Gracie Muehlberger's journal line became a mantra for her parents

Gracie Muehlberger was 15 when she was killed in the Saugus High School shooting, but one line from her journal has kept her voice present in her family’s life. Bryan and Cindy Muehlberger have carried that sentence forward as a kind of compass, using it to frame survival around memory, joy and the decision to keep living.

At Gracie’s celebration of life on Nov. 23, 2019, at Real Life Church in Valencia, Bryan Muehlberger read the line to hundreds of mourners who gathered for the Santa Clarita teenager. The church estimated about 500 people attended in person and about 3,000 watched online. The words he chose were plain and urgent: “You only have one life to live so why not live it great, real and fill it with memories and experiences.”

Those words came after a shooting that shattered the campus on Nov. 14, 2019. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said deputies received the call at 7:38 a.m. and arrived within two minutes. Investigators found six students with gunshot wounds in the quad area. Gracie Muehlberger and Dominic Blackwell, 14, died, and three other students were wounded. The shooter, a 16-year-old Saugus High student, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Years later, the family’s grief has remained public and unfinished. Bryan Muehlberger has said he wanted Gracie remembered for bringing laughter and joy to other people, and he has described how those who knew her have come to understand that life is precious, short and not guaranteed from one waking moment to the next. The family has also held onto another tender detail: Bryan said he and Gracie used to dance in the kitchen to “Cinderella” in their socks.

The loss has continued to mark the community as well as the family. Memorial obelisks honoring Gracie Muehlberger and Dominic Blackwell were unveiled in Memorial Plaza at Central Park in Saugus on June 4, 2021. The fifth anniversary of the shooting fell on Nov. 14, 2024, a reminder that the afterlife of a mass shooting lasts far beyond the day itself, carried forward in rituals, anniversaries and the language families use to keep the dead near.