In the days after her fatal car accident, the commencement essay of 22-year-old Yale grad Marina Keegan bloomed on a million Facebook pages like so many sunflowers. Her message to her peers, that it’s not too late to start something new, transcended the sad irony of her untimely death and resonated with older readers, me included, in a way she could never have imagined.

It’s one of the horrible-wonderful things about the internet, that you can learn so much about strangers who’ve made tragic headlines. A trip through the Yale Daily News archives revealed that Marina’s writing was positively effervescent, infused with such intelligence and passion and humanity. The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among others, memorialized her.