newark/buffalo plane crash and my friend
my rowan university friend, lorin maurer, was killed in the continental flight from newark to buffalo earlier this week.
i read about the plane crash when it happened, but they hadn't released any of the victims' names except the woman who was a 9/11 widow. last night, i was killing time before battlestar galactica began and was poking around online. we clicked on cnn.com's webpage and her fact was literally staring at me from the homepage - and i felt devastated.
lorin was a good friend of mine as an undergraduate. as a freshmen i actually managed to make friends with enough people to fill a hallway of a dorm floor, which is what happened my sophomore year. lorin was one of them. her roommate's name was nicole, which i used to take unnecessary happiness in since my middle name is lauren and my first name is actually nicole and not auburngrl as my livejournal name suggests.
she was a big deal in the world of collegiate swimming, and i know still holds records at rowan. she also dabbled at rowan radio, where i was also a dj for four years. she was one of those people who was always positive, sunny, and laughing. she had one of those somewhat-cheesy posters in her old dorm that read 'its a beautiful day and its great to be alive' - except that she really meant it. it was her attitude pretty much all of the time.
we spent a few vacation weekends together - she came to my family's shore house in ventnor a couple times, and once i met her family and visited her home in reading. she was concentrating on having a healthy mind and body, and used to tease me all the time because i hated rowan food and basically ate a big pile of carbs for every meal. unfortunately or not unfortunately, one of the strongest memories i have of her involves really needing to use a bathroom once at a fraternity party and a penthouse magazine.
she's one of those people that i lost touch with when we went to graduate school, but that i always thought i needed to track down. i actually came across her on facebook this june, and, as luck would have it, we missed each other by a few days. she had just been in philadelphia and i was about to leave to go back to bowling green for school stuff. we vowed to get together the next time i was in town.
she's been working as an athletic director at princeton for a few years, and i think her athletic accomplishments have elevated her to the level of 'featured passenger' in a bunch of news stories. which i guess is good since i might not otherwise have known.
but i can't really describe how horrible it was to see her face on the internet. i keep picturing how scared and alone she must have felt. i know that's morbid and not healthy, and that she might very well have been unconscious at that point. i'm not sure how to make sense of it - except to say that i'm sad. i'm definately not an organized religion type of person, but i know i believe that what everyone calls god, energy, truth, love, soul, etc, is, to me, basically the same thing. and i do think we're more than our bodies and that we do exist beyond this realm. so, there is a part of her that's somewhere in a different existence, but i don't know that my idealogical beliefs are kicking in at the moment.
she was a really good, really cool, really beautiful person in every sense of the word. i'll miss her. keep her in your thoughts.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/02/13/22745/
i read about the plane crash when it happened, but they hadn't released any of the victims' names except the woman who was a 9/11 widow. last night, i was killing time before battlestar galactica began and was poking around online. we clicked on cnn.com's webpage and her fact was literally staring at me from the homepage - and i felt devastated.
lorin was a good friend of mine as an undergraduate. as a freshmen i actually managed to make friends with enough people to fill a hallway of a dorm floor, which is what happened my sophomore year. lorin was one of them. her roommate's name was nicole, which i used to take unnecessary happiness in since my middle name is lauren and my first name is actually nicole and not auburngrl as my livejournal name suggests.
she was a big deal in the world of collegiate swimming, and i know still holds records at rowan. she also dabbled at rowan radio, where i was also a dj for four years. she was one of those people who was always positive, sunny, and laughing. she had one of those somewhat-cheesy posters in her old dorm that read 'its a beautiful day and its great to be alive' - except that she really meant it. it was her attitude pretty much all of the time.
we spent a few vacation weekends together - she came to my family's shore house in ventnor a couple times, and once i met her family and visited her home in reading. she was concentrating on having a healthy mind and body, and used to tease me all the time because i hated rowan food and basically ate a big pile of carbs for every meal. unfortunately or not unfortunately, one of the strongest memories i have of her involves really needing to use a bathroom once at a fraternity party and a penthouse magazine.
she's one of those people that i lost touch with when we went to graduate school, but that i always thought i needed to track down. i actually came across her on facebook this june, and, as luck would have it, we missed each other by a few days. she had just been in philadelphia and i was about to leave to go back to bowling green for school stuff. we vowed to get together the next time i was in town.
she's been working as an athletic director at princeton for a few years, and i think her athletic accomplishments have elevated her to the level of 'featured passenger' in a bunch of news stories. which i guess is good since i might not otherwise have known.
but i can't really describe how horrible it was to see her face on the internet. i keep picturing how scared and alone she must have felt. i know that's morbid and not healthy, and that she might very well have been unconscious at that point. i'm not sure how to make sense of it - except to say that i'm sad. i'm definately not an organized religion type of person, but i know i believe that what everyone calls god, energy, truth, love, soul, etc, is, to me, basically the same thing. and i do think we're more than our bodies and that we do exist beyond this realm. so, there is a part of her that's somewhere in a different existence, but i don't know that my idealogical beliefs are kicking in at the moment.
she was a really good, really cool, really beautiful person in every sense of the word. i'll miss her. keep her in your thoughts.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/02/13/22745/