Bengal Roar
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PAINFUL JOURNEY
Bengals libero excels for team after difficult redshirt season
BY KELVIN ANG
Every morning when Paige Palmer dresses to go out, she slips a gold necklace around her neck. She attaches around her left wrist a silver bracelet with 10 miniature hearts dangling from its chains.
Idaho State’s redshirt junior libero already is wearing a silver wedding band on her right ring finger. She never takes it off, except maybe when she’s playing a volleyball match.
As Palmer leaves her room, she’ll walk by two photographs propped on her television set of her and her high school sweetheart, Jason Long, who gave her all those mementos. Palmer wears her hair curly in each of the photos, but she doesn’t so often anymore.
Long’s no longer around to see or feel her hair. He died of leukemia a year ago, barely nine months after he proposed to her and they began dreaming about the house they would live in as they grew old.
“I think about him every day, more than once,” Palmer said. “Sometimes, I can laugh about it. Sometimes, I cry about it.”
Palmer now laughs more than she cries, but it’s still hard for her to hold back tears when she hears the Rascal Flatts song they once designated their own or drives by Señor Iguanas, their favorite local restaurant.
Palmer and Long’s was the classic tale of the picture-perfect couple whom everybody envied, until leukemia dashed it. But the illness could not erase it.
Leukemia deprived Long of the strength that made him a football star at Lone Peak (Utah) High School, but it didn’t rob him or Palmer of the resolve with which they fought it.
Long’s struggle against the blood disorder prompted Palmer to redshirt last season to spend more time with him, but it didn’t distance her from the Idaho State volleyball team. Instead, she leaned on her teammates more heavily than ever before.
Her fiance’s death sapped Palmer of her upbeat personality, but only for the briefest time. After a season away from the sport, Palmer has returned this fall to lead the Bengals in digs. Today, she’s still the Paige Palmer her friends and family love fiercely, and yes, she still carries an aching love for Long that will not fade.
“I miss him a lot, but I still believe that there are angels that watch over us,” Palmer said. “It took me a long time to feel that way, but I think once it comes down to it, I don’t believe that he was just taken from me or from his family or from his friends just because.”
Long and Palmer were, in the words of Palmer’s mother, Suzanne, a “darling couple.” Long was the star receiver and safety on Lone Peak’s football team. Palmer was the captain of the volleyball team.
They faithfully attended each other’s games, after which, like an old married couple, they would nag at the other to take ibuprofen and ice their sore bodies.
“It was cute,” Suzanne Palmer said by phone from their home in Highland, Utah. “They weren’t all mushy and stuff because Paige wasn’t that way.”
After high school, Long prepared to embark on an LDS mission to Harrisburg, Penn. Palmer teased him that she wouldn’t be the girl who waited around for him, but of course, she fully intended to do so, handwriting letters to him weekly.
Then, 10 months into Long’s mission in August 2006, he sent a letter informing her he was having trouble eating or drinking anything but Gatorade without vomiting. A follow-up e-mail said he was throwing up blood.
Against Long’s wishes, the mission president dragged the stubborn missionary to a local hospital. Blood work revealed stunning news: Long had leukemia.
Palmer already had returned to Idaho State by then in preparation for preseason camp. Tear-stricken, she made the excruciating decision to stay at school while their church whisked Long to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City.
“Being away from him was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Palmer said. “My first thought was: I want to go out there. I want to be with him. I want to be there for him.”
As it turned out, that was all Palmer could think about that fall semester — in class, at volleyball practice, all the time. Whenever Idaho State flew into Salt Lake City after away matches, Palmer would stay at the hospital for the night. Sometimes, she would drive down after practices because she just burned to see him.
Their meetings weren’t always easy on her. Every time she saw him, even if it was two days after a previous visit, he looked different. He had new bruises on his arms from intravenous puncture wounds. Chemotherapy made more and more of his brown hair fall off until he one day decided to shave his head bald.
By the end of the semester, Long had lost a quarter of his 200 pounds. His eyes at times looked so sunken he complained to Palmer he hardly even recognized himself anymore.
But to everyone else, Long refused to show any signs he was feeling demoralized. And as much as it tortured Palmer to watch him suffer, she also remained all kisses and smiles around him.
