Darkness

There's just nothing like having to break the news to your teenaged children that a special teacher and his family have been involved in a horrendous car accident, and then informing them that two young people they knew died in that wreck.  There is something raw and cruel about watching their reaction. 

In 1980, I was 16 years old, and school was out for 'senior skip day'.  I would return for my report card the next day and then I had the next three months to have summer fun.  I spent the entire day at the beach on the Shenango, sunning and swimming in the still frigid water.  I was there with a gang of my girl friends.  We felt careless and excited about a day off, sunshine, the beach, and impending summer vacation.

Late in the afternoon, my mom and younger brother arrived to pick me up.  I hopped in the back seat and began to tell them all about my exciting adventures of the day.  They seemed awfully quiet and somber.  12 year old Jim looked at me and said, 'Our cousin was killed today.'  There are truly no words to describe the effect those words had on me.  It was like this obscene violation of my deepest spirit--like a sword plunged into my soul and ripped it to shreds.

  I couldn't begin to process this.

I learned that my cousin, Jim, who was born just a few months after I was, and was also my classmate, had been killed when a tractor trailer (18 wheeler) cut off the car he was riding in, and the truck actually fell on top of the car.  Jim was the youngest child in my aunt Mary's family.  His dad had died just a couple years earlier of bone cancer, and he was Aunt Mary's only son.  He had not even reached his 16th birthday yet.  He was a tall thin blond boy, with an incredibly high I.Q.  Jim showed so much promise for his future, and had just begun to notice girls.  Jim had been on a trip to Geauga Lake with some of our fellow classmates.  None of them sustained any life threatening injuries. 

I have never recovered from this awful event.  Decades have passed, and all it takes is an accident like the one from last night to tear the scab off my wound and I begin to bleed all over again.  I have never even quite been able to face my feelings about this head on.  The next day when I went to pick up my final report card of my sophomore year, I sadly asked for my cousin's, so that I could pass it along to my mom's sister.  Poor Aunt Mary, she had lost her husband and now her young son.  I...don't... know how she ever lived through that.

I guess that's about all I can say right now. 

HUGSxxxoooAnnie