‘She Was Our Sunshine’: Loved Ones Share Memories of Caroline Kyle
Caroline Kyle, autumn 2020.
Everything and everyone radiated from Caroline Kyle.
She was the glue that joined friend groups and siblings and families together, in Avalon and back home in Blue Bell, Pa. She was the one who always made the plans to meet up with her favorite people and never missed out on an opportunity to have fun.
“She was our sunshine,” says her mother, Beth Kyle.
All who knew her were devastated when Caroline passed away unexpectedly but peacefully in her sleep on July 9. She was 19.
She’d spent her summer right here in Avalon – her favorite place, as a true beach girl – the same as she’d done since before she could walk, in the house her grandparents bought in 1997. Her mother and her father, Rob, dipped her toes in the Avalon sand for the first time in late September 2002, when she was just five weeks old.
During her summers, when she wasn’t at work – this year, at Stone Harbor Pizza Pub and as an intern at Seven Mile Publishing & Creative – she was out surfing with her friends or spending time with her brother Rory and sister Grace.
“She just was kind of the center of everything,” says one of Caroline’s best friends, Kevin Comerford, who has known her since third grade together at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy. “I feel like I remember so many times, like when I'm trying to think of memories – it's just the Kyles’ kitchen counter, just sitting at their kitchen counter, talking to Mr. and Mrs. Kyle, talking to Caroline, talking to whoever else was at the house at that time.”
Because Caroline was so close with her family – Rory and Grace are just one and three years younger – her friends became their friends, and vice versa. Caroline and her group of girls were the ones to welcome Grace into Mount Saint Joseph Academy on her first day of high school.
“The first day, I was a little scared freshman,” Grace says. “But when I walked in, all of the seniors were like, ‘Grace!!!’ – all of Caroline’s friends.”
“These guys never really fought,” their mother says.
“It was just Rory and Caroline teaming up on me,” Grace says, shaking her head a little at the antics of her older siblings.
“We’d squish her,” Rory says, laughing. “We’d sit on opposite sides of the car, Grace in the middle. And I’d be like, ‘OK, Caroline, 3, 2, 1 squish!’”
The three of them learned to surf together on a trip to North Carolina when they were all in elementary school, and none of them ever stopped. Caroline often went on sunrise surfs in Wildwood with Kevin, or met up with their whole friend group — August Blatney, Ryan McLaughlin and Kevork Zeibari, among others — to just sit on the water, even if the waves weren’t very exciting. Just being with her friends, on her favorite board – Darla, she called it – was enough.
Caroline fell in love with Darla when she saw the surfboard through the window of She Be Surfin’ during Memorial Day weekend one summer, and she set her determined heart on getting it for herself. She checked up on it every week, and watched the price tick down as the summer crawled on.
“All summer long, she’d walk by She Be Surfin’ and just stare at this board,” her father says.
She begged her parents week after week to help her get the board, and they didn’t cave – not until Labor Day weekend, when Rob finally took her down to She Be Surfin’ to purchase it.
(Her mother says that’s how she always was – persuasive and prepared with a bulleted list of arguments to get what she wanted for any occasion.)
Caroline pitched in for the board with her babysitting money. And she surfed with it ever since – her smile says it all.
Caroline’s love for the water extended through her time in high school when she joined the crew team. Rob, who rowed at St. Joseph’s University, said he suggested it as something she might enjoy after she decided she was done with lacrosse entering her freshman year.
And it stuck. Caroline graduated from the Mount with three varsity letters from crew and a national championship under her belt. After winning the 2019 Stotesbury Regatta, her Lightweight 8 boat traveled to Ohio and was victorious in the Scholastic Rowing Association of America National Championship.
Their days in the Lightweight 8 boat are among the things that Kaylee Dougherty, another one of Caroline’s best friends, remembers most. “The Jeep girls” – a nod to Caroline’s navy blue Jeep and Kaylee’s blue one – were the only sophomores in the boat that year, and they spent every Tuesday at PJ Whelihan’s after practice, devouring a plate of Wicked Chicken Nachos. They were inseparable.
“She’s just my sister,” Kaylee says.
“She was the goofiest, most loving human being,” she adds. “When you think nice human being — she was on another level.”
That meant she was always there for her friends, no matter the distance or the time of night.
“A lot of times, something will happen in the friendship and you're like, ‘Oh, I meant to text you,’” McLaughlin says. “And I think being in college and everything, it's easier to be less in contact with all your friends. But that was never the case [with Caroline]. The whole year, she was always there, 100%.”
