Leah Hazard

I met Julie at Mercy Corps - my first job right out of college. She could always be counted on to be floating around the building with a can of diet coke, and some frank wisdom -- usually along the lines of, "Don't worry about it. They are such a fucking douche bag." She made everything more fun. Under her influence I definitely used glitter guns to spread confetti all over our boss' office (maybe not my best move), attended a Lady Gaga concert, and just got through some otherwise rough days. She was eternally generous in all ways.

But when I think about the sense of loss I've felt over the past few days, it's really more about the occasional phone calls and instagram messages we would exchange in the 10 years since. She was a fucking prolific cheerleader throughout so many stages of my life. She was always the first to applaud a life decision whether it was working on a political campaign (she volunteered to help text voters telling me "I can text without swearing and have also done training"), graduate school ("fucking Princeton"), or my handsome husband (her words, not mine - after all as she told me, "hair is overrated").

Scrolling through years of messages, I'm sitting with one of her last to me: "But you shine wherever you are - you know that right?"

And one of mine to her from a few years back: "We all need a Julie fucking Mancini in our lives." God we, really, really do. I'll miss her so fucking much.