Wright On: ‘She lived a perfect life’

All the years combine

They melt into a dream

— Robert Hunter’s “Stella Blue”

It was an afterthought that brought Lindsey Poulsen to Hilo in the first place, eight years ago.

Poulsen was nearing graduation from Archbishop Mitti High School near San Jose, Calif., when she visited Oahu with her family to take a look at Hawaii Pacific University and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, two schools she was interested in attending if she could get some scholarship help.

HPU felt awkward to her, with athletics in its own complex and academics downtown, giving it a commuter school feel as she was looking for a college campus experience. When her father Tom turned the corner and found Hawaii-Manoa, Lindsey told him to just keep on driving. It was too big, not what she was looking for.

“It was a little disappointing,” Tom Poulsen said the other day in a telephone interview from the family home in Reno, Nev., “so we decided to hang out on Waikiki for a couple days and maybe think about what to do next.”

UH-Hilo assistant soccer coach Terry Yamane had tossed the school’s name in as being interested in her months earlier, and he heard she had visited HPU, so he called Tom.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you come check us out,’ and we thought, ‘Short hop, we have time, let’s do it,”’ Poulsen said. “Terry met us and then Marc (Miranda, former coach) caught up with us. They took us everywhere, administration, all over the campus, much more extensive than what we had seen before.

“While they were showing us around, Lindsey whispered to me, ‘Dad, this is it, this is where I want to be,’ and I asked if she was sure. At the end we were sitting on the balcony of the UCB (University Campus Building), looking out over Hilo, talking with Marc, and that was it.”

Miranda made a scholarship offer she accepted on the spot — with the specific provision that she would wear number 22 — and at that moment, Lindsey Poulsen began a lifelong love affair with the school and the city that only ended a week ago when she passed away after suffering complications from her ovarian cancer medications.

She was among the leading scorers in her four years for the Vulcans, made some all-conference lists, but it was less what she did and more who she was that distinguished her life.

“She always said she would beat it,” Tom said, “and she beat it once, then after nine months of remission it came back and she was beating it again, until this got in the way.

“She lived a perfect life, she really had everything all figured out and the rest of us learned from her.”

Galvanizing force

Poulsen was a magnetic figure for the young Vulcans team that had opened the NCAA program just a few years before she arrived. She played up front and was forceful, relentless, determined on the attack. Yamane still remembers a game in her freshman season against Seattle Pacific when Poulsen ran the channels so hard, so consistently and so aggressively that her defender eventually broke down in tears.

“She ran her into the ground,” Yamane said. “Lindsey didn’t even score, but she worked so hard she absolutely broke that girl down trying to mark her, she made her quit. I’ve never seen that before at this level.”

Off the field, she was the best friend of every friend she had, she was the one whose shoulder you could lean on, who you could laugh and cry with because she would always listen.

“We will never have another one like her,” said UHH women’s soccer coach Gene Okamura. “Her loss is really, for me, unspeakable. I don’t have the words to express the depth of the caring and sadness we all feel.

“There are a lot of people hurting right now and we’re going to be hurting for a while longer. This will be with us forever.

“I have never coached a mentally tougher player, a more mentally driven player as her,” he said. “On and off the field, she was both the most willing and the most selfless person I have ever know.”

Miranda has many Lindsey Poulsen memories he will carry with him, but her fierce determination became a neon remembrance, something he learned about her before she played her first game.

After she signed in the spring, Miranda had copied several sheets of conditioning drills he gave everyone to work on over the summer, both for the men’s and women’s teams. He accidentally gave her the men’s conditioning drills and she accomplished all of them before she returned in the fall.

“The first year, she was a freshman and we were playing HPU on that mess of a field, I think it was the last time we ever tried to play on what was supposed to be our home field,” Miranda said. “It was OK until it clouded up and we got one of those Hilo monsoons, I mean, it really came down and we just kept playing.

“We had white kits back then — white tops, white socks and red shorts — and she chipped one in early for us, got knocked down and came running over with a huge smile on her face and a mud brown uniform. They knew what she was, who she was and I swear she got knocked down every time she touched the ball, but that just made her work harder and frustrated them even more.”

In the second half of that game, her father, Tom, remembers Lindsey going up for a header and getting hit in the shoulder blades, causing a shoulder separation.

“I remember her running to the sidelines, hanging her shoulder,” said Tom, “and I thought, ‘Well, that’s the end of the freshman season,’ but one of the trainers ran up to her, popped that shoulder back in and she ran back out of the field, waving for the ball.”

