In a video shared on YouTube last week, the Hall of Fame quarterback and Latter-day Saint Steve Young sat down with Graham Bensinger for an interview on Graham’s Emmy-award-winning show.

In the middle of the interview, Steve shared a difficult experience he hasn’t talked about often but that changed his life and led him to believe in angels.

When Steve was 21, he agreed to drive with his friend Jill Simmons from Provo, Utah, back to their hometown in Scarsdale, New York. Steve drove the first 12 hours through the night, and Jill took over in the morning while Steve slept. The next thing he knew, their car was in the median.

“We had flipped a few times. We ended up on our wheels and I was OK, and I looked over and Jill was slumped over the door and immediately, [I] started to try to figure out how to—I’m not an expert—but how to try to do what I could in the middle of nowhere,” Steve says.

Jill had passed away at the age of 19 from an aneurysm “before the car even hit the median,” Steve says.

As a young college student, Steve remembers feeling “broken.”

“At the time, she had passed away, and I’m alive and I’m in the middle of Nebraska, and I promised her mom that I would drive her home, and I remember being really broken about it, about letting her down and letting Jill down. The guilt of it was super heavy,” he shares.

When he went to see Jill’s parents, her mother grabbed him by the face and said that she was glad he was there and that he was “the one person I’d want to have been there.”

Steve says that experience—a mother’s selflessness and grace in her own moment of intense pain—is something he has never forgotten. Her actions helped him find healing.

“There was a spirit about how her mom and dad saw [this experience]. … There was a healing and a strength that came out of it in a weird way. And instead of wallowing in what I thought was the guilt I was going to feel for the rest of my life, it was healed by her parents.”

The tragedy also cemented Steve’s belief in life after death.

“I do believe in angels,” he says in the interview. “I believe there are durable spirits that can be near us and can help. … And I honestly felt like there was an angel over my shoulder through my life. Jill was an athlete, she loved football, and she loved talking about football. And so I’d be playing, [and it felt like] I could hear her voice, in the way that you carry people with you.”

Read more from Steve Young in his latest book Law of Love in Action.

The Law of Love in Action

The law of love: loving as God loves, seeking another’s healing, expecting nothing in return. It’s a lot to ask. How can we apply such a law to life’s challenges—from the smallest daily offenses to seemingly insurmountable sources of pain, like abuse, infidelity, or war? This volume brings together a wide variety of insights and firsthand experiences. Stories include a grandpa at a family reunion, a journalist visiting a prison before a big football game and a father with a temper. In every situation of life, the law of love is undefeated.

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