According to friends and family, senior Bailey McCoy is an independent, fierce, loving and funny individual with a lot to say. Despite the familial and physical loss she has experienced, she remains to have an upbeat and bubbly personality; however, many of the descriptions given by her friends and family were in the fruition of her grief.

Five months after her grandfather was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer, McCoy drove to the airport with her family at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night and flew to Washington. As they drove, McCoy emailed her teachers, letting them know she didn’t know when she would be back; three weeks later, she returned with one less family member.

“We kind of all knew it was coming. With him living in Washington, it was a little difficult on my mom. I could see how it affected my mom because she’s the oldest on that side, and it’s her dad. So I basically told all my teachers it could happen any minute now. … We had an emergency bag packed,” McCoy said. “I just miss him, and I miss talking to him and … I really connected with him the last like two years of his life, and that’s what hits me the most.”

Sunday, March 17, 2019, marked the one-year anniversary of his death.

Over the last year, McCoy’s nine-year-old sister McKenna McCoy has noticed the extra responsibility Bailey McCoy has taken for the family.

“I love that she loves me no matter what. … [When grandpa died] she was just crying with my mom. I think it’s been hard for her because she knows that she has to take care of me too but also herself,” McKenna McCoy said.

Not only has she “taken care of” her younger sister, according to Bailey McCoy’s mother Megan McCoy, Bailey McCoy has also been a source of support for her as well.

“She’s a second mom for McKenna [McCoy’s sister] whether she wanted to be or not. From the minute McKenna was born, that’s a role she kind of took over. She’s definitely a support for me. … Just watching her grow up and now getting ready to leave and grow into her own person without my guidance every single day, I think she’s helped me be stronger and be a more independent woman and practice what I preach,” Megan McCoy said. “I can depend on her to help, especially through the last year, to keep things going and moving forward.”

Although a year has passed, Bailey McCoy continues to feel her grandfather’s presence.

“Every now and then I get like a Facebook memory or something, and it’ll be me and my grandpa together or me talking to my grandpa, but I mean on a day-to-day basis I talk to him every day even though I know he can’t talk back. I see certain things and certain signs and stuff, and I know it’s him. … I am still [grieving]. It never goes away,” McCoy said.

Although everyone grieves when someone close to them dies, McCoy’s grandpa is not the only grief she has experienced — McCoy lost most of her ability to do physical activity when she was eight.

For eight years, McCoy was a cheerleader. At the age of six, her left ankle began popping and at the age of eight, her ankle began to go numb. This injury has been recurring ever since.

“It can be numb between … the shortest time it’s ever been is 15 minutes, the longest time it’s ever been is two hours depending on how hard the pop is. I’ve seen eight doctors, I’ve had two surgeries, I’ve had multiple scans and nobody knows what’s wrong with me,” McCoy said.

Many doctors prescribed her physical therapy; however, because the doctors were unaware of what was causing her ankle pain, the therapists did not know what they were treating, therefore, making the therapy ineffective.

As she grew older, McCoy was unable to continue her cheerleading career; it wasn’t until her freshman year that she tried out for another sport. During her freshman year of high school, McCoy had to have three surgeries within three months: two on her ankle and one on her tailbone because of a cyst.

“When I quit [cheerleading], most of the muscles in my body shrunk because I went from being super, super active to not at all, which has caused a lot of injuries within my body. My hips and my muscle went from big and loose to rock solid. So, therefore, it hurts to move my legs. My back muscles down my spine shrunk and they don’t cover my ribs so my ribs pop in and out of place all the time and they’re not hard to get back in because there’s no muscle there to hold it in place,” McCoy said.

Senior Ginny Curtis has known McCoy since the eighth grade, which was around the time she had her first surgery on her ankle.

“I feel like she thinks about it a lot and internalizes it. You know some days it affects her mood and sometimes it doesn’t. But I think she is very into sports and I think [that the loss of activity] has had an emotional scar on her,” Curtis said.

As McCoy continues to move forward from her losses, Megan McCoy recognizes how these experiences have impacted her daughter.

“Unfortunately, I think she’s grown up a little bit faster. I think she’s more in touch with her own feelings and expressing them with those that she knows she can trust. … She’s learning to live each day differently. She takes more value in the time that she has with people, with friends and family that matter. She tries to take those occasions a little bit more wholeheartedly than she did before. She’s not one to live with any regret,” Megan McCoy said.

Junior Tara Pikey, although acknowledges the negative impact of death and loss, chooses to look at the positive effects it has had on Bailey McCoy.

“I think it’s really affected her in a good way really. Having been through all of this stuff that’s terrible, … it’s given her a lot of ways to help other people because she knows so much about how to deal with that kind of stuff and how to really tell someone and how to make them feel a lot better. … She showed me really that I can get through a lot more than I think I can and she’s impacted the way that I handle that situation, the way I deal with it because she’s like a role model to me,” Pikey said.

Within months of McCoy’s grandfather’s passing, DGS’s own bowling coach John Ryan passed away of a similar form of cancer, which solidified her decision to participate in her third and last year on the DGS Girls’ Bowling team.

“That was a tough one because I think she was so tied in with her grandfather’s grief and Coach Ryan came as very much of a surprise to all of us, myself included. And having to tell her, having to tell all the girls on the team was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do,” Head bowling Coach Bob Topor said. “When you lose somebody the first time, it’s hard and now the second time, somebody who’s close [dies], and Coach Ryan was almost like another father figure to all of the girls, somebody you look up to and respect and admire, and so it’s very hard for her.”

Bowling teammate and senior Ashley Stephenson has been McCoy’s friend for two years. Stephenson is one of many girls on the team who were impacted by the death of Ryan.

“I think we all learned how to like not to take things for granted. You really don’t know what’s going to go on and I think she’s living proof that you can’t, and then I think she’s definitely very aware of herself and her emotions,” Stephenson said. “I’m really proud of her. I know it’s hard with Papa and with Coach and then college and everything that she has going on but I am really proud of her. She’s done a lot. She got dealt a hand of bad cards this year and she’s dealing with it really well.”

Although McCoy’s injuries have limited her abilities, bowling was the only sport she was able to tolerate the pain.

“[Bowling] has actually helped my back a little bit but it’s also hasn’t helped because my ribs move when I go to throw my ball and my ribs pop out of place but joining that team kind of gave me a little bit of hope because I felt so weak. Because I went from one hundred to zero. So joining bowling has helped me emotionally to say ‘OK. I’m not just a body sitting there,’” McCoy said.

Topor believes McCoy’s frustrations with injuries and loss of physical activity are another form of grief.

“I think it’s like the double whammy of grief and loss of loved ones and loss of your body so to speak. She’s suffered from a lot of physical injuries, some that are very traumatic and some that are just kind of recurring type things … and so I think it’s hard to deal with that on top of other things that are bad. But I think she definitely leans on the people here at South and on the team to help her through those things,” Topor said.

Although Bailey McCoy’s experiences with loss have weakened her emotional strength, she feels proud of the person she has become because of it.

“I feel like I’m proud of myself for coming out of these dark times, and I think my friends know exactly when those dark times were. So I hope to just live in the moment honestly and try not to pick up the bad things and I think I’m working better towards that,” McCoy said.