“In that situation, anyone’s going to get down and be upset, but when we saw Jason, she would never show that side at all,” said Idaho State junior Emily Waldron, who accompanied Palmer on several trips to the hospital. “She compensated so he could lean on her. It just shows you what kind of a person she is. She was just so strong the whole time.”
Fate seemed to reward them for their faith when Long underwent a bone marrow transplant right before Thanksgiving that year and showed dramatic improvement in his recovery.
By Christmas, Long was strong enough to leave the hospital, even if he had to wear an oxygen mask and carry a portable IV pump with him everywhere he went. Still, he was in a bright enough mood Christmas Eve to play a memorable trick on Palmer.
In front of a large crowd of friends and family, Long got on one knee before Palmer and fished a red velvet box from his pocket. Palmer began tearing up, only to realize he wasn’t proposing. He was merely giving her the gold necklace she now wears daily.
It wasn’t until they were alone together later in the day that he presented her with a diamond-encrusted engagement ring.
“She felt such a deep love for him,” Suzanne Palmer said. “When you tend to someone like that who is ill and who depends on you, you love them so much.”
Long’s cancer remained in remission all through the spring. By the summer, he was back lifting weights at their local gym, even if he often had to endure Palmer’s ribbing that he was barely lifting heavier weights than she was. They could once again go bowling and mini-golfing. It was like the good old times.
Their peace of mind didn’t last long. Palmer had packed her Subaru Legacy late one Sunday night in early August, all ready to return to Idaho State for her junior season, when she received a call from Long. He couldn’t breathe.
A frantic trip to the hospital later, they discovered his heart was failing. After a night of prayer, Palmer decided she wasn’t going to leave his side this time.
“That fall,” Palmer said, sighing, “was a long fall.”
Long was sick, and none of the doctors the Huntsman institute brought in from across the nation knew why. Instead of growing skinny, Long this time gained weight. Every time he shaved, his beard, once a dark brown, grew back a different color. His eyesight began to fail.
Through it all, Palmer stayed by Long. Having packed her car for school, Palmer had everything she needed to virtually live in the hospital. She showered there. She slept on a chair by his bed. She stayed seated so long her ankles grew swollen and painful.
She cherished those days like none other. They constantly held hands and talked about how they would have four or five kids. Palmer would name their first-born, if she was a girl, Breanne Celeste Long. He would go play football for BYU, which had recruited him as a walk-on.
And when they ran out of things to talk about, Long would just softly sing to her their favorite Rascal Flatts song: “This much I know is true, that God bless the broken road that led me straight to you,” words that held so much more meaning to them than most could imagine.
“I only saw him cry twice,” Palmer said. “He never in his mind thought, this isn’t going to happen; this isn’t going to work.”
On Sept. 13, 2007, Long’s family gathered in his hospital room for his 21st birthday. Palmer collected pictures of his friends on their respective missions and compiled it into a scrapbook along with their e-mailed greetings. She had to read them to him because his eyes weren’t working too well by then.
Six days later, with Palmer holding hands with him in the intensive care unit, Long stopped breathing.
Palmer didn’t want to see the flowers and consolatory cards in her room. They only made her question: Why this? Why him? What could she have done differently?
She didn’t want to leave her house, either, and drive by the Wendy’s or Gandolfo’s Deli where she had accumulated so many memories with Long.
More than anything else, Palmer wanted to be with her Idaho State teammates. She returned to campus for one Bengals match at Reed Gym, then another and another. The Bengals, in turn, wore ribbons in their hair every match to pay tribute to Long.
“They were just waiting for me to come back, and it was such a great feeling to have that open-arms feeling,” Palmer said. “Just to have 12 sisters to come lean on whenever I needed someone, it was perfect.”
Back in Highland, Palmer’s friends and family did their best to protect her from solitary moments she might have spent in her room with just the life-sized teddy bear Long bought her.
One by one, her high school buddies returned from their missions and camped in her living room, enticing her with games of “Guitar Hero.” Her three brothers took her out to ride their horse and walk their two golden retrievers. Her girlfriends visited with romantic comedies and tubs of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.
