Memory of Her Will Last Forever

They streamed into church in summer dresses, crisp skirts rustling, collegiate women on campus, squeezing hands, cupping tissue in their palms, occupying pews with their arms curled around one another’s shoulders, nudging one another to step forward to the altar and be the next one to share a tender memory of Megan Holliday.

She was an unfailingly cheerful young thing with blond bangs who breezed into Southern California from Canada like a puff of cool air, always laughing, always playful, a doctor’s daughter with a heart condition of her own but the disciplined body of an athlete, a distance swimmer who always made her teammates happy and occasionally drove her coaches crazy and ultimately, unwittingly, unwillingly, painfully, ended up making all of them cry.

At a memorial service Tuesday attended by so many of her friends from USC that they stood against the walls and spilled into the vestibule of the United University Church, the words used to describe Megan Holliday painted her as exactly that--everyone’s friend.

She died Saturday after a freak and unreal fall, trying to climb through the window of her second-story bedroom after locking herself out, an act so tragicomic that one of her dearest friends, laughing through her tears, could not resist saying, “That was Megan.”

Only 20, her vivacity was such that, two days before the accident, a Trojan Spirit Award at the USC women’s athletics banquet was bestowed upon her for “competitiveness, leadership and effort exemplifying the Trojan spirit.” And her popularity was such that Tuesday, university officials announced that the annual prize has now been renamed the Megan Holliday Trojan Spirit Award.

Heather Ray remembered a teammate who was “like a mother to everybody,” someone who recently accompanied three friends to Catalina Island and not only cooked the meals, but tucked each one into bed for the night, wishing them sweet dreams. Renata Adamidov remembered a “nurturing” roommate who adopted three sickly baby bunnies born near their house, rose from her sleep every two hours to feed them through an eye-dropper, named them, nursed them and wept over them when they died.

“Megan wanted to be a doctor, like her father,” Adamidov said. “But she already was like a doctor to most of us. She always made us feel better.”

USC swimmer Monica Koyama said: “I’ve never known anyone so incredibly full of life.”

One of USC’s coaches, former Olympic swimmer Cynthia (Sippy) Woodhead-Kantzer, had as much difficulty composing herself as the athletes, to the point that, at the hospital vigil while Megan lay in a coma, she recalled one of them saying: “Sip, you’re human after all.”

Holliday had that effect on even the strictest coach.

“Let’s face it, Megan missed practices,” Woodhead-Kantzer said, bringing smiles of recognition to the faces of the swimmers as they nodded. “She was always going off somewhere and having some other great adventure. And then she’d come back the next day with this big grin on her face, and I’d be burning up inside at her, and five minutes later she’d have me laughing again.”

By the dozens, virtually every swimmer, male or female, from USC kept a vigil for Holliday at the California Medical Center, some for more than 20 hours. Hospital workers bent rules to accommodate the crush of Megan’s friends, recognizing the impact her condition was having on them.

Some who had been at her off-campus residence at the time of the accident had evidently been close enough to witness Holliday’s fall, almost to the point of being close enough to catch her. Her roommate, Cindy Makens, saying she wanted to “clarify for everybody” what happened, said that Megan had gone upstairs to her bedroom because the bass of the stereo system was bothering her.

Locked out of her own room--”She’d done that before,” Makens pointed out--Holliday entered an adjoining room and climbed through Makens’ bedroom window. After reaching her own window, Holliday lost her grip and fell, landing on the concrete pavement below.

Her parents, Susan and Dr. Ron Holliday of London, Ontario, were notified and flew to their daughter’s bedside Saturday, but she never regained consciousness. Dr. Holliday is a neurosurgeon.

His only daughter, a junior biology major at USC, once swam for the Canadian national team, winning bronze medals in the 400- and 800-meter freestyles at the 1987 Pan-American Games, and also had been a champion cross-country runner. In the fall of 1990, however, Megan was found to have Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, and underwent a 12-hour electrical stimulation procedure to remedy a rapid heartbeat. Three days later, she was back in the water.

One of USC’s top distance freestylers for three years, she was always breaking up Woodhead-Kantzer with outrageous questions such as: “You mean you want me to swim every one faster?”

Said the team’s head coach, Mark Schubert: “The thing I will remember most is her smile. Every time she came out on the pool deck, she wore it, and it was contagious.”

Everyone who spoke about her Tuesday referred to that smile, to someone who always could be counted on for a shout of cheer. They smiled themselves as they echoed Holliday’s favorite expressions: “Fire up, guys!” and “No stress!” They smiled again at an announcement that a maple tree will be planted outside USC’s Heritage Hall, as a tribute to a young woman who brought so much life to everyone she encountered.

“I was thinking about Megan on Sunday, the day after she died, because when I looked outside it was one of the most beautiful days I have ever spent in California,” said Ray, a junior from Lutherville, Md. “It was so warm out, and the sun was so bright.

“And I knew that Megan was in heaven and that she had personally sent down a day like that, just to let all of us know that she was up there and that everything was going to be all right. She still made me smile and she wasn’t even here.”