The news spread across Facebook at the end of June this year. Two Wheaton College Football Players Drown in Lake Michigan. One, ostensibly, had jumped in an attempt to save the other. He was lauded as a hero, known in his community as a selfless servant leader, working in ministry for disadvantaged kids on the West Side of Grand Rapids.
That same week, a loaf of banana bread in hand, I got out of my car and crossed the street. Stepping into a cafe strewn with plants and named after the paradisal garden in Genesis, I couldn’t shake the feeling of death. One of my friends and coworkers was weeping uncontrollably in the adjacent youth room. I clambered up the stairs and found other members of my community standing around their computers, listless, finding themselves unable to return to work after the funeral.
I knew Jalen distantly—someone who quietly hefted totes and made chicken nuggets around our ministry sites. Who would keep an eye on the students, who’d swarm around him and play catch. He had a mop of sometimes tousled blond hair and looked exactly the part of a football player—tall and broad, someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. The kids called him “Captain America,” and it fit.
I don’t remember having a single conversation with him about faith, but in the stories that were told during his funeral, I recognized in them the tireless colleague I passed several times a day. My last impression of him was perched on the top of a jungle gym in Millenium Park, helping direct our middle schoolers across the playground in a thrown-together obstacle course. At noon. In summer. It was so hot, and it was a blast—we all had laughter lingering behind our eyes.
**
The question we thought to ourselves, asked each other in quiet tones: how does Captain America drown? Somehow it felt so wrong that someone so strong, so clearly full of life, would somehow be overcome in the turbulent waters in Lake Michigan.
A People article came out the week of his death—which, I felt, made some sort of nation-wide, sob-story spectacle out of something that left my community in shambles. But in some ways, I also felt like a spectator.
I processed the shock of the news by crying in the ecosystem preserve for an afternoon. Bawling over Instagram posts. Calling others to pass on the news (not on any of my college syllabi, that specific skill). Carrying a sort of sadness in my bones for the two or three days that followed.
But, after that, it settled into a reassurance, trite as it was, that Jalen was in a better place. Then, after the funeral, I added the confidence that God was able to work through his death—not just in the gospel being presented at his funeral, but in how the arc of his life and decisions pointed to Jesus. Apparently he’d once said that if he ever were to die prematurely, he hoped it would be in the act of helping someone else. A verse surfaced often in the social media posts of those who’d known him well: Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.
Maybe these truths, these platitudes, was how I instinctively glossed over the tragedy of someone’s life ending at 26, just a hair older than my own brother. Or, maybe I just wasn’t close enough to miss him.
**
My friend Savannah once told me about her experience at her great aunt’s funeral. We were both dating guys that were more laid-back, less accomplishment-oriented than us and were wrestling with some of our future ambitions as a result. She said something like, No one mentioned any of her accomplishments. They just remembered the kind of person she was.
Easy to hear, slightly more humbling to experience. In the wake of Jalen’s passing, I felt that everyone was singing the same refrain—humble, servant-hearted, didn’t hesitate to jump in after his friend. My dreams of living abroad, of pursuing a master’s degree in my field of expertise, seem overreaching against that type of legacy: certainly not as plain or pedestrian, but perhaps less durable. It seems that the way you carry yourself in the world speaks the loudest—not what you do, but how.
Some things have changed in the building since I walked in that afternoon with the banana bread. A virtually new youth ministry team running events, wearing these bright blue and white tie-dye shirts that seem meant to shout fun summer afternoons. They hurt my eyes a little bit. They feel like a little bow being tied over the pain of what came before.
But, also new in the youth center is a mural designed by a local artist. Among the spiritual imagery like doves and vines are these enormous orange blossoms. His college colors, the ministry colors—they feel like something Jalen would have liked. Something growing, something vital, something perpetually oriented to the sun.
Grace Hsu graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a major in speech pathology and a minor in English. A phonetics nerd outwardly but a poet at heart, Grace currently resides in Taipei, Taiwan, where she teaches English at a language school. Apart from writing, you can find her reading, running, and eating inordinate amounts of Thai coconut curry.
