Kimberlee K.

On the last page of my 8^th grade yearbook, there is a signature from a girl named Leana.

“Hey, you r so sweet & you’ll have no prob in H.S. Have a kick ass summer!! xoxo”

I never called the number she wrote beside her name or sent anything to the email address she included. I didn’t assume she actually wanted to hang out with me. She was popular and cool, sparkly and outgoing. I thought she must have written that in everyone’s yearbook. Even so, the compliment made me smile. It gave me a little confidence boost going into high school, and it made me giggle that she wrote “kick ass”—which felt so scandalous at the time.

In my junior year of high school, I found out that Leana passed away.

That shortly after we’d left middle school, she’d gotten sick and was never able to recover.

“Oh,” I remember saying to the friend that told me. “She was always so nice to me.”

I went home that night and found that yearbook and flipped to the last page.

“Hey, you r so sweet & you’ll have no prob in H.S. Have a kick ass summer!! xoxo”

She’d signed her name big, taking up a good chunk of the page and drew a squiggly cloud shape around it. I traced my finger over the black pen, trying to make sense of the fact that this writing didn’t exist anymore—that she didn’t.  

It’s become a kind of ritual whenever I go through my things. Whenever I move to a new place or am just feeling nostalgic, I pull out my yearbooks to look through the pictures and signatures. Sometimes I play detective on social media to see where people are now, sometimes I just let vague memories flash through my mind. But I always get stuck on Leana’s page for a couple extra seconds, tracing the cloud as I remember the slightest hint of her voice.

—

This past week I found out a local newscaster died.

He’d been a staple of my childhood mornings, someone who felt like part of the family, like someone I could trust.

I’d never met him, never planned on meeting him, never knew anything about his life outside the hour or two he spent on my television. But when I heard about his death, my first thought was, “He was such a nice man,” which made the wires in my mind cross and made me think of Leana.

Somehow, at some point growing up, we (or at least I) became afraid of being known solely as “nice.” It became a sign of plain, basic, boring. A flimsy compliment people throw in when they don’t have anything else to say.

But then at some point it flipped back over. With time, age, and an understanding of the constant presence of mean, sad, and confusing, nice became a wonderful surprise—a cozy memory.

It’s like that Maya Angelou quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Sometimes even the smallest memories of good feelings can stick with you.

Even if it’s just a familiar voice on the morning news, or a signature in an old yearbook.

It is a memory of a concerted effort to be kind, to spread positivity.

I’ll never be able to thank him, or her, for the little glimmers they put in my life, but I like to believe that thinking about them honors them. I like the idea of holding part of the grief that their family and friends still carry—of remembering who they lost, even if they never know who I am.

I remember your little girl, I remember your husband, I remember your sister, I remember your dad.

And I’m thankful for them. They made me feel good. They were so nice.