The End of Ordinary

Her teammates all agree, she was too alive to die. She was the quintessential girl next door, a country kid with a dazzling smile who had just found out that nine months of hard work had earned her a varsity volleyball jersey. A little over a week later she was dead. She was eulogized as, “ordinarily different.”

Lillian “Lilly” Romaine Elizabeth Vandeford, 16, passed away at 6:14 pm, Friday, August 27, 2021, in her hometown of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois. She was struck by a train and killed instantly. The Red Bud, IL High School student was driving home, 14 miles from Red Bud. She was almost there. She had 30 minutes prior ended with an after-school pre-season volleyball practice the first full week of her junior year at RBHS. 

In the end, in the sudden, final instant of her life, her friends pray that Lilly never knew what hit her. Those were the words a local counselor, brought in by their school, on that endlessly horrible night had used to sooth them. Lilly was, her classmates hoped, in her mind planning the group’s next fun getaway, and never saw the massive train engine barreling down on her Chevy Cruze. She was the kind, one classmate told the area media, who if she couldn’t find a party, she would start one. Eternally exuberant, her bubbly nature would light up any room she entered. She was that one every small-town high school has, everyone’s best friend. 

Lilly Vandeford

It was a typical Friday afternoon, nothing out of the ordinary, when Lilly drove around an engaged railroad crossing signal and was hit broadside by the lead engine of a freight train cruising as 60 mph. The kids did it all the time (proved by a beaten tire path at the scene). Rumor had it that often the crossing gate malfunctioned, and locals had grown weary - and obviously, ambivalent - to the inherent lethal danger of ignoring the warning.  One poor judgment and she never had a chance.  Lilly only had her driving license for six weeks. The next week, the volleyball team would on Wednesday launch their regular season with a tournament in nearby Chester, IL. 

Head Musketeer Coach Erin Legendre was thrilled the week before the accident to tell Lilly  that she had earned a spot in the varsity rotation. She would man the position of defensive specialist. “As a sophomore she was on the JV and many of her friends played varsity,” recalls the veteran coach. “This did not sit well with her. So, I said, ‘work hard over the off season and earn a spot.’ And she did.” It is the kind of cause and effect dynamic that coaches love to preach to their athletes – you want it, then earn it. “I will never forget the look of happiness on her face,” a smiling Legendre continued, “when I told her she was going to be a varsity regular. I cannot express how I treasure that memory.” Lilly never got to make that first varsity start. 

If, as philosopher George Henry Lewes said, the only cure for grief is action, volleyball has been the driving force in helping the four Musketeer’s 2022 senior volleyball members, Lilly’s classmates, move past the most painful experience of their young lives.  We speak 403 days after their friend’s death. That is a lot of missed memories, they say. We converse before their rivalry home match that evening with Sparta. The four acknowledge to me how the remaining home matches of their careers have now dwindled down to a precious and bittersweet few. When in the preseason they had the senior group picture taken, they stood in pairs with a gap in the middle. It was symbolic gesture - saving a spot for their departed friend. 

Next week, they tell me, on senior night Lilly’s jersey will be draped during the match on the team bench. They have invited Lilly’s parents to attend but if they decline, they say they understand. The four hope the event will be the next step on their grief-filled journeys, another stride along a path to finding a destination that would close out the omnipresent emptiness they all share. We visit in a classroom down the hallway from their locker room, a locker room that since the accident had become their sanctuary. 

“When the accident first happened,” shares Coach Legendre, “we talked a lot about grieving, for them, and for me, both. Getting back in the locker room, in the gym, in the routine of volleyball helped. You could just feel it. Lilly was with us. We didn’t want to let her down. We had to keep moving forward. It got us through last fall.”

The coach notes that the adults in the program and Lilly’s teenage teammates have taken different paths of grief. “I have a hard time wearing the shirts, for example and constantly be reminded of her. The kids, they like the symbolism. It seems to help them. We have a practice ball with her name and her number written on the ball. It is always on our practice ball rack and sometimes it will get into a drill. When that happens, it really can to me be kind of spooky. But the kids comment (immediately) if they see it in a drill, like she has joined in. I have learned that there really is no certain way to grieve. You just go day to day, but she will never be forgotten. She was that special.”

