WARNING: There are a few trigger words in this story. Your mental health and well being is more important to me than stars or views, so I encourage you: PLEASE skip this chapter if it will affect you in any way. Thank you! Stay healthy and drive safely!
I died when I was 22 years old because of a drunk driver. One insignificant moment in the multitude of passerby was the focal point in mine. What disguised itself as a normal Saturday afternoon, turned into the last.
You always hear things like this on the news and your heart goes out to them and their family for the few minutes the anchors discuss the catastrophe. Then you move on, going about your life. We think, "That will never happen to me." Yet it does.
I missed my family dearly. It broke me to watch my mother and sister mourn my death. It hurt to see my father come home from active duty to bury me in the cold ground.
My college layered candles outside my dorm room and they sat there for two weeks. People I knew and a few I didn't recognize came to remember my life.
My two best friends graduated without me. They decorated their caps with pictures and letters in my honor. It made me smile knowing I had positively impacted their lives as they reminisce about their younger days.
I wasn't even supposed to be driving that night, but my sister needed me to pick her up from a friend's house when her ride fell through. So I climbed into the used four-seater that I had worked so hard to save up for.
Then I got hit. All because a forty-six-year-old woman decided to drive home under the influence of countless alcoholic drinks. She will remember for the rest of her life that she ripped the fragile life from mine.
Now I am reduced to a memory, distant, but barely existing. I flit around my broken family, unable to make contact. My parents divorced after I was taken off of life support which left my sister in between the somber break.
Unfinished business is what I assumed. Why else would I still be among the living mortals? I tried everything I could to help, but soon realized it would be of no use. So I resigned myself to watching over my family as they move past the tragedy.
So I just watched as my sister named her first son after me. As my Mom passed from a heart attack. As my old house crumbled under the weight of heavy machinery used to clear out space for a building. As my best friend got married to the love of his life.
And that's when I realized why I was truly here.
I discovered that it isn't just life and death, light and dark. There is so much more of the grey in between that we can't comprehend. Just like there isn't just good and bad. All the different shades blend together as we try to elucidate the details, but I'm ready to accept what happened. For years, I've watched the people I love to move on as I burdened the weight of sorrow.
Now it's my turn to let go.