Rebecca Caitlyn Asla’s family had Ducks football season tickets for most of her life, and her father would tease her that no matter which college she chose to attend, her tuition would go to Oregon.
Scott Asla’s joking did not matter much. He said his daughter, who was to be a senior this fall, always wanted to be a Duck.
Asla died unexpectedly July 17 while at her job as an intern purchasing children’s bedding and accessories at Fred Meyer corporate headquarters in Portland. She experienced several seizures while at work, the result of blood clots that traveled to her heart and lungs, her fiancé Justin Simpson said. She passed away two hours later at Providence Medical Center. She was 21.
“She was absolutely the most positive, outgoing person in the world,” Scott Asla said. “She touched a lot of people’s lives simple by inviting them to be a part of what (she and her friends) were doing.”
While at the University, Asla worked various jobs on campus in catering, career services, and at the Lundquist College of Business where she was an honors student.
Simpson said he was working in Bend while Asla was staying with her grandmother in Portland. The two were usually in different places during the summer.
“We’ve been apart because we always tried to work jobs to keep saving for our future. She was pretty motivated like that. We both were,” he said.
Scott Asla said his daughter was on the first Bend Senior High School culinary management team to win a national title.
“(T)he best damn cook of the class of 2005,” former classmate Alyssa Zysett wrote on a Facebook page in Asla’s memory.
She also played soccer, tennis and was a member of the ski team.
“She had to work at things,” Scott Asla said. “It didn’t come naturally easy for her. (She) wasn’t the gifted, talented athlete that didn’t have to work hard. It was just damned perseverance.”
Heidi Katherine Rowles, another high school friend, left this message on Facebook: “Becca, I’ll never forget endless early mornings of ski team practice. That mountain was so miserable, thanks for making me giggle at the thought of it. If there was one thing you knew how to do, it was laugh.”
Other friends remember parties revolving around fondue or “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“She was the only person who could convince my father to watch ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’” senior Renee Abousamra told the Emerald. “He wouldn’t even listen to me, but he listened to Becca.”
Asla will be memorialized at 1 p.m. Sunday in a celebration of her life at the Bend Golf and Country Club, where she was scheduled to have her wedding reception August 22, 2009.
She and Simpson were engaged Christmas Day 2006. Simpson said he proposed by singing the same song he sang when he first asked her out, which he called a generic pop rock ballad he and his band composed when he was 14 years old for no one in particular.
They met in their sophomore year of high school in Mr. Miller’s biology class, he said. Asla had just broken up with her boyfriend, and the winter formal was approaching. Simpson was already escorting three girls who didn’t have dates, and he convinced Asla to join the girls in shopping for a dress.
“She was so proud,” Simpson said, because though all of the girls liked him, he was interested only in Asla.
Their first official date was Valentine’s Day 2003, when he sent her through a scavenger hunt and played her the song, called “Jacked.”
Simpson was diagnosed with cancer the following September. It was behind his kidneys and had spread to his lymph nodes, he said.
“We really believe that God used her as a tool to bring me to church and basically save my life,” he said. He said he didn’t go to church before they met. “She invited me. I was diagnosed a couple weeks after I accepted God as my savior.”
He had two surgeries and chemotherapy “and everything’s been great since,” he said. He will be cancer-free for five years in September, which was part of the reason they were waiting to get married. Switching to a new insurance policy would have been difficult before the five-year mark.
For the celebration of Asla’s life, her family is requesting that everyone wear bright colors or “elegant Duck apparel.” There will be no black clothes for the girl who laughed and persevered.
“We had an incredible relationship. We did everything together,” Simpson said. “She made an impression on absolutely everybody she talked to and I was extremely lucky to have her.”
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