Pioneer

There are two moments since last May when the absence of Sarah Luna stood out to me in particular. The first is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah’s first job after finishing her PhD was as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC. She would’ve stepped up to this crisis the way she faced all the other obstacles she faced in life, with grace, competence, and skill. All of us, whether we understand it or not, are facing a terrible foe on a scale that hasn’t happened in a hundred years when it comes to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I can’t imagine a better warrior we could have had on our side than Sarah.

The other moment was NASA’s recently closed call for astronaut candidates. I have no idea if Sarah was remotely interested in that enterprise, but she was one of a handful of people I know who would’ve made an excellent candidate. She had a PhD from Cornell, experience traveling in Asia and Africa for research, held the rank of Lieutenant in the US Public Health Service, and was about to start traveling in the rough and rugged outback of Alaska for field work for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. She was also an avid dancer and the kind of person you could lock yourself in a room with for six months and not go crazy together. That’s the kind of resume where you can easily imagine “astronaut” being the next entry.

I don’t remember the first time I met Sarah. I saw her name before I saw her, written on the piece of paper I received when I moved into Lechner Hall in August 2007. I remember it was so humid it felt like the Gulf of Mexico was curling into my throat with each breath, and I saw that Sarah was assigned to be my mentor (actually my “Lechner mom”) during my freshman year at Texas A&M. Unlike most undergrads at A&M, she was from out of state, California. Sarah grew up in the suburbified desert and scrub of southern California, much closer to the arid desert with strip malls where I grew up than College Station. We were both a long way from home in one sense, but I think we both found an adopted home we’d cherish for the rest of our lives. Maybe that’s why I was sorted with Sarah’s Lechner family.

I remember the contact we had at the end of my teenage years. I’m not fond of many of the things I remember from that age. A friend of Sarah’s wanted to embarrass her and offered “sophomore privileges” (something objectively useless that freshmen who embrace the Aggie spirit will literally do push-ups and shave their heads and do far worse for) to anyone who got her to blush in public. An hour or two later opportunity emerged. While we were eating dinner with the family at northgate I told our waitress “Isn’t Sarah totally hot?” Blood rushed into her cheeks and I never imagined it was possible for them to turn that color. God damn I was a dumbass when I was 18. But I got the SPs, alright.

I enjoyed the time I spent with Sarah, but that time was secondary to some of the other contacts I would make during that first year at Texas A&M. I met some of the people who would be instrumental in getting me through four years of aerospace engineering school in good academic shape. These were the people who helped me when I flailed around with the most basic stuff in C++, when I needed another idea to get a new solution to a problem set, who kept me sane (more or less) in a bizarre study abroad in Brazil, and who I built my senior design project with. I met the people who became the peers I imitated during my time in college and who helped me, inadvertently perhaps, prepare to continue to obtain scholarships and internships and generally keep moving my career forward. And of course, the most important of all, the most important woman I’ll ever meet in my life, that other Sarah. She happened to be good friends with Sarah Luna, too.

I look back at the pictures and I’m amazed. When did the past become so ancient? It didn’t feel like the past when we were living in it. Those long nights and sometimes-lazy, sometimes-frenetic days felt as alive with possibility as they felt thick with moisture and pollen. Surely that was always a present, catapulting us into a glorious future. I don’t understand how the present became the past.

Anyway, I don’t know if Sarah began to love dance in college or she’d taken that enthusiasm with her from Camarillo. I enjoy dance, too, but only casually. I enjoy it the way I enjoy the bass or philosophy, and not the way I enjoy my deepest passions. Clearly this was a passion for Sarah, and it was fun to see it shine through.

I’m amazed at how important all those people were to me between 2007 and 2012, and how little I see nearly all of them now. How did my life become so compartmentalized? Maybe I’m not living one life, but a series of vignettes in four- and five-year increments. I wrapped up the North Canyon chapter and moved to Texas. I wrapped up the Aggie chapter and moved to Seattle. That one got interrupted, and the Virgin chapter began in Los Angeles. That was the only time I saw Sarah in person again after we graduated from A&M, on December 26, 2016.

Annoyingly, I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of that encounter. I have thousands of pictures that I’ll never feel compelled to look at again, and somehow I never took any of that one event that I never realized mattered so much. I met Sarah’s family and talked about my job. I told them whatever unrealistic timeline we were pushing at that time for LauncherOne. They got to meet Isaac. I remember him being interested in their little fluffy dog and Sarah being amused by the cutesy crab on Isaac’s pants. Time went on, and I decided I needed to get Isaac back home. This is approximately what he would’ve looked like that day:

Sarah, my wife, was on call that day, and I wanted Isaac to get back somewhere more familiar for the evening. It was blustery under a standard-issue southern California blue sky when I strapped him into his car seat. We hugged and said our good-byes. I never imagined that would be the last time I’d speak to her or feel her touch. Why should a thought like that have occurred to me? The indifferent cruelty of the universe astounds me.

Sarah Luna packed a remarkable richness of life into her 31 years. Texas A&M, Cornell, the CDC, Alaska, and most of all her family should be proud to call her an alumnus, a colleague, a daughter, and a sister. People always go out of their way to describe how remarkable the departed are after they’re gone, but Sarah really deserves every measure of that. I believe strongly that all people are created equally, but some just seem to be higher-quality individuals than others. Sarah was one of those women.

Where she’s going, we’ll all be following her. I’m surprised, saddened, amazed again that she got there first. You should try to live your life in such a way that you do the kind of good she did on your way there.

Softly call the muster, let comrade answer “here.”

Sarah Luna, class of 2010. Here.