My friend Sam Seibert never got to see the year 1997. On December 30^th, 1996, she died in a car crash.

On an icy winter’s night during our holiday break from junior year high school classes, the car she was riding in slid off the road and struck a guard rail at Rock Creek, west of Manteno on Deselm Road.

Sixteen years old.

Memories are hazy. It’s been twenty-seven years as of this writing. Sam has been gone for way longer than she was here. The older I get, the more slides are pushed from the carousel. My mind continually attempts to create capacity for my own children while balancing a dense schedule. Movie titles and song lyrics have dropped in the queue of importance. It’s becoming harder to retain anything from the past, especially vignettes from high school era. I’m trying to grasp the final relics of warmth before they slip through.

The internet existed in 1996, but not in my universe. I can’t even find the obit online. Not that I don’t have newspaper clippings of it stored away. Sam passed away years before we’d even have the option of a social media page. Everything penned below is tethered only to my memory.

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I moved to Manteno when I was twelve. When I started eighth grade, Sam became an immediate friend of mine, drawing closer by the day that year. Starting a new school is a disarray of polaroid photos in my head. Tales are frisbeed about, jostled in a shoebox, stored in a closet. Weathered by time. But I know our friendship started with church. We somehow took up the hobby of writing letters back and forth, passing them to each other during and in between classes and outside of school, at youth group events. We did this, well…a lot.

Five-hundred notes. The analogue version of texting. I would not be exaggerating if I stated there were five-hundred letters handwritten back and forth between Sam and I. Five-hundred mostly forgotten memories folded into paper squares and footballs, fully artistically inscribed. Colored pencil drawings and opinions and ideas. Jokes and puns. Thoughts on Michael W Smith and DC Talk. The pen pal trend of notes even traversed freshman year before we both became too embarrassed to continue the handoffs.

I had two or three “girlfriends” over the course of eighth grade. I know their names, but I don’t remember talking to any one of them. Basically ever. ⁽¹⁾ I’m not exactly sure what I thought the purpose of having a girlfriend was at the time, but it might have had to do with just having more material to write to Sam about.

It’s comical to look back at the status of being a “boyfriend” to someone in junior high did nothing but draw me closer to another girl. I can conjure the rushes when I’d get my next note, but if there was romanticism between Sam and I, I couldn’t have articulated it. I don’t even know if I combed my hair at that point in life. Slow burner, I guess.

I saved all the notes and letters for over a decade in one of those giant, five-gallon popcorn tins, filled to the brim. I don’t know why. I might have a mental disorder. I did eventually get rid of most of them, but I’ve saved a sample size of about thirty notes.

We wrote so much to one another every single day, I couldn’t pinpoint any other epoch of life where my spark for composition might have begun other than writing to Sam. The challenge of creating and coming up with new ideas so regularly. Staying up at night thinking of what to say. We wrote more to each other than we ever did in any junior high English class.  

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Sam died in the car wreck December 30^th with another one of our classmates, Jennie Delise. I didn’t know Jennie too well. I hung out with her one time, at some sort of party in a barn but it was a dynamic that didn’t take.

Sam and Jennie’s lockers were both directly adjacent to me, on either side of my locker. Sam immediately to my right and Jennie immediately to my left.

By junior year, Sam and I had drawn apart socially. She got further into Christianity and the Bible, and I got more into Cypress Hill and Wu Tang Clan. I didn’t even know the two older guys that were in the driver and passenger seat of the car when they hit the guard rail.

Still, for those two and a half years of high school, I saw Sam every single day between almost every single class at our purple lockers. Inches apart, you’d have to be intentional to not keep a bond with your locker neighbor who you have a fond history with.

Even if it was just casual, quick conversation, it was still more verbal contact than I had with most other kids during the typical day. I remember sensing her kindness. I remember recognizing the times she was frustrated or noticeably sad. Even if I didn’t ask her about it, I knew.

When I returned to school after that 1996 holiday break my locker area was a haunting void. I couldn’t figure the odds of that happening. How I ended up alone there. Bells and commotion and voices buzzing all around me in the hall. Both lockers on each side of mine still full of their books, but no one to tend to them. The next half-year, until summer break, I was there in ghostly isolation.

Numerous reminders every day for months that my friend was gone.

…

In the mid-nineties I was still struggling with ideas in terms of an afterlife.

“Who goes where, and why?”

After Sam passed, I recall praying and searching desperately for signs. It took a few days before the reality bowled into me. But when it did, I remember weeping. Just intensely bawling.

“Did my friend go to Heaven? Surely, she did.”

I literally had those thoughts. I should not have been made to have those thoughts. But they didn’t exist because of Sam’s character. They existed mentally because of the stipulations that were completely impossible to grasp or obtain in the first place. Different ideologies imposed on me by my various churches, probably somewhat irresponsibly.

In my personal, direct periphery, the idea and reality of death had mainly been reserved for elderly people like my grandfather who had passed when I was eight.

