Kamber

Chapter 11

I’m proud of my parents, I really am. I think it would take a lot of courage to lose the thing you loved the most and still find purpose to walk through the mundane world you’ve been left to walk through alone. I think it takes even more courage to dare try to love again, which they did also.

They both lost themselves in that ICU, but they also gained each other. I’m not saying they fell into each other’s arms and cried about it because I know they’re smarter than to think such a thing would matter. What I’m saying instead was that they mutually realized that it wouldn’t matter if they’d each separately found somebody else that’d lost a loved one to a car wreck, even if it were a similar car wreck, because it wouldn’t have been the same car wreck. Both my mom and my dad had been there, through each part of it, which is what made it- and each other- matter.

I honestly don’t know how they do it. If I were my mom, I don’t know how I’d be able to fall asleep each night next to a man who says he loves me but at the same time contains a part of his heart that will forever be reserved to another woman. If  I were my dad, I don’t know how I’d be able to wake up each morning next to woman who says she trusts me but at the same time will forever have parts of herself she’ll only be able to talk about with somebody else.

Some people say they’re crazy, and I guess I understand it to an extent. On my dad’s end I can definitely understand how some might think it’s stupid that twenty years later he can’t get over his high school sweetheart before the reality of being an adult could have had its chance to sink in and pull them apart. The same can be said for my mom who could’ve been seen as just as foolish to believe her and Kate would’ve still been inseparable when college pulled her one way and my mother the other. But I like to believe in chances, and in the probability that there was a chance for each of them to have received their wish. At the end of the day high school sweethearts who last a lifetime together aren’t completely unheard of, neither are best friends who survive the grueling hardships of life outside of school; they’re just rare. Perhaps the craziest part is simply in the way they survived. I mean, how could a wreck that left two girls dead leave two more virtually unhamed? I don't know. This is another thing that isn't totally unheard of, only rare.

I also like to give props to my parents for not hiding from their pasts the way others might’ve. Like I said before; they married on the day Kate and Amber died; they purposely planned for me to born on the day Kate and Amber died; in fact, they even named me for them.

Kamber; Kate-Amber.

And I think that is the most courageous thing of all, which is why I have to remind myself of this- all of this- each time I feel bile rising in my mouth at my own name, because not only do I owe it to my mom and my dad who lost so much to get to where they are now, but because I owe it to Kate and Amber; the ones who got them there.