I saw taillights last night in a dream about my whole life.
Everybody leaves, so why, why wouldn’t you?
—The Gaslight Anthem, “Great Expectations” (2008)
For Katie Meyer.
My son is an athlete. I never was. Before I could drive, my mom picked me up late at night from someone’s farm, where I hung out with my friends – drinking, talking shit, listening to music, making out. My son’s school nights, by contrast, consisted of long car rides, two hours each way, so he could train as a goalkeeper with the New England Revolution Academy, and, later, with their first team. My friends were a mix of cheerleaders and burnouts. E’s friends are athletes whose names you know if you watch soccer on TV. Entering Hartford at night during those commutes, taillights dotting the highway, we often sang along to the Gaslight Anthem album, The ’59 Sound.
The title track, “The ’59 Sound,” is about the premature death of the lead singer’s friend. I only know this because I asked E after singing so many times the lyric: “Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night.” “Who died?” I asked E. “I don’t know. I’ll look it up,” he said.
By 2020, spring, E was living in Foxboro at a house with other promising Revs’ Academy kids, so I was already an empty nester. But he had been accepted to Stanford University the following fall. Every month, from March 2020 on, we were waiting for relief from more bad news. Would we restart these commutes? Would I send my son to college across the country during a pandemic? All day long, I had Gaslight Anthem lyrics in my head: Great expectations . . . We had the greatest expectations . . . and, when especially worried about the death of young people during a global health crisis: Did you hear the old gospel choir when they came to carry you over? / Did you hear your favorite song one last time?
We did, in fact, launch our only child in the summer of 2020. E came home again a few weeks later and then finally left for good in the spring of 2021, although Stanford’s campus was still on strict lockdown. Twice he got COVID—after the vaccine, thank God. All told, he was in quarantine for more days than we could count. We didn’t actually see our son take the field or even see where he lived until the fall of 2021, a full year after we sent him off with a packed red suitcase holding my heart.
That first game we saw him play live was the day we met Katie by accident. Not knowing anything about Stanford’s stadium and soccer scene, we turned left when we entered the stadium gates instead of right. On the left is where the students sit, as well as the most exuberant, vocal student-athletes, with the brightest light being Katie. The game was against Stanford’s rival Cal, which inspired jeers from the student section—and, finally, a chant Katie wrote and shared with everyone there in the crowd. I don’t remember the lyrics, but I remember singing along. Looking back now, I wonder what the more reserved parents sitting on the right-hand side must have thought of us.
When E entered the game with twenty or so minutes remaining, I gasped, and the extroverted young woman beside me, whom I only later learned was Katie, asked what was wrong. As the goalkeeper’s mom, I worried about a ball going past him in a match against the rival. “Your son is E?” she asked delightedly. And then, in a voice crystal clear soaring above the crowd, she yelled to E, standing in goal, “How does it feel to be the greatest keeper in the world?”
I knew E admired Katie then because he looked up and smiled. Rather than play it cool and act like the most popular Stanford athlete did not just say his name, he looked over at her, face open as the friend he was. I remember thinking at that moment that, however worried I might have been about my son going to college 2300 miles away and juggling difficult academics with high-pressure sports, as long as he knew Katie, he would be okay.
E is, after all, exceedingly self-sufficient. He never called home in those early days away, much more, FaceTimed. If a family decision needed to be made, it happened over text. So when the phone rang on March first, 2022, we knew his world had changed.
“Did you hear about the body they found in the residence hall?’” he asked.
It was Katie.
In retrospect, E must have been among the first to know. Word of Katie’s suicide had not yet made the news, not even the Stanford Daily, and several parents of his teammates hadn’t heard. I clicked refresh on every news outlet I could, looking for answers. “Was it the pressure that got to her?” I asked E several months later. “Katie was born for pressure,” he answered. “It wasn’t that.”
I can’t imagine how Katie’s parents coped when they found out. For a long while, I watched every interview they gave, trying to get inside their chests. What always struck me is that they said Katie had been in such high spirits in their last conversation. Now when E is in a good mood, I worry—like he has made a decision. It is twisted.
E’s coach was out of the country when his friend died, and the moms tried to figure out how to support our sons. We drafted a collective note to the coaching staff asking for help, but the boys told us not to send it.
Katie’s parents hosted a vigil for Katie later that week to help her teammates grieve. It was originally planned for the quad but was moved to the stadium where she played because of the enormous turnout—all of her friends in the stands that day we met, all of her friends from classes, all of her friends from the residence hall where she was an RA. I tracked E on FindMy that day and every day since, hoping to see where he was.
Two or three weeks later, we were able to see E during his spring break. We flew him to San Diego, where we had a little flat near the beach and dinner plans in La Jolla. During dinner one night overlooking the ocean, after a glass of wine, I asked a searching, open-ended question about his grieving process, to which E responded, “Nope.” He was not going to talk about it. We would have to navigate this through music.
Later, Katie’s parents launched Katie’s Save, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping universities support students in crisis. Unbeknownst to each other, E and I both bought sweatshirts to support their imitative; ours must have been among the first orders. Mine is red, and E’s is black. For a long time, it was the only thing he wore. Katie’s Save. Nineteen. With a butterfly.
In the fall of 2022, we made a trip back to Palo Alto to see some soccer matches and also to take E to a Gaslight Anthem concert in San Francisco. Recovering from late-stage Lyme Disease, I was unable to stand in the pit where my husband and E were, so I sat in auditorium seats with a friend. Still, I could see down to where E was standing, the spotlight occasionally on his face.
Gaslight Anthem closed with our favorite song, “’59 Sound.” I could see E singing and wondered if he was singing for Katie. Did you hear the old gospel choir when they came to carry you over? / Did you hear your favorite song one last time? The crowd was jubilant and a bit unhinged, even when singing this elegy. Whenever I looked down at them, I thought I might witness a crushing death to come. And then I realized what I saw was joy.
Time continues to pass, but now it is harder to put away Katie’s memory. During the summer of 2023 with the women’s soccer players competing in the World Cup, so many Stanford athletes have paid tribute to Katie: Sophie Smith with her celebration after a goal; Naomi Girma with her writing.
People everywhere talk about the importance of athletes’ mental health under so much pressure to achieve. I know these tributes are important. But from the day E called home to this day and every day, I worry that my son is going to die—I am always waiting for something to happen. That the next phone call will tell me something is wrong.