I remember flipping through my Far Side tear-off calendar, which I didn’t have the motivation to keep up with at the time. I never knew if I was drawn to The Far Side because of the dry, dark humor, or if The Far Side helped to shape my sense of humor. Probably gentle nudges from both proposals. Either way, I loved it, but I wasn’t in the mood for comedy during those weeks. Let alone the work of staying on top of tearing the pages off.

It was well into the new year, and the completist in me had to finish what I started. When I finally saw the entry for December 30^th, 1996, I felt an influx of comfort. Random or otherwise, my sixteen-year-old self took it as a sign:

I had that small piece of paper secured to my bedroom wall until I moved out of my parents’ place. I still own the paper twenty-seven years later.

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I was such a dork freshman year, not only did I have bullies, but my bullies were named Chops & Waldo. Neither was captain of the football team by any stretch. ⁽²⁾ In fact, the best way for me to describe how much of a geek I was, is for me to establish that my own bullies were even bigger geeks than I was. I mean, I never had a nickname. Chops & Waldo? Come on. It was some ring of existential hell where I couldn’t even be given the dignity of being noticed enough to be picked on by some sort of popular sports guy with a complex.

Nope. I had to be tormented by Chops & Waldo. ⁽³⁾

I say all of that just to mention that even though I was a true dork in every sense of the term, Sam always showed me a lot of grace. She extended all the courtesy in the world to me which I definitely didn’t deserve – what with my giant JNCO pants and obnoxious baseball jerseys, and fake gold chains and weird gangsta rap and all. She was just sort of always there, in my corner. Regardless of how awkward or quiet I was.

I never wanted to go to Campus Life. Acquire the Fire, True Love Waits, Youth Encounter. But I was conditioned from the start. Programmed without a chance in the world. That sort of thing was my normal.

“See You at the Pole” was an entire other level of dread I still can’t eloquently express to the fullest extent of the nightmares I’m left with. You not only had wake up and go to school early, like, before school even started; but you had to go hold hands with people and pray out loud around the United States flag on a giant pole. I can’t even explain how embarrassed I was, and I didn’t even grasp half of the architecture that was going on at time. None of us could.

I literally never felt included by anyone in those circles. Except Sam.

I never fit in with the scene, and frankly by sophomore year I wasn’t trying to. I went to some of those things in the later years because Sam would invite me. She even held a Bible study at one point in the school, and I went to that. She would cordially welcome me, and I felt like I wanted to support her.

I’m still a little scarred from most of the youth pastors I had and a lot of the church kids at the time. Kids that went so extreme one way and ended up going just as extreme in the exact opposite way.⁽⁴⁾ Sam was one major Christ figure in my life. Just consistent and solid. Instead of judgment she instilled dignity. Instead of fear she did her part in helping to supply honor. I had a sense of poise around her, and I could be myself. She was fun. She was really optimistic even through sad times. I’ve come to find this sort of personality very sparse in the sea of people I’ve met over the past three decades.

In a showcase of the universe’s irony, I learned of Sam’s death the night it happened while I was on a youth group retreat that she had opted out of. Not the final regrettable event I would be attending, but close to the last. I recall feeling un-surprised she wasn’t with us on the trip that I had gotten roped in to. Going into that weekend, in a way I felt proud of Sam. I got a sense she was beginning to be burnt out and she was taking action to offset that in a healthy way. Trying to find a mature balance.

…

Five-hundred notes. Purple ink, rudimentary origami, Valentines. I never re-read any of them after the original time I carefully refolded them at age thirteen. Adolescent thoughts locked in folded papyrus for thirty years. I didn’t keep them in order to read them again, as much as I kept them as a memento of a part of the map of my life. Something physical to stamp my friend Sam’s presence and poignancy as a person I feel happy to have known.

These are the waves I’m pulling up. Some are crashing and some are faint. The goodwill Sam established for herself is always paused there with me. Frozen that winter evening all those years ago. I have other fleeting memories of course, but these are the ones with elements that shaped me, at least a little.

I can’t name that many people who had any sort of effect on me in junior high or high school in a 1990s backwoods Manteno, Illinois. Mostly I remember the valley dwellers and creepers of the mundane. A lot of farmer types who weren’t really into music. Not much inspiration.

In my history stuffed with virtually just a lot of average human beings, it’s very rare for a person to stand out in a crowd for being luminescent.

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1. My first girlfriend – I hung out with one single time. She dumped me after learning the hard way that I had zero clue how to kiss. Talk about scarring, man.

2. We were too small of a school to actually have a football team.

3. Chops was this dude I knew from my previous town, Richton Park. Still not sure why he decided to become my bully. He prided himself on owning fourteen I.O.U. tee shirts in 7^th grade and he literally wore rainbow suspenders. We did squash the beef after freshmen year.

Waldo, after learning that our fathers worked together for twenty years at the same fastener plant in Park Forest, ultimately decided that I was somehow cool.

Frankly I still should have kicked both of their asses at the same time.

4. To be fair, for the most part, no one really knows what they are doing at that age. Most are wandering about in a blur, trying to establish who they are and what they believe. There was never a basis for anything besides that.