Calista Lee (2006–2025)

A warm embrace, the rushing of blood to the sound. The sound and the fury. The sound that I love. All the people that you’ve loved.

They’re all bound to leave some keepsakes.

--CML--

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There are people who pass through the world like bright comets, burning through the ordinary with wit, curiosity, and sensitivity. Calista Moxie Lee was one of them.

Born in New York City in 2006, Calista lived most of her life surrounded by its noise, and, to her, its tenderness: the subways that sang, the paper snowflakes in school windows, the steady hum of people always becoming someone new. She spent most of her life in Grace Church School in Manhattan before heading to Phillips Exeter Academy, and later to the University of Chicago.

She was an explorer of philosophy, literature, LPS, Interpol at midnight, and the strange comedy of being alive. Calista wrote with the clarity of someone who understood that the only answer to the absurd is laughter. Her works, The Porpoise, All Quiet on the Eastern Coast, Where Is Waldo, Really?, Death by Avalanche, and many others, move between humor and heartbreak, philosophy and play.

She loved Faulkner and returned again and again to The Sound and The Fury because it spoke to her need to understand the confusion and mystery of love, loss, time, and consciousness.

Her own writing carried that same pulse: laughter trembling beside sadness, clarity touched by longing. Those who read her work can glimpse the quiet struggle beneath the brilliance, the weariness that shadowed her compassion, the ache that somehow coexisted with love. She once wrote that her personal philosophy could be summed up as “everything is funny,” and meant it in the truest sense, that comedy and tragedy share the same breath.

At UChicago, Calista was known for deep, searching conversations that lasted late into the night, and sometimes into morning. On the Quad, she and her friend Bianca set up a cardboard sign, “Come talk to us about anything,” and students and strangers came. She believed that people could be universes hidden under skin and wanted to lift the hood, from professors to campus officers to friends passing by on their way to class.

She loved creating and learning in equal measure: reading, writing, sketching, making collages, board games. She played guitar, rowed on quiet water (“it doesn’t matter that I’m not fast”), and hunted for the best hot chocolate on earth. Her imagination had no borders. At fourteen she wrote that if reincarnated, she’d like to come back as a fish, a blobfish specifically, “with seaweed and seashells and sand tangled in my fins like bubblegum in hair.” Even then, her humor carried a glint of melancholy, and her melancholy, a glint of humor.

Calista is survived by her parents, Heather and Jonas Lee; her brother and best friend, Noah Lee (UChicago ’26); and the family’s loyal dog, Mouse.

She was 19 when she brought her own story to a close. Though her life was brief, her words remain, shimmering with empathy and insight, with the impossible mixture of love and pain that defined her. Her laughter was her signature: har-har-har—loud, goofy, irrepressible, echoing down hallways and across water, the sound of someone who could see both the sorrow and the absurdity of existence and still find it beautiful, even as it slipped through her grasp.

Now that the laughter has quieted and the ink has stilled, she rests, not in sound or in fury, but in peace.