Meg Herndon wanted to spend her life in hospitals. She wanted to be a nurse like her mother, and by her 3.83 GPA at Southeast Missouri State, it looked like she would have once she graduated this spring. She wanted to help people in dire situations. She wanted to bring joy.
Herndon started all 19 matches last year on the SEMO women’s soccer team back line. She started the first seven games this season, too. She liked to fight forward for the ball as defenders do, just like she wanted to fight illness and disease. She had a nose for it, fighting. This weekend, she lost a fight. She lost the fight for her life.
SEMO tied Evansville 0-0 on Sept. 11, but the name Herndon doesn’t appear in the box score. That’s because two days earlier, the 21-year-old was hit by a pickup truck as she rode her scooter to school. She suffered a massive brain injury and was put on life support at a St. Louis hospital.
There was talk of canceling the Evansville game among SEMO administrators, but Meg’s teammates intervened, as explained in [an article by the Southeast Missourian](http://www.semissourian.com/story/1897060.html). They thought she’d want them to play, so they did. A school record crowd of more than 800 fans came to show their support. What they saw that night was a 110-minute stalemate, a scoreless dogfight, a parenthesis. It was like nothing could go neither forward nor back, no matter how loud the cheers. Like something was missing.
Meg spent the next 11 days in a hospital. She’ll never step foot in one again, but parts of her will. Meg’s mother, Cindi Herndon, said her daughter’s organs and rare type B blood have been donated. Her two kidneys and liver have already been matched to patients in St. Louis, [Cindi Herndon told KSDK News on Friday](http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=339606).
The people who received them were on a very limited resource list. Type B is so scarce, in fact, it’s found in no more than 2 percent of any race, according to the American Red Cross. Somewhere, these people are smiling. And it’s because Meg Herndon saved them.
SEMO spent this weekend canceling matches and mourning its former defender. On Friday night, every member of the Missouri soccer team wore a black wristband against Ole Miss in honor of Herndon, and everyone at Walton Stadium — including a record crowd of 1,539 — stood for a moment of silence.
The wristbands didn’t stick out against the Tigers’ all-black uniforms, and that’s a good thing. Respect is supposed to be a subtle gesture, not a gaudy one. What Missouri saw from Herndon’s story was a nightmare they never want to dream.
Just days earlier she was jumping for headers and clogging the box. She might have been out to eat or on Facebook. She was just on her way to campus. You don’t realize how quickly you can be taken too soon until someone just like you is.
None of the Tigers’ players knew her personally. They didn’t have to.
“At least three other families, at least today, are crying different tears because their loved ones get a chance,” Cindi Herndon said in the KSDK News interview. “And we’re crying tears of sad. … But there’s joy. As hard as that is, there’s joy.”
She did it.