leak Corner one day. They treated Derek like a silly older brother, teasing him like we did but with decidedly more giggling. Despite none of us receiving affection from a group of girls as he did, we eviscerated Derek for this encounter and every other time they passed by and called out his name. I don’t remember our punchline, but his “fan club” became a running gag through October. I even wrote a parody song.

One of those girls who visited us was a sophomore named Sarah Lekven. After Derek’s introduction, I never interacted with Sarah Lekven again. I didn’t even know her last name.

Until July 12, 2004.

That morning, the Cross-Country team was mid-workout when Sarah Lekven attempted to cross Bruceville Road at a point close to where Game Stop is now. Neither she nor a pick-up truck driver saw one another. The accident left her in a coma.

I found out about the accident from someone on AIM later that day, but soon, there were newspaper articles online about what had happened. Optimism reigned initially, but it proved to be short-lived: Sarah Lekven died in the hospital in the early morning of July 14. She was fifteen.

When I found out she had died, I sent condolences to Derek on MySpace since neither of us had a cell phone. I expected that brief outreach to settle my stomach, but it didn’t. I couldn’t blink away the awfulness of picturing that girl who visited my friend bloodied on the street. Sarah Lekven was too young to be dead.

By that point, I’d lost three close family members. My uncle died of a heart attack while golfing, and my grandmother died from a rare bone cancer; these were taken-too-soon situations, but both suffered health-wise throughout their lives. After the fact, their deaths made sense in a way. On the flip side, my cousin Dwight had a seizure while eating peanut M&Ms; he choked to death in his bedroom. That one never clicked.

Sarah Lekven’s death tapped into emotions from losing Dwight I’d never processed. When he died, I played my baseball game the next day, grunting to my coach that I was fine. I didn’t know what else to do. Where was I supposed to “process” what happened to my favorite adult? Who was I going to tell about looking for Death around every corner?

When Sarah Lekven died, I held the thinnest connection to the tragedy. My secondhand grief had no place in the story of a tight-knit running team and community in shock. But their shocks activated unresolved feelings, and for the first time, I had somewhere I could grapple with that emotion: Cristina’s platform.

Late at night on July 15, 2004, I wrote about what had happened to Sarah Lekven. Unlike so many things I wrote at that age, my raw response mostly holds up. With a clear separation between myself and those mourning from the front lines, I wrote about her death from the outside:

I did not know her... She was just one of…Derek's fan club. But yet, i cried today. Why? The utter sadness and confusion of such a passing, so unfair and unmeritted and fucked up in itself…to take a person like her away and steal her life away? Yes, yes to all of that, yes the fragility we're all exposed to now because of the sorrowful story of Sarah Lekven.

Sarah Lekven’s death left me aware of our collective fragility. We are not supposed to bury Sarah Lekvens. Fifteen-year-old running fiends challenging themselves to defend section titles on summer mornings shouldn’t die mid-run. Rising juniors shouldn’t mourn their friends, and cross-country coaches shouldn’t plan memorial services. Yet Sarah Lekven died on July 14, 2004, from those injuries and set all of that in motion. It was an unfathomable tragedy.

An eighteen-year-old friend-of-a-teammate, I felt compelled to respond to the tragedy and posted 636 words. Four days later, two of Sarah Lekven’s close friends found and responded to what I’d written. The first of those friends was Eliza.

We’ve been friends ever since.

Ever since Sarah Lekven died.

*****

Objectively speaking, I understand that the universe didn’t take Sarah Lekven’s life to bolster mine. That’s not how the world works. This isn’t the Blue Jays swapping Francisco Liriano for Teoscar Hernandez, where we can compare bWAR seven years later and declare a winner. Tragedies just happen, and her death was a tragedy. What transpired afterward is closer to a coincidence than an outcome.

But objective awareness doesn’t stop me from feeling differently. Sarah Lekven’s death is the domino that toppled so many others that led me here. My life-altering friendship with Eliza owes to her. My writing habits that led to novels and this newsletter blossomed with Eliza, so those also owe to Sarah Lekven. My way with words and my compassion, two traits that people actively tell me make a difference, developed while writing to Eliza online...which means yet another arrow points straight back toward the girl who died. She looms over my entire adult life.

I’ve never felt responsible for what happened to Sarah Lekven, not even in a cosmic sense, but I nevertheless feel guilty. There’s something unjust about me benefiting from her tragedy. I’m no Evan Hansen, seizing on a misunderstanding to raise my profile, but my life did become better in the aftermath of her death. That…doesn’t make sense. It sets off alarm bells of impropriety—including those in my head. This shouldn’t happen. There’s a reason I waited until now to connect her story with mine in writing. I haven’t wanted to claim any segment of her legacy.

Alas, there’s no other way for me to proceed. The person I’ve become owes too much to the ending suffered by an “always smiling” “bright light” of “positive force” who “imprinted a lasting memory in the hearts of [so] many”. Although I’m outside Sarah Lekven’s story, she has landed inside mine.

So, how do I honor this stranger whose mark has been etched so deeply into my relationships, my abilities, and my character?

