It was the bottom of the seventh. Two on, two outs in a loser-go-home game between Ballard and Inglemoor high schools in the KingCo softball playoffs.
As Andrea Jewett stepped up to bat, the weight of a win on her shoulders, her father, Rick Jewett, stepped back from his spot on the sidelines and closed his eyes.
“If you can help her out,” he prayed to his late wife, Kathi Goertzen. “Be with her ...”
“The next pitch, Andrea hit it over the fence,” Jewett recalled the other day. “The team mobbed her, I was crying ...”
For joy, yes. But also because Goertzen, the longtime and well-loved co-anchor for Seattle’s KOMO-TV news, wasn’t there to see it.
She died last Aug. 13 at 54 after a long and public fight with meningioma, a tumor that grows on the brainstem. Goertzen had repeated surgeries to remove recurring tumors over the last several years, before eventually dying of pneumonia.
Now, as the anniversary of her death approaches, Jewett sat to talk about the days that have passed since, and how he and his two daughters have managed to carry on.
“As much as you’d think I was prepared for this, it was pretty shocking,” he said of Goertzen’s death. “We didn’t talk about what we were going to do when she was gone. We never left the positive realm.”
More after the bounce.
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