What Now

Just Sarah

It's funny to me how if you ask a person for a timeline of their life it most likely will be mapped out by the greatest traumas and joys in their life. I mean if you asked me I would anyway, my brother moved out, our family dog died, about then my grandma died too. My little sissy was born, then I was held back in second grade. School was hard, girls were mean, we had some fun vacations to Canada and Florida, then my dad died at 11, my best friend moved away, I went to a new school, etc. I was the kind of kid to work the snack shack and babysit for money. Got my first job as soon as they'd issue a work permit. You get the idea, heck that was just getting you to middle school. I spent my life thinking ahead, because looking back I couldn't change anything.

In middle school I worried about college. Who does that? But these moments, they made me who I am. Watching my grandfather walk out of the mortuary after seeing my fathers body, and socking the wall, muttering how a father shouldn't out live his child, is a moment I won't ever forget. I didn't know then just how true those words would ring later in my life.

My father's death shaped how I looked at life quite a bit. My dad didn't die of any illness, it was an unexpected car accident on his way home from a hunting trip. Hit a pot hole on a dusty rice field road and just as he got it corrected swerved to miss an on coming car and tipped over into an irrigation ditch.

Literally a one armed man tried to save my dad from drowning unconscious. This man made me believe in good people. The person in the car with my dad survived, and another of our dogs passed trapped drowning in the car.

I was obsessed with this series of books surrounding around one last wish for terminal teens. They were really the only books that talked about death and loss on my level. My mom took us to group hospice meetings, I never really felt any better after those, heck not event during those. The bully at my school J had lost her father, and my best friend at the time told me when J heard my dad had passed all she said was welcome to the club.

I searched for meaning, we joined a church after my father passed away but I never really felt that peace that people of faith seem to feel. I tried to find reason where there is none. We found community, but I didn't find answers. That community was there for us in my junior year when we had a house fire, and then again when my mom had to retire on disability. By the time I was in high school I would identify as atheist. There was just too many hardships to see how there could be a god. This really only changed once I had my boys and even then I'd only go as far as to say I might be agnostic, merely hoping there is a higher power.