Amidst all the loss and grief Riley Sorenson endured in 2016, he also found love, started a "family” of his own, and showed the entire WSU Cougars program what it means to be a survivor
SAN DIEGO — On this day last December, the toughest year of Riley Sorenson’s life began.
Dec. 26, 2015: As the Washington State football team ran out the tunnel at Sun Bowl Stadium in El Paso, Texas, ready to face Miami, Cougars offensive line coach Clay McGuire held Sorenson back. He had bad news — Sorenson’s father, Bart, had suffered a heart attack right before he arrived at the stadium, and he’d been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
Riley missed the Cougars’ bowl game as he rushed to the hospital to be with his father. Bart pulled through heart surgery, but he was placed in an induced coma and never woke up. He died on Jan. 5.
Less than five months later, Sorenson would lose his mother, Karen, to cancer, and as if that were not enough to grapple with, life threw him yet another curveball shortly after his mother’s passing when Sorenson was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
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But amid all the loss and grief the Cougars’ starting center had to endure in 2016, he also found love, started a “family” of his own and showed the entire WSU Cougars program what it means to be a survivor.
Love from the embers of grief
Elisabeth Haffner was in Illinois for the holidays, watching the Sun Bowl with her grandmother and telling her about the cute boy she knew who played offensive line for the Cougars, when she realized that said cute boy wasn’t on the field.
Surprised, she glanced at her cellphone and found a text from Riley.
It read: “My dad had a heart attack and I’m on the way to the hospital.”
“My heart dropped,” Haffner said. “We weren’t dating then, but I already loved him. I don’t know if it was the ‘spend the rest of my life with you’ love, but I already loved him and my heart broke.”
Haffner and Sorenson had met through a mutual friend at a New Year’s Eve party in Southern California in December 2014. Haffner, a junior at Oregon, had traveled to Pasadena to watch the Ducks in the Rose Bowl. She and Sorenson — who’s from Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif. — hit it off at the party and their friendship intensified as time wore on.
“He was someone I sent funny BuzzFeed articles and pictures to,” Haffner said. “He was so wise, and I’d be like, ‘Hey, there’s this situation, what do you think?’ We had a very solid friendship, the epitome of what a good friendship should be.”
Sorenson helped Haffner deal with the loss of Jake Stoneking, a close high-school friend who’d died of brain cancer three months before she met him.
“Riley reminds me a lot of Jake in that he sees people for who they are and not the perception they put out there,” Haffner said.
So when Haffner got Sorenson’s text about his dad’s heart attack, all she could think was “I have to be there for him.”
“How do you handle that situation? I’m 2,000 miles away, he’s at the game, his dad was the only person from his family there, and he’s in the hospital,” Haffner said. “He was texting me pretty much the whole time. We were in constant communication.”
Jan. 5 was a Tuesday. Back in Eugene for the start of winter term, Haffner got out of class to find a text from Sorenson saying his father had just died.
“He was in his dad’s house by himself when (Bart) passed away,” Haffner said. “I looked up flights that night and was out there Thursday morning.”
She stayed with Sorenson in California until his mother and siblings got back from El Paso, where they’d been since a few days after Bart’s heart attack.
Not long after Haffner returned to Eugene to resume classes, she and Sorenson started dating long-distance.
“We realized, ‘Life is short. Why not go for it?’” Haffner said. “We had a solid friendship, but the tragedy added a new level to it, and we realized, ‘We can do this too.”
About a month later, the new couple spent their first Valentine’s Day together in Pullman. They made dinner together and luxuriated in the rare opportunity to be in the same place.
In March, Haffner spent her spring break in California, with Sorenson, his mom and his younger siblings, Will and Elizabeth.
Karen had been living with cancer for almost two decades, and her medical status dipped drastically in November 2015. Doctors told the family to prepare for the worst, but an experimental treatment worked miracles, and Karen rallied.
By early spring, when Haffner was in California, Karen appeared to be in remission.
“I stayed with them for eight days in his mom’s house. I got to know Karen, and Elizabeth, Will and I bonded,” Haffner said. “At that point, Karen was doing great, making food, going shopping. She was full of life, exuberant, healthy and quirky.”
Grief, more grief
Haffner first realized something was wrong when, at the end of May, Sorenson’s little sister texted her trying to get ahold of her oldest brother.
Mom was sick — really sick, Elizabeth Sorenson said, and Sorenson should come home as soon as he could.
Sorenson arrived home within 24 hours, and Haffner booked a flight for the next morning but woke up the following day to a text from Riley saying his mother had passed away.