“Usually, it was just being with her and listening and talking and crying together,” said Alexis Barney, a close friend of Palmer’s. “We were just being there, rather than anything else.”
Palmer herself kept as busy as she could, continuing a coaching stint with the Lone Peak volleyball team she had started earlier in the fall. That team, which slammed its way to the 5A Utah state title, provided her with as much therapy as anything else.
Naturally, Palmer couldn’t wait to return to Idaho State and play volleyball this past spring. Palmer still wasn’t back to being herself. She would see a familiar restaurant and cry. She would smell a familiar scent and cry.
But having to dash from class to practice and then back home to finish her homework helped take her mind off her troubles. When it didn’t, she had Waldron and company to share her sorrows with.
“No matter what, the twoand-a-half hours of volleyball that I have every day are my getaway from everything,” Palmer said. “It’s the time when, whether I’m laughing or crying, my team’s always there laughing or crying with me.”
More than a year has passed since Palmer last held Long’s hand.
She can now look at pictures of them and remember fondly the times they spent together, instead of the dread she felt sitting by his hospital bed.
She beams when she talks about the Jason Long Foundation, a nonprofit organization their families formed to raise money for the Huntsman institute and other organizations he cared deeply about.
She’s slowly begun dating again, although the dates just don’t feel right, and she often calls Waldron afterward and points out the ways in which her suitor isn’t like Long.
So far, she hasn’t met anyone she cares about even a fraction of the way she still feels about her high school sweetheart.
“Jason will always be a part of me,” Palmer said. “I don’t think anyone will ever take the place of Jason. I don’t think anyone ever needs to.”
She still remembers him in different ways. She switched from the No. 10 Bengals jersey to No. 3 because that was his number. She scrawls “Jason” on her left wrist before each match.
Because of Long’s propensity for surprising her with little gifts, Palmer also has a lifetime of mementos by which to remember him: a room full of dried pink roses — every one he’s ever given her — back home in Utah, for example.
And of course, she has the gold necklace and silver bracelet that accompany her everywhere.
The keepsakes once represented simply a boy’s love for a girl. They now carry so much more meaning today than Long or Palmer could have ever imagined.
Bengals libero excels for team after difficult redshirt season
BY KELVIN ANG
Every morning when Paige Palmer dresses to go out, she slips a gold necklace around her neck. She attaches around her left wrist a silver bracelet with 10 miniature hearts dangling from its chains.
Idaho State’s redshirt junior libero already is wearing a silver wedding band on her right ring finger. She never takes it off, except maybe when she’s playing a volleyball match.
As Palmer leaves her room, she’ll walk by two photographs propped on her television set of her and her high school sweetheart, Jason Long, who gave her all those mementos. Palmer wears her hair curly in each of the photos, but she doesn’t so often anymore.
Long’s no longer around to see or feel her hair. He died of leukemia a year ago, barely nine months after he proposed to her and they began dreaming about the house they would live in as they grew old.
“I think about him every day, more than once,” Palmer said. “Sometimes, I can laugh about it. Sometimes, I cry about it.”
Palmer now laughs more than she cries, but it’s still hard for her to hold back tears when she hears the Rascal Flatts song they once designated their own or drives by Señor Iguanas, their favorite local restaurant.
Palmer and Long’s was the classic tale of the picture-perfect couple whom everybody envied, until leukemia dashed it. But the illness could not erase it.
Leukemia deprived Long of the strength that made him a football star at Lone Peak (Utah) High School, but it didn’t rob him or Palmer of the resolve with which they fought it.
Long’s struggle against the blood disorder prompted Palmer to redshirt last season to spend more time with him, but it didn’t distance her from the Idaho State volleyball team. Instead, she leaned on her teammates more heavily than ever before.
Her fiance’s death sapped Palmer of her upbeat personality, but only for the briefest time. After a season away from the sport, Palmer has returned this fall to lead the Bengals in digs. Today, she’s still the Paige Palmer her friends and family love fiercely, and yes, she still carries an aching love for Long that will not fade.
“I miss him a lot, but I still believe that there are angels that watch over us,” Palmer said. “It took me a long time to feel that way, but I think once it comes down to it, I don’t believe that he was just taken from me or from his family or from his friends just because.”
