Only the good die young
My high school senior quote was “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.” A nod to my just-rebellious-enough streak at a conservative Catholic high school, it was my favorite line from “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel–a song that resonated in many different ways.
I was 15 years old and a high school junior in December 2003 . I was taking a million AP courses, dating a cute football player, drinking cheap beers at parties, playing on the tennis and lacrosse teams, passing notes during class and spending far too much time agonizing about what to wear. In short: I mostly lived in a blissfully privileged bubble.
And then December happened, and things shifted. Senior Sharmelia Jeffries was killed by a drunk driver as she crossed the street in front of my high school on a December afternoon. Senior Matt Prentice died in a single car accident driving home from his girlfriend’s house the night before New Year’s Eve. Even though I wasn’t close friends with either Sharmelia or Matt, the unexpected deaths shook our community and burst the bubble of being untouchable. My best friend had been in Black Student Union with Sharmelia, a close friend had started dating Matt a few months before. It was a strange time of just wanting to be a teenager–to drink those cheap beers and test my parents’ limits and worry about getting into my first choice college–but also wrestling with these enormous holes of loss and grief and finality.
When we took our senior class photo in the beginning of the following school year, I still remember the teacher who told us to look around at each other–to really look around, to cherish these people–because we might not all be together when graduation came.
Our beloved principal Rudy Schulze died a month later, of a heart attack on a Saturday morning the week before homecoming. His niece had just showed me around the Loyola Marymount campus; Mr. Schulze was an alumnus, and we had chatted in his office about my application the week before. On Christmas Day, senior Tia Santos was killed, along with her brother and two cousins, in a car accident. The car was driven by another guy from my class who had been smoking weed. He was later charged with felony driving under the influence and manslaughter. I didn’t know Tia well, but there were only 220 people in my high school class: to some extent, you knew everyone, or at least where they sat in the cafeteria.
On the year anniversary of Matt’s death, we were again preparing to greet the new year with a funeral. There had been so many tragedies over those two years–another car accident that killed two teenagers from a neighboring public high school, a drive-by fatal shooting outside that same public high school–that a national teen magazine wrote about the string of high school deaths in Sacramento.
Those were the years when we had more funeral masses than regular liturgies to attend, when we awkwardly learned how to sit with death and grief and be present with someone who was suffering. It’s when I learned that even when you don’t know what to say, sometimes it’s enough to just be there, that showing up is plenty when it’s all you can do.
For the past 10 years, the first few days of December always bring me back to those stark moments: waking up to a text message from Matt’s girlfriend on New Year’s Eve, going out for pancakes after Tia’s funeral with a group of friends, the song that played as photos from Matt’s 17 years flashed on screen, the growing memorial collage on my wall of newspaper clippings and funeral cards. It’s always a time of wondering what might have been, of not only who those dead would have grown to be but how we the living would have been different.
I once journaled from a prompt on how I’d like to be remembered. I’d like to leave behind a legacy of words and photos, of being able to find the beautiful in the everyday. To be cheerful and encouraging, witty and optimistic. But more than anything, those last two years of high school taught me to be here. It made me want to show up, to be there for people in myriad ways–from coffee dates to birthday cards, from being on time to scheduling FaceTimes. And it also made me want to show up for myself, to make every day count and not take tomorrow for granted.
For Kevin Murray, Travis Whitaker, Kevin Keane, Sharmelia Jeffries, Matt Prentice, Rudy Schulze, Tia Santos: never forgotten.
