Fly a Little Higher

by Laura Sobiech

  TWO DAYS LATER, WE HELD ZACH’S WAKE IN THE GATHERING SPACE at the Church of St. Michael. The funeral home was too small for the anticipated number of people.

  Rob and I stood for five straight hours. The line of mourners serpentined through the room, ran up the hallway to the atrium, and out the door. For five hours the line never broke. And there were stories. Lots of stories.

  “He said hi to me in the hall,” one girl told me with a look of astonished gratitude on her face. “He said hi to me and he didn’t even know me.” It was such a small thing, a tiny, friendly gesture, but something this girl had apparently not experienced enough of. Zach made a difference in her life by simply acknowledging that she was there. He saw her.

  Another man in a business suit stopped by to offer his condolences. “I’m from North Carolina, but I was in town on business, just an hour away. My wife and I have been following Zach’s story. He’s changed our lives.”

  “Zach stood up for me,” another girl spoke through tears. “He stood up for me when I felt really stupid and everyone was teasing me.”

  “Zach saw me crying in the hall one time between classes,” said another. “He didn’t know me, but he took the time to ask if I was okay.”

  “I came from Minneapolis. I didn’t know Zach other than his story and his music. But he changed my whole outlook on what’s important,” said a man in his early twenties.

  “I never got to meet him, but I miss him,” a middle-aged man said.

  A teacher from a grade school in Minneapolis brought a handful of her students. They had seen the video in school and wanted to offer their condolences.

  They kept coming.

  Hundreds of people—both friends and strangers—poured into the church and waited in line for hours just so they could have the chance to tell us how Zach had touched their lives and changed them. They were no longer faceless people typing comments on a YouTube video. They were real people with real lives who had experienced something powerful that had made a profound impact on their lives, and Zach had given that to them.

  At the end of the evening, Scott Herold approached Rob and me. “I don’t want to bother you by talking business right now,” he said, “but I thought you might want to hear what ‘Clouds’ is doing.” He pulled out his cell phone to show me the screen. “It’s been climbing the charts all day, and it just hit number one. It seems Zach has started some kind of a movement.”

  Rob put his arm around me, and I laid my head on his chest. Our brave boy who battled for so many years and who had no hope for a future, through his death, was spreading hope to the world.

  May 23, 2013

  MAY TWENTY-THIRD WAS A PERFECT DAY. THE KIND OF SPRING DAY that gets us through the long, cold winters in Minnesota. The sky was completely clear—cloudless, many noted. The air was crisp, but the sun was warm on our skin. It was the day that we would say good-bye to Zach.

  The Church of St. Michael was packed to overflowing with people who had faithfully carried our family through the past three and a half years of Zach’s battle. They had filled the adoration chapel at all hours of the night and day to pray that God’s grace would carry us through no matter what came our way. They had prayed, in many cases despite their own suffering, for a boy whom many of them had never met. They filled the pews and aisles and even spilled out onto the sidewalk that was lined with pale blue and white balloons that gently twirled in the breeze, the words Up, Up, Up written on them.

  Four priests concelebrated along with Father Miller at the funeral. Zach had touched each one of them in some way. Father Miller and Father Lynch had been particularly impacted by this teenage boy whom they had visited countless times over the years to bring the comfort of the sacraments and prayer.

  The choir lifted our souls to heaven on the wings of angels, and Father Miller soothed our grief with a beautiful homily that encouraged us to take Zach’s message of hope, and that of the gospel, with us into our hearts.

  At the end, our dear, sweet Sammy stood before twelve hundred people and delivered a eulogy befitting her lifelong friend. Her final thoughts were these:

  There are two very important things in particular Zach has said to me that I will keep with me for the rest of my life. The first is to think of him whenever I eat a taco, because he really loved tacos. The second is that life is really just beautiful moments, one right after the other. He has taught me to see beauty and joy in everything. And although today is very sad, it is also very beautiful. Because what is more beautiful than a congregation full of lovely people celebrating the life of a beautiful, young man?