As was Lilly, seventeen is what we all once were. Youth and idealism, dreams and promise are what we cradled. Time has always been the most depressing of life's unhappy unpredictability’s; how time moves on, where it goes and, most haunting, when it stops.

After Lilly’s funeral, an event so packed that it seemed the whole town attended, ahead now was what the four survivors had planned to be the best two years of their lives. It was devastating when the sight of Lilly’s casket drove home the lethal reality of the situation to the four - she really is gone, and she really is not coming back. You want to stomp an angry foot and scream at God, “Listen, I am not through with her, yet.” 

But they knew Lilly would never want them to let their grief hold them back. “That next day we all got together that morning,” says senior middle hitter Madison Falkenhain. “There is no way we were not going to pick back up right away and get to work on the season. Lilly would have been so mad if we had not.”

Still, all four say it has been a difficult fourteen months. They strive to focus on all the good stuff, the fun times. The deep thoughts pop up at the strangest of times. In the school lunchroom where they gather daily, and Lilly is not there. Hanging out and acting goofy in the gym lobby before practice, Anytime and anyplace, there's a missing piece and the four can feel it.

The outpouring of support for the Red Bud volleyball team was immediate and, all four seniors say, overwhelming. "It's been amazing to think of how much support we have had,” says Allie Zipfel, a senior outside hitter. “And it is just not here in our town, the other schools were so supportive. It really helped us (cope).” Coach Legendre notes it was a life lesson for her players in how to be gracious. “So many people reached out to us. I know our girls were very touched and I am sure it will be something they (will) pass on at the (appropriate) times in their future lives.” She says it was the final impacting lesson Lilly taught to her teammates. 

Friday, August 27, 2021. It was that moment when all four realized that the ordinary cannot be ordinary anymore. One minute she had the world by the tail, the next she was not even alive. “Sometimes I just stop and think why,” says senior Kiana Dufrenne-Klein, an outside hitter. “It is always with me.”  If only we lived in a dual universe, says Kiana. “We had our first football game of the year and Lilly had just dropped off a friend and was going home to change and then going back to pick up the friend and head to the game. What if she had gone to her house first to change? It would not have happened. But it did. I think like that all the time.”

Coach Legendre was at her elementary child’s ballgame when her athletic director called her. “He was at our football game in Perryville, MO. Normally we never play out of state, but it was Covid and in the middle of the week the (football) team we were to play went into lockdown and we had to find another school in a similar last second bind. That whole night was just never what it was supposed to be.”

“Her car was so mangled,” continued Legendre, “when we first got the report the police weren’t for sure yet if it was even her in it. The word spread quickly and soon we all knew the news was as bad as it can get.”

It is the way of personal tragedy - the most mundane of everyday life occurrences can trigger memories. What should be insulated high school rites of passage are now interrupted by sad reality. The four say that a random song, a homecoming wall poster, class ring day, a dress – any of the endless props in the life of a carefree 17-year-old can throw the switch, trigging waves of grief. “She is always in my mind, in my thoughts, especially on the volleyball court,” shares senior setter Aubrey Piel. “Next week on Senior Night it is really going to be hard.”

One of them died and they lived. It is hard still, at low times, says Falkenhain, to accept. But she notes there is a reason for everything, and it takes a hard twist to find any good from any of this, but the 17-year-old Piel says maybe it is this: “When you get as down as we have been, you can still comeback. That is what this season is about, it is about Lilly’s spirit still being with us and we want to prove that to everyone.”

In that fleeting instant when such a young and promising life was snuffed out, her teammates tell me their wish is that Lilly had one last millisecond to realize how much she was loved.  What makes this tragedy so difficult for their teenage brains to process, the four for a solid 30 minutes -at times stoically, at times with a laugh - share with me, is that Lilly died so needlessly and, before that, had never put a burdens’ spot on a human heart. “It is not fair,” I hear from the mouth of each. All I can do is give my best empathetic nod to the affirmative.