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Orange’s Hannah MacDonald, 22, remembered and cherished for her heart

March 31, 2023

Hannah Rae Luna MacDonald was going places. Anybody who watched her grow up in her hometown of Orange, or met her however briefly, could see that.

The 22-year-old already had gone so far, living her dream in New York City.

Hannah Rae Luna MacDonald graduated in May 2022 from The Hotel School at Cornell University. (Courtesy of the MacDonald family)

She graduated May 2022 from The Hotel School at Cornell University – a proud “Hotelie” of the nation’s top hospitality school – and a month later started as a project coordinator for foodservice design firm Jacobs Doland Beer.

As busy as work and fun (somehow seeing 40 plays in the span of eight months) kept her, MacDonald still visited home, including just in March for a best friend’s bachelorette party.

That trip was the last time family members would see her alive, blowing a kiss to her parents as she passed through airport security. It was the last chance for neighbors on East Palmyra to say hello as she walked her beloved dog, Luna.

Two days after her flight back to New York, MacDonald died in her sleep on March 23 at her Eastside apartment. Her roommate, worried she hadn’t woken for work that morning, found her lifeless in her bed.

The shock has reverberated from her newly adopted town to her university town to her hometown. Her death, in their words, has “broken” her parents, Nancy Luna MacDonald and Brady MacDonald, both accomplished journalists based in Orange County.

An autopsy indicated MacDonald had an enlarged heart. There had been no prior hint of illness, nor clue of a genetic disorder. Her parents won’t get any clarity until the medical examiner’s tests are completed in two months. Or, maybe, never.

What they do know they shared on Facebook: “… preliminary results show she had a dilated heart. The poetic version of that is something we already knew – she’s got a BIG BIG heart. Perhaps too big for her body to sustain all the electrifying love she had to give …”

That heart.

It’s a constant in remembrances: “Heart of gold.” “Pure-hearted.” “Warm and open heart.”

She grew up both adventurous and grounded.

From 4 years old into her teens, the girl with the long curly hair braided in two signature pigtails sold lemonade from a curbside stand to raise money for pediatric cancer research.

She was the first-born child on a tight-knit block whose celebrations included an annual Independence Day sidewalk parade led by a roller-skating MacDonald.

She played youth soccer. Sold Girl Scout cookies. Practiced piano. Learned to tap dance. Did her homework and made the honor roll.

Maternal grandparents Rachel and Fred Luna lived nearby. Her “Tata” Fred took care of her all day from 5 months old to preschool, and then after school. He affectionately called her “Changa” (Spanish for monkey) for her boundless energy and curiosity.

“She gave me more of a workout than the 35 years that I worked,” said her heartbroken grandfather, a retired municipal maintenance supervisor.

Hannah Rae Luna MacDonald, at right, loved the Disney character Peter Pan. (Courtesy of MacDonald family)

A big fan of Disney movies, she’d stretch out on the coffee table with garden flowers scattered around her, pretending to be Snow White. “Tata,” she’d say, “come and kiss me so I can wake up.”

She never lost childlike joy for theme parks, a beat her dad covers for The Orange County Register and Southern California News Group. Disneyland truly became her happiest place on Earth, Peter Pan her favorite story.

“She was this old soul who lived to always be youthful and childlike,” Brady MacDonald said in a tearful interview.

The young woman who took a post-college, month-long solo trip through Europe walked every morning as a child hand in hand with her dad to St. John’s Lutheran School. “Nana” Rachel picked her up in the afternoon, their routine until MacDonald started ninth grade at the Culinary Arts & Hospitality program of Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana.

The close bond with her parents never wavered.

Clockwise from top, Brady MacDonald, daughter Hannah and wife Nancy Luna on vacation in the Bay Area. (Courtesy of the MacDonald family)

They loved to travel and took their daughter everywhere with them – from her first road trip to San Diego in an infant seat to places across the country and overseas, and summer sojourns to Prince Edward Island to visit her dad’s family in Canada.

“I remember her singing a song she had written about marshmallows in the back seat of the car while traveling the back roads together in PEI,” her aunt Jackie MacDonald wrote in an email.

At ease among adults, she’d tag along to news assignments with her mom, a former Register reporter who writes about the restaurant industry for Insider: “She’d be talking to chefs about food and restaurants, and they’d be enthralled with her,” Nancy Luna MacDonald said.

She loved to cook. In the kitchen beside her Nana, she learned to make Christmas tamales. She also mastered her paternal grandmother’s raisin pie recipe.

“Nothing was too difficult for her. She always knew she could figure it out,” said Rachel Luna, who treasures the rosary her “Mija” remembered to bring back last year from Vatican City.

Cornell alumni Al Zelinka and Anna Pehoushek, a couple on Palmyra, eagerly wrote a college referral letter for MacDonald – and not just because she taught their son, whom she babysat, to make great barbecue.

“Most of us view her like you would a niece,” said Zelinka, city manager for Huntington Beach. “Can you imagine, if she’d had the chance to live a full life, what all would have happened in her life?”

Her parents will bring her ashes home on one last road trip together, joined by her Uncle Neil MacDonald. They’ve met her friends and co-workers in New York City and will drop by some of the sites she loved best – “to walk in Hannah’s shoes.”

On their cross-country drive, they’ll stop at places they didn’t get to yet as a family.

Her mom described their plans this way: “Let’s just take our baby home. In the fashion we always did with her, the way we always traveled.”

Hannah Rae Luna MacDonald grew up in Orange, attended the Orange County School of the Arts, and graduated from Cornell’s prestigious hotels program.
(Courtesy of the MacDonald family)

Journalists Nancy Luna and her husband, Brady MacDonald, and daughter, Hannah, at the Eiffel Tower. (Courtesy of the MacDonald family)

Hannah Rae Luna MacDonald graduated in May 2022 from The Hotel School at Cornell University. (Courtesy of the MacDonald family)

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