  As she finished and left the pulpit, the choir sang “Clouds” and hundreds of mourners, who all knew the words by heart, joined in as the casket was prepared to depart. There was a barely audible ripple of laughter from Zach’s closest friends as the casket was rolled out of the church to the sound of bagpipes. It was so . . . Zach.

  For months I had prayed that Zach’s funeral would be a time when heaven and earth would meet. I prayed that the Holy Spirit would fill the space and permeate each soul with profound hope, and that Zach’s simple message of love would be heard.

  My prayer was answered. As the mourners poured out of the church and back into the crazy world, something amazing was happening. Millions of people, all over the globe, clicked on a video and heard for the first time about a boy who wrote a song to say good-bye. They did not know that boy, they had never met him personally, but somehow his spirit had touched them in deep and unfathomable ways. They had been changed by this boy who had every reason to despair but who chose instead to fly a little higher.

  Epilogue

  ZACH’S MUSIC CONTINUED TO TRAVEL ACROSS THE WORLD AND into people’s hearts. The week of June 8, 2013, “Clouds” debuted on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 list at No. 26 and No. 1 on Rock Digital Songs, making it the first song in music history to ever reach such status with only the backing of a nonprofit and exposure from digital media. No major record labels were involved, and there was virtually no radio play outside the St. Paul/Minneapolis market.

  A Firm Handshake’s Fix Me Up EP made it to No. 20 on the Billboard 200 for the same week and reentered Folk Albums at No. 1. The songs Zach and Sammy wrote and performed together continue to climb the charts in countries around the world.

  On September 28, 2013, the “Clouds” video won an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy award for musical composition/arrangement. Karl Demer, Mike Rominski, Rob, and I accepted the award on Zach’s behalf. At the end of December, 2013, CNN named Zach as one of their “Five ‘Extraordinary People’ You Have to Meet.”

  The My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech video that SoulPancake produced has also reached unprecedented numbers. The twenty-two-minute video was intended to reach thousands. To date, it has been translated into twenty-one different languages and received over ten million hits from people across the globe.

  At the writing of this book, Zach has been gone for four months. We still receive messages daily, in various forms, whether letters in the mail or comments on the various videos, expressing how much Zach and his music meant to people. We treasure them. They make Zach feel close.

  But then, he’s closer than ever, isn’t he? He shows us sometimes.

  As our family pulled out of the church parking lot and followed the hearse to the cemetery on the day of his funeral, out of the blue we heard a familiar sound. The radio in the car had been turned down so low that we didn’t know it was on until we suddenly heard the first notes of “Clouds” played out on the glockenspiel. I turned it up as we drove to the burial site at the cemetery.

  A couple of weeks after the funeral, Father Miller was saying the closing prayer at Mass. As he turned to walk past the altar and into the sacristy (the little room off to the side of the altar where the priest’s vestments are stored), a green balloon gently floated at about the height of a man from the church atrium through a door and into the front of the church. Father Miller didn’t see the balloon as it floated around the c
ommunion rail, up the steps past the altar, and followed him into the sacristy. My friend Molly and her children, who associated “Clouds” with balloons, were stunned as they watched. Father had walked through the sacristy and directly to another door that led to the atrium where he stood and greeted people as they left the church. He never saw the balloon that had followed him. Molly opened the door to the sacristy and found an altar server standing with the balloon in his hands. “Is this yours?” he asked with a confused look on his face.

  “No, but I think I know who it belongs to.” She took the balloon and brought it to Father Miller. “Have you been thinking about Zach lately?” she asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking about him a lot these past couple of days,” he answered. He had been struggling with severe pain in his feet for several weeks, and it was starting to get him down. Over the months of visiting Zach, watching him suffer and administering the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, he had developed a unique spiritual connection to Zach.

  “I think this is for you.” Molly handed him the green balloon.

  Father Miller was shocked, but not totally surprised, as he took the balloon from her. “You know, I think you’re right.” The color of the balloon matched his vestments. Green, the color of hope.

