A friend from Virginia called the other day to tell me we had lost another classmate. This death hit me a little harder because when I was a lot younger I ran around with her, including roller skating at the only rink in that part of the world.

It’s not easy knowing time is marching on as quick as it is. It seems like only yesterday the two of us used to talk and do a little skating. The last time I saw her was about 50 years ago when she picked me up while she was en route to another day at the university. Then about 15 years ago I chatted with her on the phone and like days of old she told me all the secrets of her life, which by now had turned real sad. There was an abusive ex-husband, a terrible disease and a wish by me that I could wave a magic wand and it would all go away.

Now, it has gone away. I pray she now has the peace that avoided her for so long.

As sad as the death of my latest friend is, if you think in terms of age there’s some satisfaction in knowing she had a lot of years of life, even it wasn’t the best. But when you lose somebody who has yet to experience the full throttle of life – good or bad – then that becomes tearfully sad and tragic.

Mary and I and the rest of the family know about that. We lost Junior at the age of three and half when a truck backed over her. Our granddaughter would now be 22. It doesn’t seem possible that 19 years will have passed since that sad Memorial Day weekend accident, but that’s the way it is. Life goes on, and you move forward whether you like it or not.

The thing about Junior’s death is the family believes it was meant to be, that she was here to help us turn our lives around. Her mission was accomplished, so when we look at it like that we thank God for the little time we had with her and thank her for helping us.

Still, no matter how I much I believe that, there is always a tinge of mystery and a lot of questions I have when somebody young dies.

Why does Junior have to die to turn us around?

Or why does Katie Haggard have to die?

Katie Haggard, as you might know, was a talented gymnast for Greg Mutchler’s Olympic Gymnastics Center in Silverdale who moved last summer with her family to Groton, Conn. She was back visiting recently when she got so sick she was airlifted to Harborview where she eventually died at the age of 13.

As you might expect, people who knew Katie were crestfallen. Mutchler could hardly hold himself together. He had an experience in the midst of this similar to what I had the day Junior died, although Mutchler’s was not as profound.

The day Junior died Mary and I and Todd, one of our sons, rushed to Sea-Tac to pick up our distraught daughter, Wendy. As the three of us approached the South Terminal Train at Sea-Tac, I started hearing “Amazing Grace” being played although there has never been music there.

Then, just a second before Wendy stumbled out of the train, these words were telepathically placed in my mind: “Don’t worry about me, I walk with the grace of God.”

It was Junior.

Mutchler was an emotional wreck. He’d been close to Katie, who was an exceptional Level 8 gymnast and a free spirit. He obsessed over what to say at the funeral, and kept coming up with brain lock in addition to the crying.

“I thought to myself, ‘Greg, what would Katie tell you right now,’ ” Mutchler said. “I was a mess. Every time I kept thinking of something I choked up and couldn’t even talk.”

Then it came to him.

“Greg just be strong. Just be strong,” Mutchler said he heard. “I don’t know if I was visualizing something or it’s something I heard Katie say or something she would say.”

But whatever it was, it calmed Mutchler.

Mutchler has experienced tragedy before – his father, Ralph Mutchler, did take his own life – but offered that he had been lucky that way compared to other people. But Katie’s death made him stop and realize every day is special, every child that goes through his program is special.

“It’s a reminder to make sure you give your kid a hug, and that the things that make you mad aren’t so important,” Mutchler said.

Sydney Olson, who is 15, was a teammate of Haggard’s at OGC and now does some coaching there. The two were close and one time when Katie was about to do a scary move on the bars, she asked Olson to promise that if she died she would sing at her funeral. It was one of those silly kid moments.

“She was just kidding,” said Olson. “But a couple times we talked about death. She was a pretty wise kid. She always told me if she died she wanted me to move on, not be sad that she wouldn’t be there anymore, but be happy she was there.”

At the memorial service for Haggard that was held locally – two others were held, one in Hurricane, Utah, where she was buried next to her grandfather, and another in Groton – Olson desperately wanted to uphold the promise to sing she made that day by the bars. So when the service broke up and while people were mingling about, Olson said she and a couple friends sang while tears flowed.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are,

Up above the world so high,

Like a diamond in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are!”

Things will never be the same.”

They never are.

We have moved on since Junior’s unexpected death. I seldom go to the grave site anymore like I used to do. I feel Junior is with us in spirit, which is common ground with the way Katie’s mother Trish Haggard feels about her beloved daughter.

“We miss her, of course,” Trish says of her husband Brad and three other children – Nathan (8), MaryLynn (5) and JJ (4). “We have good days and bad days.”

But Trish, like me, believes that we live for eternity. Earth and this life is just a pit stop for me, a chance to improve my soul, my spirit.

“She’s working just as hard on the other side as she did here, I’m sure,” says Trish. “The girl never stands still. She’s always on the go, always moving.”

Still, because we are human there will always be just a little wonder – especially in our down moments – why we lose somebody we love so young, just as we did with Junior.

“It has to be for a reason,” says Trish. “I don’t know what the reason is, but I have to believe she is here with us in spirit. I know she is around and helping us. Our four-year-old was having nightmares and we told her that Katie is still around and she will help you. She will guard your dreams.

“She hasn’t had a nightmare since.”

Mutchler plans on putting pink elephants on the two state championship banners that are hanging in the OGC gym. They are the banners that Haggard won for winning state vault titles in level 5 in 2004 and level 7 in 2005. Pink elephants were Haggard’s favorite toy animals.

“When I look at them it will always make me think of Katie and the type of person she was and how independent she was,” Mutchler said. “I will use it as motivation whenever I see them in the gym.”