In the face of tragedy, family shares side of River Ridge teen most never knew

Grace Sulak remains present in every corner of her family’s Bluffton home. Every wall of the house where she lived her entire life holds a reminder of her short life.

There are years of honor roll certificates, pencil marks tracking the teen’s height from her toddler years to her 8th-grade growth spurt, and a high school track varsity letter, earned when Sulak was in just 7th grade.

In the kitchen, there is still a box of cake mix meant for Mother’s Day. Grace and her twin sister, Faith, were planning to bake the cake Sunday for their two moms.

But they never got the chance.

Instead Grace’s parents, Heidi Hanson and her partner Kristen Sulak, spent Sunday facing the unimaginable.

Their smart, goofy, athletic, girl — always the one in the family full of energy and life — was gone.

The River Ridge academy student died in a car crash returning from a Bluffton High track meet in Columbia on Saturday night. Her teammate and friend, Emma Dewey and Emma’s mother Andrea Dewey, were seriously injured in the crash. Grace was just 14 years old.

When Grace’s mothers got home after the devastating news, the house was one big reminder of everything they’d lost.

“Grace is everywhere here,” Hanson said Monday, two days after her daughter’s death. “And as painful as it is, it’s what we want. We’re always going to be a family of four. We want to hold those memories close.”

Hanson remembers that even as a teenager, Grace never pushed her family away.

“It’s comforting to go in her room because she still every night wanted to be tucked in by one of us,” Hanson said. “You just have to remember all of that. You have to try not think about the rest right now ... because if you do, you’d just drown.”

The Grace her family knew

Grace’s twin, Faith, was also one of her best friends and one of the few people who knew the goofy side of her sister who danced around the house and talked nonstop through dinner.

“She’s really quiet, she’s really shy at school,” Faith said. “She didn’t like to do anything outside of the box and she stayed with the same people. But at home she was really crazy. She’d be running around screaming and she’s really funny. There are just two different sides and if you only knew one side of her, you could never believe the other one existed.”

Her family matched Grace’s playful side measure for measure.

When Grace didn’t want to get up in the morning, Heidi began taking a squirt gun into her room. At first, just the threat of the water worked to get Grace out of bed. But eventually, Grace would just let her mom spray her with water every morning without getting out of bed.

“People probably think we have a really unconventional home, you know we’re two women raising kids,” said Kristen. “But we’re really conventional except for stuff like the water gun in the morning ... .”

This year, the family ran a life-size version of the Hungry Hippos board game using balls and baskets connected to pallet movers. Grace’s competitive spirit as an athlete — and her long arms — helped her dominate the game.

When the four family members play the card game “spoons,” which requires players to dive for spoons on the table, they took to wearing football helmets as protection.

On family hiking trips, Grace was fixated on finding a place where there was snow, having spent her whole life in South Carolina. The family would take trips in search of snowstorms, but they never got the timing right.

Still, family trips and a large extended family in the Bluffton area always kept Grace and her sister close with family.

“We kept waiting for that teenage thing to happen where they want to be left alone and they don’t want to be touched,” Kristen said, “but that never happened.”

A natural athlete

Grace was a natural athlete.

She was tall, fast and quietly competitive. She was a high school track star when she was in just the 7th grade and was the Most Valuable Player this year for the River Ridge girls basketball team.

But what made Grace exceptional was her ability to remain kind in the middle of competition.

“I remember her basketball coach had to pull her off the court one time and tell her: ‘Quit saying ‘excuse me’ (to the other players on the court),” Heidi said.

For all Grace’s athletic achievement, Kristen said she is the most proud of Grace’s moments of sportsmanship.

In a competitive qualifying race this year, Kristen remembered the moment Grace crossed the finish line in a place that didn’t qualify for regionals. But instead of acting upset, Grace turned around and started cheering for the other runners as they crossed.

“I don’t know how a 14-year-old was able to not think about herself. ...She always put somebody else first,” Kristen said. “I would like to say that I did that, that I instilled that in her, but she just had that.”

To Grace, her track teammates were some of her closest friends, especially Emma Dewey, who she had known since first grade.

Grace was looking forward to graduating middle school, to being in the same school as her older Bluffton High teammates.

“She told me she would be the popular twin because she already had so many high school friends,” Faith remembered.

Though she never enjoyed running as much as her twin, Faith decided Sunday that she is going to join the track and field team in memory of her sister.

The future, five minutes at a time

It took just hours after the news of Grace’s death for her teammates and coaches to plan a vigil for her and their injured teammate.

Hundreds flooded the track at Bluffton High School for the event Sunday night.

“She would probably be self-conscious if she saw all of that,” Heidi said. “All those people and how she touched one or another’s life. But to see the outpouring of the community was moving.”

But after the vigils and a memorial service planned for Grace on Wednesday, the family doesn’t know how it will cope with the loss.

“The only ‘forward’ that we have is five minutes from right now,” Kristen said. “We’ll have moments that we’ll start to think: ‘Oh my God, how are we even going to make breakfast in the morning?’... But you can’t go there. It’s five minutes at a time and I’m sure one day it will be 10 minutes at a time.”

Hanson said the family is trying to focus on the happy memories that defined Grace.

“I grasp for any memory that takes away the heartburn a little bit,” Heidi said. “I’m trying to find ways of keeping her close. ... I just want to remember that she was one of the best people I’ve ever known.”

This story was originally published May 9, 2016 at 6:24 PM with the headline "In the face of tragedy, family shares side of River Ridge teen most never knew."