It is somewhat rare for almost everyone in a given community to have the same memory of a friend or loved one who has passed. Not in the case of the great Mark Lerchen, though.
Amid the grief that the Annville-Cleona community experienced Tuesday, Nov. 12, after Mark’s wife of 32 years, Deb, revealed late Monday night in an emotional yet eloquent Facebook post that Mark had passed away on Saturday, Nov. 9, from ALS, many whose lives he had touched through his dedicated coaching and mentoring of youth sports in the A-C area took to social media to pay tribute.
Their remembrances had one common theme: Mark smiling.
Because he always was, or at least, that’s the way it seemed. If anyone has a different memory of Mark, I’d love to hear it. Actually, I wouldn’t. Because it certainly wouldn’t jibe with the Mark Lerchen I knew.
I got to know Mark through my job as a sportswriter at the Lebanon Daily News. I probably saw the most of him from 2011 to 2016, when his daughters, Chrisi and Emma, played softball for Annville-Cleona. Both were pitchers and excellent all-around players. They were also great teammates, something that Mark and his wife, Deb, instilled in them.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many, many people who knew Mark better than I did and were closer friends with him than I was by a country mile or so.
And yet, when I learned of his devastating ALS diagnosis last March and his passing on Tuesday at age 66, it felt like a punch in the gut. He will be laid to rest Friday afternoon at Kreamer Funeral Home in Annville. Visitation is from 2 to 4 p.m., and a memorial service will begin at 4 p.m.
Read More: Mark G. Lerchen (1958-2024)
Again, it was that darn smile and positive, upbeat nature that he always displayed. Even though I don’t remember seeing him too often in recent years — his youngest daughter, Emma, graduated from A-C in 2016 — that image of Mark and his goofy, crooked, yet perfect smile, apparently stayed burned in my brain.
I honestly don’t have a lot of specific stories about Mark to relate but that smile was present in all of them.
It was the smile of a man who loved the youth sports kids he coached in softball and other sports over the years, including his daughters, Karla, Chrisi, and Emma, who were, of course, his favorites.
But another thing that always stood out for me about Mark is that he always rooted for and coached everyone else’s kids as enthusiastically as he coached his own. That’s rare, or rarer than it should be, in this day and age of my-kid-comes-first attitudes in some corners of the youth sports world.
His family reinforced that notion Wednesday afternoon when Chrisi announced on Facebook the formation of the Mark Lerchen FUNd — note the spelling — which will provide youth in the Annville-Cleona community the opportunity to compete in the sports they love regardless of their financial situation and with the proper and safe equipment to do so. The FUNd was created out of Karla and Mark’s original idea.
Then again, that’s who Mark Lerchen was: a happy, positive guy who loved life, sports, and kids almost as much as his family.
None of us gets the chance to choose the way we’ll leave this life, but it seems particularly cruel for someone as good-hearted as Mark Lerchen to have to endure a disease as devastating and debilitating as ALS in his final days.
I don’t know for sure, but I’d still bet that he managed to smile through all of that adversity more than most. It’s certainly the least he deserved after all the smiles he created in his community and for Deb and his children during a life extraordinarily well-lived.
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