Long and Palmer were, in the words of Palmer’s mother, Suzanne, a “darling couple.” Long was the star receiver and safety on Lone Peak’s football team. Palmer was the captain of the volleyball team.
They faithfully attended each other’s games, after which, like an old married couple, they would nag at the other to take ibuprofen and ice their sore bodies.
“It was cute,” Suzanne Palmer said by phone from their home in Highland, Utah. “They weren’t all mushy and stuff because Paige wasn’t that way.”
After high school, Long prepared to embark on an LDS mission to Harrisburg, Penn. Palmer teased him that she wouldn’t be the girl who waited around for him, but of course, she fully intended to do so, handwriting letters to him weekly.
Then, 10 months into Long’s mission in August 2006, he sent a letter informing her he was having trouble eating or drinking anything but Gatorade without vomiting. A follow-up e-mail said he was throwing up blood.
Against Long’s wishes, the mission president dragged the stubborn missionary to a local hospital. Blood work revealed stunning news: Long had leukemia.
Palmer already had returned to Idaho State by then in preparation for preseason camp. Tear-stricken, she made the excruciating decision to stay at school while their church whisked Long to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City.
“Being away from him was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Palmer said. “My first thought was: I want to go out there. I want to be with him. I want to be there for him.”
As it turned out, that was all Palmer could think about that fall semester — in class, at volleyball practice, all the time. Whenever Idaho State flew into Salt Lake City after away matches, Palmer would stay at the hospital for the night. Sometimes, she would drive down after practices because she just burned to see him.
Their meetings weren’t always easy on her. Every time she saw him, even if it was two days after a previous visit, he looked different. He had new bruises on his arms from intravenous puncture wounds. Chemotherapy made more and more of his brown hair fall off until he one day decided to shave his head bald.
By the end of the semester, Long had lost a quarter of his 200 pounds. His eyes at times looked so sunken he complained to Palmer he hardly even recognized himself anymore.
But to everyone else, Long refused to show any signs he was feeling demoralized. And as much as it tortured Palmer to watch him suffer, she also remained all kisses and smiles around him.
“In that situation, anyone’s going to get down and be upset, but when we saw Jason, she would never show that side at all,” said Idaho State junior Emily Waldron, who accompanied Palmer on several trips to the hospital. “She compensated so he could lean on her. It just shows you what kind of a person she is. She was just so strong the whole time.”
Fate seemed to reward them for their faith when Long underwent a bone marrow transplant right before Thanksgiving that year and showed dramatic improvement in his recovery.
By Christmas, Long was strong enough to leave the hospital, even if he had to wear an oxygen mask and carry a portable IV pump with him everywhere he went. Still, he was in a bright enough mood Christmas Eve to play a memorable trick on Palmer.
In front of a large crowd of friends and family, Long got on one knee before Palmer and fished a red velvet box from his pocket. Palmer began tearing up, only to realize he wasn’t proposing. He was merely giving her the gold necklace she now wears daily.
It wasn’t until they were alone together later in the day that he presented her with a diamond-encrusted engagement ring.
“She felt such a deep love for him,” Suzanne Palmer said. “When you tend to someone like that who is ill and who depends on you, you love them so much.”
Long’s cancer remained in remission all through the spring. By the summer, he was back lifting weights at their local gym, even if he often had to endure Palmer’s ribbing that he was barely lifting heavier weights than she was. They could once again go bowling and mini-golfing. It was like the good old times.
Their peace of mind didn’t last long. Palmer had packed her Subaru Legacy late one Sunday night in early August, all ready to return to Idaho State for her junior season, when she received a call from Long. He couldn’t breathe.
A frantic trip to the hospital later, they discovered his heart was failing. After a night of prayer, Palmer decided she wasn’t going to leave his side this time.
“That fall,” Palmer said, sighing, “was a long fall.”
Long was sick, and none of the doctors the Huntsman institute brought in from across the nation knew why. Instead of growing skinny, Long this time gained weight. Every time he shaved, his beard, once a dark brown, grew back a different color. His eyesight began to fail.