“She was also just reliable in that, when you saw Caroline or you were doing something with Caroline, you just knew it was going to be a good time,” adds Blatney from the couch next to Ryan. “There's plenty of times where, maybe you were unsure about going to something, but it was like, ‘Oh, if Caroline's going to be there, I know I have a friend, I know it's going to be OK.’”
As for Rory and Grace, Caroline was always a role model – and someone to look out for them.
“She definitely taught me how to stand up for myself,” Rory says. “Stand up for yourself. Be your own person. Don’t follow others – it’s fine if you’re yourself.”
Says Grace: “She was never really scared in social situations. But she helped me just learn how to not be scared.”
Her father remembers her confidence when crossing any obstacles that got in her way during her life – including stop signs.
“I put Caroline in the car, and she was driving – for the first time ever – for all of five minutes, and she went right through a stop sign,” Rob recalls. “And when Caroline stopped, she's like, ‘Dad, I know what I'm doing.’ Like she’d been driving for five minutes, you know? But her confidence — she's like, ‘Dad, I know what I'm doing.’”
“She was horrible at driving,” Kaylee says (adding later, “Please make sure to put that in there.”) “The amount of car crashes we almost got into at like 7am when no one was on the road on the way to practice – unreal.”
When she wasn’t the one behind the wheel, Caroline made playlist after playlist for her beach days — her mother recalls a favorite called “surfing vibes” — and for long car rides down to the College of Charleston, where she had just finished her freshman year.
“She has such good taste in music, and she would make these playlists,” Beth says. “Driving down to Charleston – taking her to school last year – she had this whole playlist, and we would listen and sing.”
“What’s that one song?” Rob asks. “Dr. Dog?”
“’Where’d All the Time Go?’” Rory answers immediately.
The family would play it in the car every time they crossed the Ravenel Bridge to leave Charleston and start the trip back home to Blue Bell. And they just made that trip again, a few weeks ago in August, when they took Rory to start his freshman year at Charleston.
“Rory is going to take on the legacy,” his mother says, rubbing his back with a smile.
Her friends and family remembered that legacy in Avalon on Aug. 6 — a day that was already Caroline’s. In 2018, she unknowingly started a tradition of gathering all her friends together for a day of surfing and a celebration of summer, when everyone happened to be on Seven Mile Beach.
“She was trying to get everyone together, and it ended up that the day that worked for everyone was Aug. 6,” Kevin said. “Then, the months following, everyone was like, ‘Aug. 6, Aug. 6, that was such a good day, Aug. 6, that was like the best day ever.’”
And so, Aug. 6 became a holiday for their crew. This year, because they already had plans to get together for the Fourth of July, and a few of them would be leaving for school before the big day, they happened to celebrate on July 6 instead — just a few days before Caroline’s passing.
“She got her fifth year of Aug. 6,” Kevin says.
This year, her friends and family gathered on 15th Street beach with their surfboards — including Darla — for a paddle-out in Caroline’s memory, where they had a moment of silence and scattered Caroline’s ashes over her surfboard before spending the day celebrating her life.
They all wore T-shirts featuring each of their surfboards displayed in a circle around Darla and a sample of Caroline’s handwriting from a journal entry dated on her last day.
“Be happy,” she wrote. “Love, Caroline.”
The Kyles want that to be Caroline’s legacy: Be happy.
The week after her passing, a woman who speaks nationally about the hardships of her life came to the Kyles’ house. She told them her story, and said that in times like these, people have two choices: to be bitter, or be better.
“After two hours of talking with her, that phrase – it's five words – be bitter or be better,” Rob says. “It hit like a ton of bricks. So that – be better – is kind of becoming like our mantra because other choices are the dark, the angry, and that doesn't help.”
“Caroline wouldn’t want us to be bitter,” Beth adds. “She would want us to live our life. She would hate us sitting around crying, pining over her — she would want us to be out living life, and I do know that. So, we choose to be better.”
The Kyle family is raising money to donate and name a boat in Caroline’s honor for the Mount crew team. Donations can be made online at msjacad.org/support/mount-fund specifying that the gift is to Mount Crew in memory of Caroline Kyle in the “Special Instructions” line, or be mailed via check to Mount St. Joseph Academy Crew, 120 W. Wissahickon Ave., Flourtown, PA 19031, with a designation in the memo line to Caroline’s memory.