I’ve struggled to answer this question for years, especially since I asked Eliza’s permission to write publicly about our history. This is my second from-scratch draft, but I’ve started and discarded at least six others. I’ve tried stylistic approaches, scripted connections to movies, and even mined Eliza’s own words in search of the right way to address the somber circumstances of our origin story. I have no idea what to do with this.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I’m thinking about all this incorrectly. I didn’t know Sarah Lekven, but the site memorializing her can still be accessed. Although it looks every bit its age and features broken links and a jarring pink background, the news stories about the accident, her death, and the community’s response still fill the page. I’ve visited the site many times over the years, but I haven’t read it from start to finish since 2004.

Between it and Eliza’s remembrances, I understood twenty years ago that the Cross-Country team and our community lost someone special, but the details of Sarah Lekven didn’t sink in then. At the time, I was projecting my losses onto her death; my outsider’s perspective left me focused on the dying more than the deceased.

With the gift of elapsed time, I read every word today and caught things about Sarah Lekven that I never did before. She wrote “Run fast” on her arms before races. She did double workouts every day. She was co-captain as a sophomore, a vegetarian with a quartet of cats, and a much-lauded writer who wanted to go to UC Santa Cruz and open a coffeehouse with live music. Woven between so much reporting about grief and injuries, Sarah Lekven transforms into a three-dimensional person, a fiery, passionate, and competitive kid. Assembling that profile in the past tense is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

I also found one more thing I’d never noticed before. Sarah Lekven’s parents wrote a letter to her teammates that they posted at the makeshift memorial in front of campus. Although its words were never meant for someone like me, they stand out today as if they were:

Some people feel guilt after such a senseless tragedy. Neither Sarah nor her family would ever want you to feel such pain.

*****

Perspective is such a tricky thing. This story, when told from my perspective, is a happy one. I met a fantastic friend online in July 2004. Across the intervening years, that friend has been a force of good for me, and having her in my life has guided it in directions central to who I am.

Loosen the reins on that tight POV, though, and this is an awful tragedy. The world lost a special person just getting her start in the world. Her death shook an entire community. I can only speak for Eliza, but her death remains palpable for those whom she loved.

There’s no undoing what happened to Sarah Lekven. I’d give everything back if I could, but I can’t. The tragedy happened, and whether it was part of some twisted cosmic machination or ugly random chance, she is gone from a world that continued without her. She should be 35, but she is, instead, still fifteen. She’ll be fifteen forever.

Under these miserable circumstances, isn’t it beautiful that something good bloomed? Isn’t it incredible that, in death, Sarah Lekven still managed to inspire good? I said earlier that she loomed over my last twenty years, but I could just as easily credit her for blessing that interval. Why shouldn’t I?

I want to think of what followed her loss not as a miscarriage of cosmic justice but as her lingering goodness enduring in the world. The “bright light” of Sarah Lekven persevered when her heart stopped, and her goodness found new outlets in the community at large. In one of the articles, an assistant coach calls her “a guiding light for everyone”, and that’s what I’m going to hold onto. Sarah Lekven didn’t know me, but somehow, she became that for me. I have to think she’d be happy that Eliza and I found each other because of her.

Would she be? I’d love to ask her. She died before she could earn her driver’s license, so it would be a humongous question to answer, but I want to believe she’d smile that constant smile everyone raved about. I want to convince myself she’d appreciate an unexpected silver lining and relish that something good blossomed from a patch of something terrible.

I don’t believe in the Mitch Albom afterlife conjured in The Five People You Meet in Heaven, but I do like playing with its mechanics. For the longest time, I’ve imagined that when I die, Sarah Lekven will be one of my five people.

Today, it dawns on me that I might be wrong. I don’t remember anything in that book that establishes time’s linearity after death. While Eddie meets people who died before him, others might experience that differently. Maybe some who die meet future versions of the living from the far side of the departed’s lasting influence.

That is, on her afterlife journey, could it be that Sarah Lekven met some future version of me? What a privilege it would be to introduce myself as one of her quintet and outline all of what I’ve written here for the girl who inspired it.

I guarantee that Mitch Albom would love that.

So would I.

---

This might be the most challenging piece I’ve ever written for Substack. This covers one of my fundamental stories and foundational relationships in less than 4000 words. That will never feel like enough, but the extra time I spent reading about Sarah Lekven delivered a sense of peace I haven’t felt before. I’m happy I wrote this.

If you check out Sarah Lekven’s memorial website, I recommend you start reading from the bottom. That captures what receiving news felt like then, which also captures what I tried to do in the original version of this piece.

Lastly, since it does not appear in this piece, I should note that this week’s thumbnail shows Eliza and me at Sarah Lekven’s memorial rock. This can be found on the corner of Big Horn and Vicino. I try to drive by every time I’m in the area. I donated a paycheck to her memorial fund that summer and can’t imagine a better symbol. Students sit on it all the time. It strikes me as perfect.

I’ve been thinking about this piece for so long. I have no idea what I’m going to write for next week.