Lorin Maurer, Remembered

 

TigerBlog cannot begin to express properly what he felt the minute he read the email that said that Lorin Maurer had died.

It's not possible, even now, 12 years later, to fully explain it.

Maybe the only time that comes close is 9/11, when he looked up at the clear blue sky on a pristine morning and felt something that was more confusion than anything else, like his brain couldn't process the notion that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center on such a morning.

That's the best way to describe what he felt when he first saw that Lorin was gone, actually.  

It was confusion, extreme confusion, that resulted in an initial inability to fathom the news. His brain read the words in the email that Gary Walters had sent around and rejected them as impossible.

No chance. 

He read it again. And again. Each time, he had the same reaction. This was not possible.

Just like 9/11, though, it was true. Lorin was gone.

For those who don't know, Lorin Maurer was Princeton's Athletic Friends' Group coordinator prior to her death on this day 12 years ago. There are fewer and fewer people each year at Princeton who do know that, and probably fewer than 20 percent of the people who work in the Department of Athletics now worked with Lorin.

Lorin Maurer was a few weeks past her 30th birthday when she died. She was one of 49 people on a flight from Newark to Buffalo that crashed in icy weather, killing a 50th person on the ground as well.

Lorin was going to Buffalo for the wedding of her boyfriend's brother. It was all so normal. 

She was 30 and in love. Her own wedding couldn't have been that far off. 

Before she left for the airport, she was in a meeting that included TigerBlog. She was antsy, TB recalls, in the way that most people who need to catch a flight are antsy.

Maybe the fact that she was antsy left TB a bit surprised that she still hadn't left yet when he saw her again. It was probably 30 minutes or so later. 

At the time TB's office was on the Jadwin mezzanine. Lorin had been down the hallway a bit, and when she walked past TB's door, she stopped, smiled, didn't speak a word and kept going.

He never saw her again.

Who was Lorin, to those who never met her? She was a sweet young woman. She liked to have fun. She was very close with her family. She gave maximum effort at her job.

She had great friends in the athletic department, people with whom she was much closer than she was with TB. 

Mostly, she just brought a lot of positive energy to Princeton and to the people in her life. Her job required her to interact with members of Friends Groups from all different generations, and they all seemed to like her a lot.

TB remembers one day when he saw Lorin in the lobby of Jadwin, putting table clothes on tables. Why? There was an event coming up soon, and whoever was supposed to put the table clothes on the tables hadn't done it. 

As a result, it fell to her. That's part of the job. Did she complain? Nope. She just took care of it, laughing about it.

When TB goes back to the last time he saw her, it's her smile that he remembers the most. She was always smiling. 

And then she kept going down the hallway.

TB gave it no thought until he saw the email the next morning. Lorin Maurer was dead? It had to be a different Lorin Maurer, right?

It couldn't have been the Lorin Maurer he had just seen the day before. He read the email over and over. He watched TV all morning, hoping for some different outcome of the news.

By that night Princeton had home basketball. The news media descended on Jadwin, looking to speak with people who knew her. It was surreal. 

She should have been at a wedding in Buffalo, not on the news.

She was so alive, so happy, so young, so vibrant And then she was gone.

It didn't make sense then. It doesn't make sense now.