And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
I’ve wanted to tell this story from the beginning. Not the beginning of your life, but from the first memory of you coming into mine. Yet you came into my life as all students do. First as names, printed in bold serif fonts, next to grainy black and white photos a few inches square. A list. A long list. A memorization task to complete. It was inevitably another moment of stress in my second year of teaching—memorizing names next to blurry abstract shapes that read as faces in the morning, but by night take on forms that haunt or that stretch the imagination. Reaching your name on the list, I’m sure, brought a smile to my tired face: Sarah Best. It was the perfect name for a law student coming into her first year; a name that flew in the face of our forced grading curve and the heavy structural baggage of law school pedagogy to declare, “I’m here. I’ve arrived. I dare you to try to make a ‘gentleman’ out of me.” But the truth is that I can no longer remember you as a mere name—a piece of text filled with the promise of a person. You are now, forever and will always be, Sarah. Sarah Best. Two words that capture, without an ounce of irony, the best of what we were, what we are, and what we could have been.
As law teachers, we promise our students that the power of words will bring order to the chaos and violence of the world. Would that we were studied enough in the art of language, we could mend broken hearts, move broken men to embrace peace over war, and stop a broken world from starving innocent children because of the sins of their parents or the religion of their people. We teach our students that words build governments, create societies of “laws, not of men,” and hold those governments and laws to their word. Language serves justice, if only we can wield it properly to write, interpret, and enforce law. Sarah laid these presumptions bare.
Sarah Best moved through the world quietly, often with as few words as possible. I learned her story only when she shared it with me while crafting her applications to clerk for federal judges. Relationships between clerks and judges are like family, and so judges often seek out life stories to project the future of potential clerks from the trajectory of their past. Sarah’s story was almost too easy to write. She was born and raised in Clarkesville, Tennessee. One of only a few Asian American students winding their way through an underfunded public school system, Sarah fell in love with language.
Latin and classics, in particular, brought depth and clarity to the complexity of Sarah’s experience—the inequities of socioeconomic status and the perils and burdens of race. She learned to see others, to peer across the divide of thought, dream, culture, and language. She found love in that divide. Love of the diversity of humanity; individuals whom she seemed to embrace, collect, and cherish like shells from a beach. But she found love also for the study of that divide. Not far from home, she became a star student at Vanderbilt University of both neuroscience and classics—a line of inquiry that only makes sense in the context of Sarah, her ability to see the distance between herself and others, and her dream of crossing that chasm with the might of words. Sarah understood the power of language more than any of us, so much so that she valued silence as much as speech.
No doubt Sarah was coaxed to law school by the tantalizing possibility that brings us all to the law—the power of words to heal. But we needed her far more than she needed us. One of Sarah’s greatest lessons was that the healing power of language is not found in the articulation of rules or in its ability to persuade. Its real power is found in quiet moments of kindness—expressed as much through silence, the deliberate absence of words, as through words themselves. Sarah taught us all that being with one another—observing, accepting differences, and allowing those differences to remain complex and conflicted, resisting the boundaries of simple words and the flattening effect of simple sentences and stories—was power. It was so powerful that it could generate love from thin air; build community from silence.
Sarah came to take several classes with me in law school. She was always in the room, and yet never fully in it. In a strange sense, she was the room. She reflected back to the classroom a vision of our best possible selves, and she set the tenor for everything we did together—she saw each and every person around her, with their shortcomings and their self-interest, and she loved them like a fractured little beach shell. I could tell she was in class because the discussions seemed to flow, questions were heartfelt, and even the most trenchant disagreement was bookended with care for those who disagreed. It took me months to learn that it was Sarah and to grasp her lessons—far longer than it took her classmates. Where I heard silence, they saw the power of her restraint: the space she made for the words of others and the way that she resisted fixing the world’s imperfections into words. Sarah understood that words have the power to both make and unmake worlds. She chose her words carefully to make a world of hope, one of aspiration, and she welcomed all of us into it.
The great Robert Cover once described similarly the power of language to make and unmake violent and chaotic worlds. Yet he dwelled as much on its limitations as its promises. He understood that language, for all its reach, struggles to sustain a shared moral universe in the face of pain and death. These forces do not merely resist language—they fracture it. As Elaine Scarry so famously argued, pain is an experience of absolute certainty for the one who suffers, yet it becomes elusive, even inaccessible to others. Pain and violence divide us. Law, constructed through language, seeks both to imagine new social worlds and to impose order—sometimes violently—on the existing one. And so, when pain becomes too great, when death arrives too abruptly, even language and law may fail to hold the world together.
Sarah likely encountered Cover during her time in law school. But she was never one to accept limits—least of all on herself, and certainly not on her first love: language. She may have admired Nomos and Narrative, while setting Violence and the Word aside. Sarah understood the reach of pain and the inevitability of violence, but she refused to concede that language could not shape that pain for the better.