  A few days later, Father Miller traveled to his parents’ farm in rural Minnesota. It was a sanctuary for him, a quiet place where he could rest and pray. As he was walking the farm with his father, they came to the milk house.

  “The strangest thing happened a few days ago,” his father said. “Out of nowhere, a clump of green balloons came out of the sky and settled on the ground right here.” He pointed.

  It would happen to Amy too. He would show up in little ways. She pulled into a park for a graduation party not realizing that it was the same park where she and Zach had planned their first picnic. It was weeks after his death, and she didn’t think she could handle the memories, so she decided to go home. Just as she began to back out of the parking spot, “Clouds” came on the radio. It was as if Zach was letting her know he was still there with her. She decided to stay.

  A week before she went off to college, Amy was down in Zach’s room, hanging out like she sometimes did when she wanted to feel close to him. A glint of something caught her eye in the middle of all the knobs on the microphone soundboard Zach had in his room. She walked across the room to find it was a pin she had given him more than a year earlier, the pin we all desperately tried to find before his funeral because Amy wanted to place it in the casket with him. Dancer’s Boyfriend, the pin said. She’d gotten it at a dance competition as a joke, but he wore it proudly on his jacket all winter just to tease her. He liked to tease.

  “You’ll find it when you need it,” I’d told her the day before the funeral after we’d searched the room two and three times over. “It’s here somewhere, and he’s probably just waiting for the right time to give it to you.” And there it was. Right there where it couldn’t have been missed.

  She left for college the following week, and when she moved into her dorm and began putting her things away, she opened the top drawer of the empty desk and there were two guitar picks waiting for her. She asked her roommates if one of them had placed them there. They hadn’t.

  Some of Zach’s closest friends went on a day trip to Duluth, Minnesota, in his honor before they all headed off to college. Zach had always wanted to go with his friends, but never made it to the beautiful north shore of Lake Superior.

  The kids spent the day on the rocky shore reminiscing about Zach and vowed never to forget him, each of them memorializing him with a tiny Z tattoo etched into the inside of their middle fingers. To commemorate the trip, they all gathered on the rocks in front of the lake and had their picture taken. The day was clear with a few tiny clouds dotting the vast blue sky. Later, after the picture was uploaded onto Facebook, they realized there was a lonely cloud in the shape of a Z just above Amy’s head.

  He got his trip to Duluth after all.

  On December 6, 2013, a year after KS95 played “Clouds” for the first time on the radio and interviewed Zach and me for the “KS95 for Kids” Radiothon at the Mall of America, Rob, Grace and I returned to the mall for another radio event. This time, KS95 invited those in the community who wanted to remember Zach and honor his legacy to come to the mall and join in singing “Clouds” together. They hoped to get one thousand people to respond. They got five thousand.

  The place was buzzing with excitement as the rotunda filled with choirs and groups from across Minnesota, all clad in light blue T-shirts with white clouds and the words “Up, Up, Up” written across the front. The talk at the mall and all across the Twin Cities was about how unusual it was to see a rainbow on that clear and sunny December day positioned directly over the mall, just a few puffy clouds floating lazily in the sky. It was then I recalled another rainbow that appeared years earlier on a dark and cloudy November day as we traveled home from the hospital—a sign of hope to keep us going.

  I HOLD ON TO LITTLE THINGS. THE CLOTHES IN HIS DIRTY-CLOTHES basket are still there. I hold them to my face sometimes and breathe in their scent. For weeks, I left his toiletries where he had carefully placed them on the bathroom sink. Sometimes I cradle his tooth-brush and remember his smile and what it felt like to kiss his cheek. His room remains as it was the day he died, and it will for some time.

  Rob visits Zach’s grave daily. He has a hose in the back of his car that he hooks up to the faucet and waters the grass at the site. Zach’s grave is the only patch of green in the parched cemetery. Football is wrapping up. He misses watching the Vikings games with Zach.

