On Nov. 13, 1997, my basketball team sat in my coach’s classroom to have a meeting about our upcoming game. Like always, the team scattered after the meeting, but this time, we were quickly called back together.
A senior, Amity Pascal, who played basketball in junior high with many of us, and a volleyball star, passed away an hour earlier. She’d been out of school for a couple of weeks with severe headaches, which were caused by a brain tumor.
Surgery proved successful and the tumor was removed. But a day or two after, as she was getting a MRI, her brain swelled and Amity Pascal passed away at age 17.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Amity’s death marked a three-year span where we felt the pang of childhood death down into our souls. One girl tried to beat a train, another boy was killed when the car he was riding in flipped, another boy was killed when his car was hit from the side, there were a couple of students who committed suicide.
The days after Amity’s death were a whirlwind. It rained and rained and rained until her funeral. The day after her death, in a school of over 1,200 students, you could have heard a pin drop as students entered the hallways. I remember walking into my Spanish class to a teacher whose eyes were overflowing with tears, and this was at the end of the day.
The news media followed us with their cameras and their coverage for days. Even when the line for her visitation wrapped around the gym, ran through the hallway and ended somewhere outside the school, they were there. I remember every moment of being in that line, and I remember every second of her funeral like it was yesterday.
Her parents opened their doors to anyone who wanted to come into their home. I remember visiting with them for years after she passed. We had five guidance counselors in our school, and each of them were there in the immediate days after, but also for months and years after as we tried to process what was happening around us. Our teachers even took time away from their lessons to counsel and console us. Processing their death wasn’t something we did on our own, but something that we tried our best to do together while we still got done what needed to be done.
There are things that you experience and forget quickly. And then there are those moments that are so deeply ingrained in your being that they change you forever.
Like many of my peers, I don’t really like to think about that day or the days that followed. More than 20 years later, I still don’t have any answers to my questions, which included: Why did this happen? She was a “good” person, why didn’t a “bad” person die instead? She was young, why didn’t an old person die instead? If God is so good, why does He let bad things happen? Will I die next?
As we all know, the list was much longer than that as it grew and time went on. Today my questions are a little different. Today, I ask, what did she possess at such a young age that I can take with me into my own life?
While thinking about the day Amity died brings great and tremendous sadness to my heart, even still today, I now enjoy thinking about her: who she was and what she taught us about life.
Amity was full of life. She was vibrant, like a magnet who drew people in. Not because she was the prettiest or richest, but because she knew how to accept everyone and everything for who they are and where they were in life.
Amity, in her tall stature and skinny body, was noticeable, but she wasn’t the loudest in any group. She was just always behind the scenes, working hard to become a better student, a better athlete, a better editor on our school newspaper, a better friend to all who crossed her path.
She was kind. And when I think about her, when I remember the hours we spent together and the way in which she carried herself, I am reminded that we are all in this big conglomerate of a mess together, and everyone can use just a little more kindness.
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Many of our Mahomet-Seymour students will forever be impacted by friends and peers they have lost over the last few years. They will remember the day that they received the news, the days following will be a whirlwind, they will go through months or years of questions and they will forever be impacted by these moments.
It’s important that we give these children the space they need to process through their thoughts, feelings and memories.
As I cried in my room 21 years ago with my door shut, my dad asked me what I was doing. He told me that I shouldn’t be that sad. Amity and I weren’t best friends; I wasn’t even in her inner circle. She was on my AAU basketball team in junior high. We were also in newspaper class together. We weren’t close by any measure, but she was someone I looked up to.
When I yelled at him, telling him he didn’t understand how I felt, he said he did; he lost a friend to cancer in high school.
But we never talked about any of it.
So, I retreated to navigate my emotions and thoughts on my own. It was because of the support I found at school, through counselors, teachers, coaches and friends that I was able to process my grief.
The school encouraged us to remember Amity. For many years, even after we graduated, the school hosted the P-Dog Classic, a light-hearted recreational volleyball tournament. And through this tournament, even people who did not know of her light, were able to meet her.
If Amity Pascal was still alive today, she’d be just like every other person I went to high school with; we’d be friends on Facebook, passing pleasantries here and there.
But she passed on before Facebook was even a thought. I’m sure that if she were still here today, she’d be carrying on her legacy of creating spaces for people in this big conglomerate of a mess.
When she left us, she also multiplied. All of the students whose lives she touched are now, on this day, Nov. 13, 2018, twenty-one years later, creating those spaces for people in our lives because of what she did for us.
And there, she will always live.
