An Uncle Nurtures Hope Niece’s Purpose Will Live On

He thought his letter was “disjointed” and “not suitable for publication.”

I beg to differ.

He wrote it from 3,000 miles away, an uncle back home in Florida from a Southern California funeral and coming to grips with the death of his 19-year-old niece and the pain that her loss was causing his brother and sister-in-law.

“My niece had a lifelong ambition of entering medical research to find cures for kidney diseases, which plagued an older cousin from childhood,” Jim Borad began.

He was writing about the death of Amanda Marie Borad, an Ocean View High School graduate killed when the car in which she was riding was struck by another. The sudden, violent nature of her death--followed by an outpouring of sympathy from hundreds of people--compelled Borad to put words on paper.

“In addition to being a very intelligent young lady, at 5 feet 9 she was also strikingly beautiful,” Borad wrote. “She had been a dancer since age 4 and attended both Ocean View High School and Huntington Beach’s performing arts school. To help pay for college she had worked last summer at Disneyland’s Light & Magic show that performed nightly throughout the park. She was also a runner-up in the Miss Huntington Beach beauty pageant, which she reluctantly entered only because she might win scholarship money. She disliked any sort of boasting about herself.

“As one friend commented, ‘Her joyful smile would light up a room.’ Her statuesque yet lithe figure would cause a young man to gasp. But, she looked for what was in someone’s heart rather than their appearance. There were over 400 people who came to honor her last Friday on a rare sunny day in the Southland. . . . One young man drove the 120 miles in the rain the night before to recite the rosary and returned that same night.

“She turned 19 at the beginning of this month. She had gone with friends to a party for some basketball players and wanted to leave early. . . . It was Valentine’s Day . . . “

Borad ended his letter with this: “Please don’t let her be forgotten. Ask your readers to do a special act of goodness in her honor. Let us not allow the evil men do to their fellow man to triumph.”

From his winter home in Naples, Fla., Borad explained why he wrote the letter in which the sadness jumped off the page.

Partly, he said, he fears the other driver may not be brought to justice. Police arrested a driver later in the day and he was charged with felony hit-and-run.

“The other reason is that the girl herself in some way needs to live on,” Borad told me. “It was the idea that she had a purpose that young people seldom have. There are so many kids about whom you can say it’s a terribly tragedy that they died, but they had no promise, they didn’t amount to much or do much with their lives and it didn’t appear that they were going to give back more than they took. So when someone special is lost, it’s a loss for all of us.”

His niece was a freshman at UC San Diego, majoring in biochemistry. Her cousin’s kidney transplants had set her on her life’s course, he said. Fittingly, she had signed to be an organ donor on her driver’s license in the event of her death.

Given their geographical separation, Borad had seen only “snippets” of Amanda’s life as it unfolded and had last spoken to her at Christmas. Struck by her beauty, impressed by her desire to help society, Borad said he didn’t want her death to get lost in the myriad tragedies that dot the landscape.

“If somehow or other,” he said, “people could know there are special people in the world and know that that special person is gone and that maybe the rest of us have to pick up the slack in one way or another . . . maybe that’s the message. I don’t know.”

Amanda Borad’s parents, Deborah and Fred, live in Westminster and have a 21-year-old son, Matt. In the 2 1/2 weeks since her death, they’ve been whipsawed by grief on the one hand and tributes to her on the other. Deborah Borad says condolence notes are nearing 1,000, including those from people who had only met Amanda once or twice.

The family will carry on, Deborah Borad says, because to do otherwise would dishonor their daughter’s wishes.

And so life does go on, as it did last Saturday night when dancers from the Huntington Beach Academy for the Performing Arts gave a special program.

The final number of the evening was entitled “Love Song,” and was a routine that Amanda had choreographed. Watching their daughter dance had been a family treat all the way back to when she was 5 years old and teamed with Fred in a father-daughter program in which Amanda was dubbed “Dancing Flower.”

Last Saturday, the Borads feared that the moment would be too much for them, too painful.

Instead, Deborah Borad says, the show uplifted her.

For at least one more time, she says, she could feel her daughter dancing.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com