Her smile lit up our days, her laughter may her hearts soar. I remember saying good-bye to everybody for Winter Break, all of us happy and smiling. Everyone was so excited for break and was wishing each other happy holidays. I said good-bye to Yi-Dan as I did to my other friends. I never knew the pain that I would feel when I came back.

We came back from Winter Break and Yi-Dan wasn’t there. We thought that maybe she has taken an extended break and then forgot about it. Then she was gone for three days and people were talking. Some kids knew what had happened, but I wasn’t one of them. The counselor came in on day and that was when she told us, “If some of you may have noticed that Yi-Dan hasn’t been in school this week, you see, over the Winter Break, Yi-Dan passed away… on Christmas Eve,” I could feel the tears streaming down my face, thinking to myself, how could this wonderful, beautiful girl be taken from this world.

Thinking about her brings tears to my eyes: she was such a wonderful person and deserves to be remembered in this world.

She lived with her Grandmother and her parents. Her grandmother died five days after Yi-Dan died. Her parents had finally saved enough money to bring Yi-Dan and her Grandmother from China. And as soon as they came here, two months after, they were both gone.

No one knows for sure how both Yi-Dan and her grandmother died, but they think that it may have been poisonous mushrooms. They do not know because the doctors stopped trying to figure out what happened. It was amazing to me that this could happen because in fourth grade I thought that only old people and people from natural disasters dies, but then Yi-Dan died. It really made me realizes how important it is to treasure your friends and not take them for granted.

One of her friends said, “I had to leave for Winter Break early, I remember saying good-bye to Yi-Dan, hugging her and her telling me, ‘I’ll see you when you get back,’ but when I got back she wasn’t there.” Yi-Dan will always be remembered and even now, four years later my memory of her doesn’t fade. Yi-Dan will live forever in all of her friend’s hearts.