SEQUIM — It was just the kind of party 13-year-old KayDee Mae Chrisman-Campbell would have reveled in, her friends say.
About 200 people she knew and loved gathered Sunday afternoon at Carrie Blake Park to eat cake, talk softball and view hundreds of pictures chronicling her childhood.
“KayDee would have loved this. She was always the life of the party,” said Ashley Pearson, 14, KayDee’s teammate on the Sequim Pyros fastpitch softball team.
The three-hour celebration of KayDee’s life — which ended July 22 after a car crash in Maple Valley — was marked by a mixture of joy and pain, laughter and tears; the sort of complex display of grief expected of teens who have limited experience death.
Among the adults at Sunday’s service, the pain was just as obvious.
KayDee’s mother, Ronda Campbell, attended with her surviving children — Tony, 18, Jeff, 17, and Brianna, 10.
Campbell said she was trying to maintain her composure to get through the service.
She is still wheelchair-bound, recovering from injuries sustained in the crash that took her daughter’s life.
“This is really beautiful,” she said, glancing around the Guy Cole Convention Center, which was adorned with balloons, flowers and mementos of KayDee.
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The rest of the story appears in the Tuesday Peninsula Daily News.