Miranda recalls the Vulcans’ loss that day, but in it, this fighting spirit emerged that was recognized by all her teammates.

“We had chances but it didn’t happen,” Miranda said. “Everyone was dirty that day, but nobody on either team was more covered in mud and sweat than Lindsey. She ran up, saying, ‘Coach I just needed a little more time, I was going to get another goal, honest.’ It was that kind of thing, she was like that. She was a coach’s dream, the best I’ve ever been around.

“If you wanted to show people what you want in a player, she would be the example.”

Miranda last spoke to her a few days before she passed.

“She sounded good, she always sounded good,” he said. “It’s unbelievable she’s gone, but in another way she will always be with us.”

A Vul to the end

Poulsen was wearing a Vulcans’ shirt on June 16, having a rough go with the latest round of trial medications she was on.

“She was working with some very strong stuff with very strong side effects,” Tom Poulsen said. “She had gone through six surgeries and four different rounds of chemo, but it didn’t matter to her, she didn’t care how hard the meds were going to be, her attitude was to take it and fight it off.”

That day she felt strong abdominal pains and thought it best to go to the hospital in Reno as a precautionary measure. Her mother Jill drove her in, things seemed to improve, she was sent home a few hours later and then it happened again. Jill drove her back to the hospital.

There were more tests and a decision was made to stay a while for observation. A few hours later, Jill related to her husband that Lindsey sat up in her bed, and said, “I’m good.”

She almost hopped out, stretched her arms high, smiled and said, “Mom, I am good.”

Moments later she collapsed.

They rushed her in to the emergency room, she made some improvement and then she was gone. There will be no autopsy.

“She said she did not want to live with cancer and we know it wasn’t the cancer that killed her,” Tom Poulsen said. “It could have been an aneurysm, a blood clot, a stroke, some other hidden killer, we don’t know, but she knew these things were possible, she took on the fight.

“She was so strong, but the side effects were so horrific.”

Her primary oncologist had been at Stanford, but Poulsen, while living with her parents in Reno, had told her father of her plans as soon as she kicked cancer to the ditch.

“She said she wanted to return to Hilo and be an assistant coach for Gene,” Tom Poulsen said. “I told her she’d be great at that but how did she expect to live in Hilo on an assistant coach’s salary?

“She has an accounting degree, she did her job while taking chemo in Honolulu,” he father recalled. “She said she would just do accounting part time on the side.

“She said, ‘Don’t worry, dad, I can do this.’”

Her father did not doubt her.

Last goodbye

Okamura saw Lindsey Poulsen for what turned out to be the final visit last November.

“I had come down with a cold, a bad one,” Okamura said, “it lasted about a month. She was trying to take care of me, like I was the sick one and she was the healthy one.

“It wasn’t until after that I realized what had happened. She never whined like a baby about having cancer, about going through all the tests, all the pain, she never complained, and here I was whining over a cold.”

For Okamura, the incident became revelatory.

“By her, just being herself, doing what she would always do, she taught me that life is too short for hate, for complaining. She taught me in life we need go toward love, for caring for others, for being selfless, all while still being strong.”

That lesson worked for Okamura until a week ago Sunday when he got the message at 6 a.m. that Lindsey had passed.

“I was kind of in shock or something for a while,” he said, “but around noon I started getting sick again, exactly like I did last November, then I remembered what she taught me, I took my mind off it and I swear, by 6 o’clock or so, I realized it was gone. It was intense a few hours earlier, and it just disappeared.

“I feel those two things were connected,” Okamura said, “I truly believe that.”

If it all feels like a dream some times, maybe on some level, it is.

Last Tuesday, the third day after she passed, Okamura woke up and at some point that morning, checked out Facebook. There was one of those Facebook Memories that occasionally pop up, reminding you of a conversation with a friend.

This one was from Lindsey Poulsen.

“I miss you, friend,” it said.

Her parents Tom and Jill and her younger brother Tyler will be back in Hilo in a few months for a remembrance and to scatter her ashes into the ocean as she had requested.

In the end, while she came here for soccer, it was not soccer that defined her, it was something inside that allowed to drive and to care more than most people could imagine.

It was an afterthought that a simple game brought us Lindsey Poulsen to Hilo and displayed how to lead a life well lived.

Comments? Questions? Whistleblower tips? Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com