Through it all, Palmer stayed by Long. Having packed her car for school, Palmer had everything she needed to virtually live in the hospital. She showered there. She slept on a chair by his bed. She stayed seated so long her ankles grew swollen and painful.
She cherished those days like none other. They constantly held hands and talked about how they would have four or five kids. Palmer would name their first-born, if she was a girl, Breanne Celeste Long. He would go play football for BYU, which had recruited him as a walk-on.
And when they ran out of things to talk about, Long would just softly sing to her their favorite Rascal Flatts song: “This much I know is true, that God bless the broken road that led me straight to you,” words that held so much more meaning to them than most could imagine.
“I only saw him cry twice,” Palmer said. “He never in his mind thought, this isn’t going to happen; this isn’t going to work.”
On Sept. 13, 2007, Long’s family gathered in his hospital room for his 21st birthday. Palmer collected pictures of his friends on their respective missions and compiled it into a scrapbook along with their e-mailed greetings. She had to read them to him because his eyes weren’t working too well by then.
Six days later, with Palmer holding hands with him in the intensive care unit, Long stopped breathing.
Palmer didn’t want to see the flowers and consolatory cards in her room. They only made her question: Why this? Why him? What could she have done differently?
She didn’t want to leave her house, either, and drive by the Wendy’s or Gandolfo’s Deli where she had accumulated so many memories with Long.
More than anything else, Palmer wanted to be with her Idaho State teammates. She returned to campus for one Bengals match at Reed Gym, then another and another. The Bengals, in turn, wore ribbons in their hair every match to pay tribute to Long.
“They were just waiting for me to come back, and it was such a great feeling to have that open-arms feeling,” Palmer said. “Just to have 12 sisters to come lean on whenever I needed someone, it was perfect.”
Back in Highland, Palmer’s friends and family did their best to protect her from solitary moments she might have spent in her room with just the life-sized teddy bear Long bought her.
One by one, her high school buddies returned from their missions and camped in her living room, enticing her with games of “Guitar Hero.” Her three brothers took her out to ride their horse and walk their two golden retrievers. Her girlfriends visited with romantic comedies and tubs of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.
“Usually, it was just being with her and listening and talking and crying together,” said Alexis Barney, a close friend of Palmer’s. “We were just being there, rather than anything else.”
Palmer herself kept as busy as she could, continuing a coaching stint with the Lone Peak volleyball team she had started earlier in the fall. That team, which slammed its way to the 5A Utah state title, provided her with as much therapy as anything else.
Naturally, Palmer couldn’t wait to return to Idaho State and play volleyball this past spring. Palmer still wasn’t back to being herself. She would see a familiar restaurant and cry. She would smell a familiar scent and cry.
But having to dash from class to practice and then back home to finish her homework helped take her mind off her troubles. When it didn’t, she had Waldron and company to share her sorrows with.
“No matter what, the twoand-a-half hours of volleyball that I have every day are my getaway from everything,” Palmer said. “It’s the time when, whether I’m laughing or crying, my team’s always there laughing or crying with me.”
More than a year has passed since Palmer last held Long’s hand.
She can now look at pictures of them and remember fondly the times they spent together, instead of the dread she felt sitting by his hospital bed.
She beams when she talks about the Jason Long Foundation, a nonprofit organization their families formed to raise money for the Huntsman institute and other organizations he cared deeply about.
She’s slowly begun dating again, although the dates just don’t feel right, and she often calls Waldron afterward and points out the ways in which her suitor isn’t like Long.
So far, she hasn’t met anyone she cares about even a fraction of the way she still feels about her high school sweetheart.
“Jason will always be a part of me,” Palmer said. “I don’t think anyone will ever take the place of Jason. I don’t think anyone ever needs to.”
She still remembers him in different ways. She switched from the No. 10 Bengals jersey to No. 3 because that was his number. She scrawls “Jason” on her left wrist before each match.
Because of Long’s propensity for surprising her with little gifts, Palmer also has a lifetime of mementos by which to remember him: a room full of dried pink roses — every one he’s ever given her — back home in Utah, for example.
And of course, she has the gold necklace and silver bracelet that accompany her everywhere.
The keepsakes once represented simply a boy’s love for a girl. They now carry so much more meaning today than Long or Palmer could have ever imagined.