On the afternoons that I set my computer up for class, I was inevitably greeted by bright eyes staring over the top of my desk, silent except for the three words spoken when our eyes met: “How are you?” It became such a ritual that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. At the time I was an untenured academic, still flailing in the classroom and on the page, traveling to multiple states and countries each week, living hundreds of miles away from my family in a city where I knew no one. And yet, in that moment I was fine, delighted even, by the world Sarah had built and welcomed me into.
Throughout each day, Sarah leveraged the power of words—and, at times, the grace of their absence—to render pain knowable, to give others language to wrap around their pain, to dull and shape it, and to invite others into a shared experience of meaning. No doubt there is the pain of a young law professor, and then there is pain, the world-shattering kind, that ends lives. But the former transcended Scarry’s theory when placed in Sarah’s hands. She made that pain communicable. She gave it form. She was its company.
In the years after graduation, Sarah lived with her family and friends. Her world was now theirs. She clerked for a few years and then became a successful attorney, jet-setting between Washington, D.C., where she lived, and wherever her cases took her. The rest of us carried Sarah and her world with us, as best we could.
But the grace—and tragedy—of life is that memory fades. Papers are misplaced between moves. Precious missives are lost to old accounts. And when the material moves away, memory often follows. In this case, memory was not just eroded by time but violently displaced by death—a pandemic that began midway through Sarah’s time in law school and that claimed millions, leaving behind grief, disruption, and aftershocks that we all live through. Yet somehow, as always, the world inched forward, rebuilding its fragile scaffolding of shared meaning.
Then, on January 30, 2025, at 9:38 a.m., I was suddenly pulled back into Sarah’s world. A phone call. A voice asking if I had seen the news. I hadn’t—ten days into a new presidential administration that shifted the world under our feet, I was buried in legal research. But the tension on the line was unmistakable. There had been a plane crash in Washington, D.C. They were looking for passengers in the Potomac River. My former student was on the plane.
I took a deep breath. “Which student?”
It was you.
I can no longer remember exactly how your name broke through the flood—of disbelief, tears, and irrational hope—but there it was. I followed the news obsessively, sent a few messages, even considered catching a train to D.C. But by then, you were gone. Truly gone.
For months, I have resisted telling your story. I needed to sit with the grief, the silence, the absence, before reducing your life to words. I walked along the banks of the Potomac, trying to feel the water and earth that met you in your final moments. Since that day in January, the world has only become more unstable. It has been set ablaze and the social fabric of our country continues to unravel. Even your death was consumed by political spectacle—held up by some as evidence of political failure, by others as fuel for their attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I know it would hurt you to see what the world has become without you.
I understand now that my resistance to telling your story has never been about the story itself—it is about the world into which I would be offering that story. A world that did not deserve you then, and surely doesn’t now. In your absence, it has become a place hostile to vulnerability. It dismisses the power of language and embraces chaos. It is so exhausted, so morally adrift, that even shame cannot deter its descent into self-interest.
I have turned your lessons over in my mind, again and again, searching for a way to honor you in a world shaped by violence and loss—a world that, in its violence, took you from us.
But in the end, I see now what you always tried to teach me—what you offered everyone. You, ever the student of the classics, would never let me write your story as a tragedy. Yes, you were a brilliant young lawyer, a rising star whose life was cut short by a plane crash—perhaps a symbol of the political crisis unfolding around us. That simple story is easy to write, but it is far too simple. Too easy. And far too small for you.
The truth is that your death fractured the world again. Those last few moments between us are rendered truly unknowable, no matter how many rivers I walk. I stand at the divide and cannot cross. But to end your story at that tragic divide is, in many ways, to truly leave you behind—to lose you forever to the past tense and to the forgetting that comes with the repetition of all too familiar narratives.
You would never allow that.
What you left behind resists erasure—not only in memory, but in practice. To write your true story is to refuse the convenience of tragedy. It is to carry your lessons forward, to cross that divide, and to insist that even in pain, there is the beginning of meaning—of connection, of community, of something more enduring than suffering.
In some ways, the end of Sarah’s story is the one we might have imagined. Pain isolates. It severs the bonds of connection, makes us unknowable to others. It often denies articulation, resists the grasp of language itself. But Sarah Best always understood that this wasn’t the whole story.
She knew, instinctively and profoundly, that language—at its most elemental—could give shape to pain. That it could make the unbearable visible, nameable, and in doing so, draw others close. Even amidst violence, chaos, and loss, she believed in language’s power to build a shared world.
This was the work of Sarah’s life: not to treat language as a tool, but as a force for healing, for comfort, for community. And in her final moments, on the evening of January 29, 2025, I imagine that she did what she had always done. She set the emotional tone for the plane, holding those nearby in her presence. She reflected back to each of them a vision of their best selves, loving them fully like a fractured little beach shell.
Then, with her characteristic grace, she met their eyes and offered them what she always believed language could offer: not order, but meaning. Not silence, but solace. With just a few simple words, she bent the violence of the moment into something bearable: “You are going to be all right.”
And they were, and so must we all be.