Oct. 17, 2023, fell on a Tuesday. Following the ritual of every other Tuesday that semester, I woke up, ate my breakfast and dragged my feet to class at 10 a.m. After class, I sought out my friend Peyton and found her sitting in the sun outside the Pepperdine University library. I remember her saying to me: “I don’t know why, but I’m just so happy. I’ve never felt like this in my whole life….”

Peyton and I were in a sorority together, and she was my “big sister,” charged with looking out for me. But in reality, we were more like twins. I had never known a friend like her, I haven’t since, and I know that I never will. We both loved going to bed early after a cup of peppermint tea. I lived one floor above her, and she often could hear my footsteps. We found ourselves thinking alike and would laugh and ask over and over again, “How did you know I’d say that?” It felt to us that the workings of the universe had conspired for us to meet.

That same Tuesday evening, I stopped by her apartment before leaving for one of our sorority events. I saw the radiant faces of my dear friends Asha, Deslyn and Niamh alongside Peyton. Asha offered to drive me, but I had promised to drive my roommate, so I took my own car. I said a quick, “I love you,” as I scurried out her apartment door.

Twenty minutes later, Peyton and my three friends were struck and killed by a reckless 20-year-old driver hurtling 104 miles per hour around one of the deadliest curves of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Calif. I unknowingly drove past them just moments after. 

After the crash, I stepped into a reality that was empty and dark. Grief left me strangely deaf; every word became meaningless. Brought up in a faithful, non-denominational Christian home, I recognized that this should be the time that I prayed most desperately, but I stopped praying altogether—not out of anger, but because I had lost my voice. And for all my efforts, I couldn’t hear God’s voice either. The words of Christ in the Gospel were quoted to me often: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

“But if only you knew my pain,” I thought, “no one would ever say something so foolish.”

In the months that followed, I tried to find any sign of a truly consoling word in the world, one that I could hear. My cries fell upon deaf ears. I felt alone in my grief and I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be heard. I wanted someone to take me by the shoulders and tell me I mattered even though nothing in the world seemed to matter any more. But no one came, no one took me by my shoulders, no one saw me. 

I became someone I didn’t know, and maybe didn’t even like. With sad eyes and a fragile spirit, I let my shadow live for me. I punished my body with too much to drink and too little food. I felt out of my mind and searched for the divine in the profane.

October bled into November; suddenly it was Christmas. In the spirit of the season, my friends and I attended a holiday concert on campus. The traditional carol “Angels We Have Heard on High” began echoing in my ears. Why couldn’t I hear them? “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” my singing peers rejoiced. Not for me. There was no glory in this life.

How could a life without song, glory or enchantment be worth living? I wanted to die, to slip away quietly. I felt like I was drowning but had no desire to fight for air. I would always remember that I didn’t get into Asha’s car that night with my friends. Why had I been spared? I wished I hadn’t been.

Then, in my weariest moment, I did what my mom taught me to do when I was a girl if I ever got scared: I prayed. The truth is, I have no idea where the inclination to pray came from. I bowed my head, and without moving my mouth, I begged: “Say something to me.”

For a while, it seemed my prayer had gone unanswered. Christmas and the New Year passed. The holiday merrymaking glittered and disappeared in a flash. Reminiscent of all the Januarys before, I returned to school, resolved to throw myself into coursework. For a class in political theology, I spent my evenings reading St. Augustine’s Confessions by dimmed light in my living room. It was just homework, I wasn’t seeking anything more from it, but one line caught my attention.

Sometimes a text, if it is profound and true enough, can be heard through the din of the voices that surround us. As I read Augustine’s words, I could have sworn he wrote each one for me: “The decayed parts of you will receive a new flowering…all that is ebbing away from you will be…renewed.”

After months of silence, those words from Augustine finally broke through. “You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness,” Augustine wrote. My silence, like his, was shattered.

I started reading with a greater sense of intimacy and intensity. “[God is] present, liberating us from miserable errors, and [he puts] us on [his] way, bringing comfort and saying ‘Run, I will carry you, and I will see you through to the end,” Augustine wrote. My anguish had been drowning out all else; but even at its loudest, God remained relentless in calling me.

I slowly entered my life again, curious if I would find Christ ever-present, too. I wanted to see with Augustine’s eyes.

This was the very beginning of my conversion. It was slow, happening a little at a time, whispers from witnesses here and there. I tried returning to the evangelical churches I had been used to growing up, but I still felt alone. I spent most services wondering why the worship music didn’t strike my heart like lightning, as it appeared to do for everyone else. Was I missing something?

I attended my first Mass on Oct. 19, 2024, a year and two days after Peyton died. My favorite Augustine-assigning professor led the way, explaining the liturgy and the Latin. But I knew this was truth the moment we all knelt together at Mass. And, unlike at that Christmas Mass, this time, I wasn’t alone. We begged in unison, “only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.” The stained glass of the parish church restored the color to my face as I looked up—finally. I started seeing the people around me as sparkling pieces of this mosaic, too.

I still see through grief’s glass dimly. Peyton’s memorial—a lantern behind Pepperdine’s chapel—is a gracious tribute but not nearly as beautiful as her life was. I’ve noticed a resident hummingbird that lingers around her light. In a strange way, we continue to accompany one another.

When I began to consider converting to Catholicism, I happened upon a picture of Peyton’s first Communion. As a young girl, she stands on the steps before the altar, with a beaming smile next to her little sister. 

This April, I received my first sacraments, and I joined her in the one, holy Catholic Church. I still find her in all the places I miss her. And I “thank my God in all my remembrance” (Phil 1:3).

Charlie Robinson is a graduate of Pepperdine University. She was a junior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Nova Forum and plans to pursue doctoral studies in political philosophy. She lives in Orange County, Calif.