  Sam grieves quietly. He finds the best way to honor his brother is simply to live. He studies diligently and hopes to one day join a research team that unlocks the secrets of osteosarcoma. Sam has vowed to visit Zach’s grave every May 3, on Zach’s birthday.

  Grace, too, grieves quietly. She misses Zach’s presence as she moves into high school. She teared up after getting her schedule for her first semester at the high school.

  “I would have taken this to Zach, and he would have told me about all the teachers,” she said. He would have been there for her, offering his support and guidance.

  Alli had started a blog called Married in the Mourning, Sailing with the Knight. She grieves through writing, laying it all out—raw and real.

  Eight days after Zach’s funeral, we all reentered St. Michael’s for Alli and Collin’s wedding. We felt Zach with us there most especially. It was a tumultuous day, weather-wise. There were clouds churning all around the Twin Cities, violent storms popping up all around us. Yet as dark clouds rolled in from every direction, the sky above us remained clear. It was a night that defined us. Despite our mourning, we all came together, family and friends. We filled the dance floor and danced until our feet hurt, and then we danced some more.

  And we remembered.

  We remembered that beautiful boy who showed us that hope could raise us to a better place where the view was a little nicer. A place where we could look and never see the end. A place in the clouds.

  Acknowledgments

  ZACH’S STORY IS ABOUT GOD BRINGING THRONGS OF INCREDIBLE people together to make beautiful things happen. The task of adequately thanking all those who have held my hand, scooped me off the floor, dusted me off, and sometimes even thrown me over their shoulder to carry me as I voyaged through writing our story is daunting. I would like to acknowledge all of them, but these pages aren’t big enough, so I am forced to acknowledge just a handful.

  Zach, thank you for showing us how to be a channel of grace through suffering. You make your dad and me so proud. We love you and miss you.

  Rob, you held me through tears, laughter, and everything between. Thank you for trusting me with the telling of our story. I love you.

  Alli, Sam, and Grace you are each amazing in your own unique and wonderful way. My life would be so much less beautiful without you. I am so grateful to
have you in my life and to be your mom.

  Mom and Dad, thank you for sacrificing for faith and family and teaching us what true hope is. Adam, Lee, Andrea, Amy, Maria, and Luke, I could not have chosen better siblings. I love you all.

  Thank you to Zach’s friends for pulling in closer when many would have fallen away.

  Thank you, Sammy Brown, for bringing the melody of love through friendship to Zach’s life.

  Thank you, Amy Adamle, for your example of courage and selfless love. You are the strongest woman I know.

  Thank you to my dearest friends, Anne Greenwood Brown and Stephanie Landsem. This book would never have happened without your constant encouragement, guidance, and practical sensibilities. Anne, you taught me to jump without overthinking and Stephanie, you taught me to have a parachute at the ready. I love you both so very much.

  Thank you to the communities of Church of St. Michael and St. Croix Catholic School for all the countless ways you supported Zach and our family over the years. We were fed by both your constant prayers and meals. I would especially like to the Father Michael Miller and Father Brian Lynch for their prayerful support and for bringing us the grace of the sacraments.

  Thank you, Danielle Magnuson, for the late nights of editing.

  Jacquie Flynn, my agent, thank you for your unwavering confidence that I could actually do this when I wasn’t so sure of myself.

  Thank you to the folks at Thomas Nelson for taking a chance on me, especially Brian Hampton, Chad Cannon, Emily Lineberger, and Kim Boyer. And thank you to my editor, Katherine Rowley for cleaning it all up and making it look pretty.

  Dan Seeman (Hubbard Broadcasting), Karl Demer (Atomic K Records), Scott Herold (Rock the Cause) Jeff Dunn (J. Dunn Photography), Adam Gislason (Snyder Gislason Fraiser LLC), Mike Rominski (Whoolly Rhino Productions), and Justin Baldoni (Wayfarer Entertainment/SoulPancake) without your vision, countless hours of hard work, and dedication to bringing Zach’s music and message to the world this story would have been very different.