It started with a New Year’s resolution.
Maggie wasn’t a runner. She grew up playing volleyball, “which is the exact opposite of running,” she says. But in January of last year, she set a goal: run the Charlottesville Half Marathon in April.
“I went from running zero to running 13.1 miles. It was painful and terrible,” she laughs. “And I really enjoyed it.”
Two weeks later, her brother Nathan died in a car accident. He was 32.
“And so, as people do, you choose a mildly toxic coping mechanism when you lose a loved one,” she says. “I signed up for a marathon about a week later. It was kind of my way of taking control of something in my life when I was losing control of other things.”
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The Big-Everything Brother
Nathan was four years older than Maggie. “He is four years older than me,” she corrects gently. “He always will be.”
“Nathan was a weirdo,” she says, smiling. “Really, really big emotions—big joy, big sadness.”
He struggled at times, never quite finding his rhythm in adulthood, but he had an undeniable energy. “When he loved something, he loved it so aggressively and loudly that it was pretty infectious to people around him.”
They were very different from one another, as siblings sometimes are.
“He was a video gamer. And I’m like a yapper, social butterfly. But we both watched this super niche show called Game Changer, and I remember one time he was humming a song from it, and I knew exactly what it was. We just looked at each other like, ‘You know this too?’ It was the funniest little moment of connection.”
They shared other similarities, too.
One of his greatest loves was the Philadelphia Eagles. He and Maggie would often attend games together, especially when the Eagles played the Commanders in D.C., which she joked was “always a home game for Eagles fans anyway.”
When she signed up for this spring’s Hospice of the Piedmont 5K, she registered under the team name ‘Fly Nathan Fly,’ a variation of the Eagles’ rallying cry.
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A Nurse’s Perspective on the Unthinkable
Maggie was at work when she found out about the accident. A nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at UVA, she knew it was serious when her dad called repeatedly from Europe and texted her to go to the Emergency Room.
“I was the first one there. I work at that hospital, so I knew how to navigate the system. I got my family into what we call ‘the sad room,’” she says, referring to the conference room where staff often organize hard conversations with family.
Nathan never regained consciousness. And while her parents held out hope, Maggie and her husband (an EMT and firefighter) understood what was coming.
She understood what she saw in the Operating Room: ECMO equipment. “They had ECMO, which is the highest level of life support, in the room with him.” The medical team tried everything to save him. She wasn’t sure if that’s what he would have wanted.
He didn’t have an advance directive. Most 32-year-olds don’t. “Unless you work in a hospital,” she says, “nobody our age thinks about that. But you should.”
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The Party That Couldn’t Wait
A year earlier, Maggie and her husband had quietly eloped for practical reasons—“health insurance,” she laughs. But the plan was always to throw a real party eventually. Then Nathan died.
“About two months after Nathan died, I was like, I don’t want to lose anybody else before we have this party,” she says.
They set the date for Saturday, May 10, 2025.
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Getting to Know Him, Still
Nathan’s death didn’t just spur a wedding celebration. Surprisingly, it deepened Maggie’s relationship with him.
She describes a moment of clarity while listening to All There Is, a grief podcast hosted by Anderson Cooper. One episode explored the idea that even after someone is gone, you can still learn about them, still grow in your understanding of who they were.
“That line wrecked me,” she says. “You don’t have to finish getting to know that person just because they’ve died.”
So, Maggie still texts Nathan.
She sends him TikToks.
The podcast helped open her eyes to a new perspective on Nathan’s death.
“It doesn’t have to be the end of him being my brother. He barely texted me back when he was alive. I can still text him. It’s not going to be that different,” she jokes.
She’s connected with his online friends. Found old videos. Learned he was a fan of Corinne Bailey Rae. “I feel closer to him now than I ever have before,” she says.
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Serendipitous Timing
As spring approached, she noticed something unusual while reviewing her race schedule for the Charlottesville C-VILLE-athon: one of the 5Ks coincided with May 10, the exact date of the wedding party.
“It was such a big day. I didn’t want to waste a minute of it,” she says. “And when I saw it was Hospice of the Piedmont? I was like, great. Now I will definitely be doing it.”
She quietly listed the race on her wedding website under “optional activities.” To her surprise, the sign-ups started rolling in.
“I just started getting these emails—so-and-so signed up for your team. It was my husband’s high school friends, people I hadn’t even asked. They just showed up.”
Fifteen friends laced up that morning. Two of them placed first in their age groups.
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The Memorial Mile
Near the end of the race is the HOP5K’s Memorial Mile—a final stretch lined with signs bearing the names of lost loved ones.
Maggie saw Nathan’s name.
“I’m not a religious person,” she says, “but I do practice science. There’s a scientific principle that says, ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it simply changes form.’ That is something I really hold on to in grief and the afterlife.
“Whatever his energy is doing, I hope that he can see that this many people are continuing to care for him and love him. That’s the one regret I have: I’m not sure he knew that, not as loudly as he should have.”
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The Backyard Wedding Party
The wedding party that evening was perfect: local food trucks, Scrabble on blankets, friends bartending, four spontaneous singing toasts, and weather that Maggie calls “the best Virginia has ever seen.”
Instead of spending thousands on a venue, Maggie and her husband had decided to pour their time, energy, and budget into transforming their backyard.
“We built this phenomenal 800-square-foot deck and landscaped everything,” she says. “We basically renovated the whole backyard to make it amazing.”
Still, one person was missing, and Maggie felt it, especially during the weeks of physical preparation.
“We were digging holes for the backyard deck, and we were like: Nathan, what the heck? You’re supposed to be here digging holes. Now we have to do it ourselves. You would have been so good at this!”
It’s a joke. But it’s also not.
That’s grief. That’s love. That’s how you keep the relationship going.
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Don’t Break
When asked what she would say to someone facing sudden loss, Maggie doesn’t hesitate.
“Don’t break,” she says. “Because you could. I could have. It’s easy, too. It would have been so easy to go down the pathway of being angry, not going outside, and not talking to people.”
Instead, she ran. She built a garden. She went to therapy. She talked to her friends. And she sent her brother texts.
“The world doesn’t need you to break. That doesn’t help the person you lost,” she says. “What their energy needs is for you to come back stronger—and come back better—and pass on what you’ve learned from them.”
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Thank you to Maggie, the ‘Fly Nathan Fly’ team, and everyone who ran, walked, volunteered, or donated to this year’s HOP5K. Your support makes programs like our Grief and Healing groups available to the entire community at no cost. To find an upcoming group visit, visit hopva.org/grief.