Haffner spent about 10 days in California then returned to Oregon after Karen’s service on June 6.
She’d been back in Oregon for less than two days when she woke up to a text from Sorenson: “Hey honey, I didn’t want to text you before you went to bed, but I want to let you know that something is wrong with one of my testicles. They think it might be cancer. I’m sitting in the ER right now. I’ll keep you posted.”
After everything they’d been through, Sorenson’s cancer diagnosis was the nadir for both he and Haffner.
“That was the toughest part because it was so soon after my mom, and I really just hadn’t had time to grieve my dad at all,” Sorenson said. “I was in California. It was the week everyone was on break, and I was going to come back that day and be in Pullman and work out and try to get back into it. But I didn’t because I went to the doctor for my cancer stuff.”
Haffner still gets choked up thinking about the day she found out Sorenson had cancer.
“I thought I’d dreamed it. I thought, ‘That’s the worst possible thing that could happen right now.’ He just lost both his parents and now we’re dealing with Riley having cancer,” Haffner said.
The news hit her hard as she imagined the worst and thought she might lose the man she’d decided to spend her life with. Throughout Haffner’s life, it seemed, every time someone close to her got diagnosed with cancer, they died.
“My freshman year of high school, I lost a close friend who’s like a sister to me to cancer. Then I lost Jake, then we lost Riley’s mom. So there’s very few people in my life who’ve beaten it and gone on to be around,” Haffner said. “You say ‘Riley has cancer’ and I think, ‘He’s the person I love most in the world, the other half of me. How am I going to do life without this person?’”
But things worked out much better than they’d expected. Sorenson had surgery to remove a testicle, and two days later, the entire WSU coaching staff surprised him by arriving at his grandparents’ house to show their support.
Initially, there was some debate as to whether Sorenson needed chemotherapy, and Haffner accompanied him on a litany of doctors’ appointments as they tried to determine the best course of action.
She also decided to take a leave of absence from Oregon and move to Pullman to care for Riley if he ended up needing chemo.
Ultimately, a specialist in Seattle pronounced that chemo would not be necessary — a huge relief for both Sorenson and Haffner.
Sorenson returned to Pullman and eased back into workouts with the football team. He still gets medical checkups every couple of months, but other than that, he’s healthy and back in shape as an athlete.
Just keep going
Haffner moved in with Sorenson and his roommates in Pullman this summer and, a few weeks later, the couple got a dog.
She and Sorenson named their new Rottweiler puppy “Jake,” in part because Sorenson likes people names for dogs — though, Haffner nixed his original name suggestion of “Fluffy” — and in part to honor the late Jake Stoneking, Haffner’s friend who’d died of brain cancer.
Haffner says her experience with grieving for Jake helped her better understand how to support Sorenson and his siblings through their loss.
“It helped me with him because I understood that everyone processes grief in a different way. I was able to understand their reaction toward me. It gave me an understanding of what they’re going through but made it harder because I knew that at that point, there was nothing I could do,” Haffner said. “It was hard to sit and watch and know that I couldn’t do anything to help because I couldn’t bring them back.”
For Sorenson, some days are tougher than others. Football season helped because he was too busy to sit and think. But with things winding down, he’s had more time to reflect, which can be hard.
“I definitely feel like I’m starting to grieve,” Sorenson said. “I’ve had some time to think about it more. I’m kind of still working through it, but it’s definitely gotten easier.”
On Tuesday, he’ll play his final game as a Cougar in the Holiday Bowl against Minnesota.
No one can predict what it’ll be like for Sorenson to walk out that tunnel at Qualcomm Stadium and he said he hasn’t thought much about that beyond the realization that it’s been a year since he found out about his father’s heart attack.
“You can’t hide from the fact that feelings are going to come up. It’s a similar situation and timing to what happened last year,” said Clay McGuire, Sorenson’s position coach. “But with the amount of character he’s shown, I think he’ll be able to handle it very well. The good thing is, he’s extremely close to his teammates and we’re all gonna be there with him.”
Riley will have a horde of extended family in the stands, and Haffner, his chosen family, will also be there ready to embrace him at the end.
“I think it’ll be a somber time for the whole family because it’s the one-year mark of losing Bart,” Haffner said. “And even for CougFam and Tracy (Cracraft) and Jill (Osur-Myers) and everyone in the stands when Bart was taken to the hospital. It’ll be a somber feeling. But I think it’ll be a time for celebration as well. We’re going to celebrate Bart and Karen and focus on the game.”