The Last Will & Testament of Seventeen-Year-Old Sarah
An open-casket party in a high school gym, a Diet Coke, unpublished manuscripts, and a teenager determined to make sure nobody erased her story.
Readers, did I ever tell you that I keep everything?
I am an incredibly nostalgic person. I believe in the historical record. Every letter, every journal, every random document shoved into a folder somewhere feels important to me because it tells part of the story of who I was at that moment in time.
Now, for said historical record, I want it noted that I was not actively looking for this.
I was searching for something completely unrelated when the universe decided to kick open a closet door labeled “Proceed At Your Own Risk.” And that is how I found my original Last Will & Testament from 2004. Then I found the updated version I wrote after Robi passed in 2010.
Yes, Readers. Sit down. We are taking a trip down memory lane. Now this is not something I usually do on this channel, and there is a very good reason for that. Some parts of the past are easier to leave buried in old filing cabinets than they are to revisit. But apparently the archives had other plans today.
For legal reasons, names have been omitted.
So while some seventeen-year-olds were worrying about prom, homework, and who liked who, seventeen-year-old Sarah had a will. An actual will. Written with the confidence that only a teenager who thinks she has life completely figured out can possess.
Now, after reading this 2004 will, I can say with complete confidence that some things have not changed. I still want an open casket. I still want cremation after. I still want people laughing more than crying. I still do not want some sad beige funeral where everyone sits around whispering and pretending I was a quiet, understated person. I have never been quiet or understated in life, and I see no reason to start after death.
So, in that sense, seventeen-year-old Sarah understood the assignment. She wanted a party. An open-casket party. In the gym at Lake Havasu High School. Readers, please take a moment to appreciate the sheer confidence of that venue choice. Not a church. Not a funeral home. Not a reception hall. The gym.
The same sacred institution where teenagers were forced to run laps, fake school spirit, and endure the emotional warfare of P.E. Seventeen-year-old me really looked at death and said, “Yes, but what if we made it feel like an assembly?”
I do have questions. Many questions. Who was approving this? Did I think the school district was just going to unlock the doors and say, “Sure, bring the casket in by the bleachers”? Was there going to be a sign-in table? Programs? A snack station next to the folded volleyball nets? The logistics alone feel like something that would have required a permit, a liability waiver, and at least one adult saying, “Sarah, no.”
But seventeen-year-old Sarah was not consulting adults. Clearly.
She also requested refreshments. Specifically iced tea and Diet Coke. This was before iced coffee became part of my bloodstream and before BuzzBalls entered the chat. Seventeen-year-old Sarah was simple in her beverage needs, but do not mistake that for emotional restraint. The girl may have requested Diet Coke, but she also planned an open-casket party in a high school gym, so let us not pretend she was operating from a place of moderation.
Then came the ashes.
Half of my ashes were to be placed in an urn, and the other half were to be spread over Lake Havasu. Honestly, that still makes sense to me. Lake Havasu raised me, shaped me, entertained me, traumatized me, humbled me, and gave me enough material to write for the rest of my life. Of course part of me would end up there after death.
The urn was supposed to go to my parents. If my parents were gone, it would go to my firstborn child. And if I did not have a child, the urn was supposed to go to “*****” so I could haunt him for the rest of his life.
Sounds fair.
Healthy? No.
Creative? Unfortunately, yes.
There was also an empty casket situation because apparently one casket was not enough for my teenage estate plan. My body would be cremated, my ashes would be divided, and then an empty casket would still be buried in the cemetery because seventeen-year-old Sarah believed in symbolism, logistics, and making sure everyone had a lot to talk about afterward.
And on the headstone, I wanted the words:
“Died by the hands of *****.”
No, I will never post his name publicly. This is not about dragging him into the light. This is not about turning Season 1 into a public courtroom where everyone gets to sit in the jury box with popcorn and opinions. But that is what seventeen-year-old me wanted or so she thought she did.
And that is where this stopped being funny for me.
Because seventeen-year-old me was angry. She was hurt. At that point in my life, he had hurt me and become the villain in my version of the story. But the older I get, the more I realize that life is rarely that simple.
I did not hate him. I still loved him. I still do to this day.
What I did not understand then was that love, loyalty, pain, betrayal, grief, and anger can all exist in the same place at the same time. I did not understand that wanting the truth seen and wanting someone destroyed are not the same thing, but they can start to look dangerously similar when you are young and hurting.
And that brings me to what seventeen-year-old Sarah considered her most valuable possession. Not jewelry. Not money. Not anything practical.
My writings.
According to the 2004 will, every journal, every chapter, every page of what was then called Affair of the Mind, what I now refer to as Season 1, was supposed to be turned over to my friend Brooke if I died. And Brooke was supposed to publish it. All of it.
At seventeen, I thought the writing was proof. I thought if people could just read everything, they would finally understand. No one could rewrite it. No one could minimize it. No one could erase it.
I was not thinking about what would happen after people read it. I was thinking about the relief of finally being believed. And honestly, as a writer, that part still hurts. Because there is a story there. A real one. A story that shaped me. A story that changed me. A story that still lives in the bones of who I became. But I know now that I can never tell it the way seventeen-year-old Sarah wanted it told. Not without consequences.
That is the wisdom I did not have then. Seventeen-year-old Sarah did not understand fallout. She did not understand that truth does not stay neatly on the page once it is released into the world. It moves. It reaches people. It changes lives. She did not understand that a story can be true and still be too destructive to hand to the public. She did not understand that loyalty is not pretending someone never hurt you, but sometimes choosing not to become the person who destroys them for it.
Thirty-nine-year-old me understands that now. I understand I was hurting. I understand why I was angry. I understand why seventeen-year-old me wanted everyone to know exactly what happened. But I understand love differently now. I understand loyalty differently now. I understand consequences differently now. And no matter how angry I was, no matter how betrayed I felt, both versions of me loved him too much to survive what would have happened if those pages had ever been released.
So when I read that old will now, I do not just see the anger. I see the hurt. I see the fear. I see a seventeen-year-old girl desperately trying to make sure nobody erased her version of events. I see a girl with a Diet Coke, an open-casket party planned in a high school gym, and a legal document that somehow doubled as an emotional manifesto.
And honestly? I love her for it. I love that she wrote it all down. I love that she believed her words mattered. I love that she fought so hard to protect the record. But I am grateful time gave me enough wisdom to understand that some stories can be true and still not belong to the world.
Anyway, that was the 2004 version.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about the updated 2010 edition.
Spoiler alert: somehow it got even more unhinged.