I have no right, no place, to make any comment whatsoever on the death on Sunday evening of that lovely young woman, Scarleth S. Urgiles of East Hampton High School. There are, as the cliché has it, no words. The only thing I would like to say to her fellow students at the high school, who must be in a daze of grief and confusion this week on Long Lane — bereft as I am of any other topic on my mind as we all absorb the news of what happened to eight kids in a Toyota Camry on Old Stone Highway — is that Scarleth’s memory truly will live on.
None of us will ever forget Scarleth. She will be forever 19, and forever beautiful, and her face — a gentle, forthright gaze and cupid’s bow mouth — will remain stamped in our thoughts actually forever.
If so inclined, you might Google her name, Scarleth Urgiles, now to find a quick link to the GoFundMe that her grieving mother has set up to help cover the cost of her funeral.
Scarleth was 19, originally from Ecuador, and, according to a statement from her mother on the fund-raising site, a dedicated student and selfless volunteer whose big dream in life was to buy a house for her family.
“Not all of them make it,” a friend said on Monday afternoon. He meant teenagers. We always lose one or two, especially in spring, especially in June, as their sheer joy and exuberance at the end of classes and the promise of summer freedom bursts out of the confines of the cinder-block walls of high schools and they spill into streets, into the surf, and into friends’ cars like a pile of puppies.
I can certainly still remember the faces of the two girls from East Hampton High School who “didn’t make it” back in the early 1980s, when I and my brothers were there, one lost to a car accident and one to crime. They’re always there, glancing back over a shoulder in the hallway of the school, a Trapper Keeper notebook on the hip of their corduroy pants.
This isn’t the moment to judge these young passengers. Who among us didn’t, some June long ago, climb into the back of a beach car and ride on someone’s lap, “just this once,” or “only for a short ride.”
No one in town will ever forget this heinous Sunday night, the night before the last day of school. The freshmen and sophomores at the high school will never forget that the driver had been drinking, or that their classmate may have survived if she’d been wearing a seatbelt. It goes without saying that nothing will lessen the pain for her friends and mom, and her brother, Jack, of this excruciating loss, but still it is true: Scarleth will have a place in East Hampton’s heart forever.