I have the good fortune of working with a lot of really incredible women, many of whom are young, smart, ambitious, and almost preternaturally glamorous. They are exactly the sort you expect to encounter in this crazy advertising industry, and you can tell within moments of meeting them that they’re on a rocket-ride to fabulous careers and lives.

But the world is frequently capricious and cruel, and one of those young ladies won’t get to finish her ride. Her name was Julie Ann Jorgenson, and she was killed this morning in a brutal car accident.

I don’t claim to have been a friend of Julie’s. The sad truth is, I really don’t know a lot about her. We were on different accounts and didn’t talk much. Hell, in a lot of ways, we were on different planes of existence. But I liked her. She was tall and shapely and blonde and genuinely beautiful, although I often got the impression that she was unaware of her looks, or perhaps indifferent to them. She reminded me of Julia Roberts or Cameron Diaz in the way she could shift from elegant to endearingly goofy in the flash of a megawatt smile. And as far as I know, she was kind to everyone she met. If I sound like I had a bit of a crush on her, well, I did. Half the men in the building did, and that includes a few of the gay ones. She was that kind of girl.

As I said, I didn’t talk with her very often. I hardly even saw her, thanks to the layout of our building and our being on different teams. I can recall having only one actual, non-work-related conversation with her, and that was several years ago, when we were both new to the company. I noticed one day that she looked sad, and being a big ol’ bleeding heart, I asked her what was wrong. To my surprise, she started telling me. So I listened. And I did my best to offer some advice, or at least a different perspective. I don’t know if I truly helped her, but she seemed better at the end of our talk. Lord knows she helped me from time to time; her smile always lifted my mood on bleak days, if only for a few moments. I wonder if she ever realized that?

Julie — Jules, I sometimes called her — died in the frigid, murky hours before dawn, not far from work, when her tiny Mazda was struck from behind by a GMC pickup truck. It appears her gas tank exploded. Police officers aren’t yet sure if she was killed by the impact or the fire. Either way, her body was badly burned and officers had a difficult time identifying her. I’ve always found inspiration and joy in my vivid imagination, but just now, I really wish I didn’t have it, because my head is filled with horrible pictures of what must have happened to her… to her skin and her hair… Christ.

I’m not a religious man. Most of the time, I don’t even believe there’s a god out there. But I’ve praying all day, praying that she was already dead — or at least unconscious — before the fire reached her. She was so pretty, and it’s so unfair that even this was taken from her in the end.

The hell of it is, the guy driving the truck didn’t even have the decency to go out with her. He survived. There are witnesses who say the dumb asshole’s windows were frosted over and he likely couldn’t see through them.

Weirdly enough, though, the thing that’s really bothering me is that her Facebook page has already been taken down. Press a key, click a mouse, and it’s like she never existed. And I keep thinking of a line of dialog from an old episode of M*A*S*H, of all things. It’s something Margaret says in that one where BJ tries to keep a mortally wounded man alive until midnight, so his kids won’t remember Christmas as the day their dad died. She says something to the effect of, “It never ceases to amaze me. One minute, you’re alive. The next, you’re dead. No drums. No fanfare. Just… dead.”

I’m amazed, too. Tomorrow would have been Julie’s 27th birthday.