The Worst Part

 I don't believe that I was particularly feeling any one thing the night that I died. Sure, I was very grouchy that day, only because I hadn't gotten the grade that I'd been aiming for on an essay that I wrote. I'd gotten a B and my English teacher wouldn't even tell me why. I mean, it wasn't as if the essay was based on an interesting subject that I knew much about so, of course, the essay wasn't as good as it could have been but, I still worked my ass off for it in all the forty minutes she gave us to write it. She had given us assigned topics, all of them different.

Back to the point, however, I was really pissed off about that, and of course, I couldn't confront her later on after school because I had to get home right after school ended. My mother had wanted me to go with her and my younger siblings to the Zoo. They were five, eight and ten, whereas I was a sixteen year old in my second semester of Sophomore year.

The entire day had just been one bad thing after another and I had tried to keep a smile on my face and enjoy the time with my two younger brothers and sister but, it was like trying to move a mountain; just a little close to impossible.

By the end of the day, my mother was mad and so was I. I was mad about having to go with them and I was mad that my teacher wouldn't even give me a rundown about why I had gotten the grade I did. With all three of the younger kids sitting in the back seat of my mom's Suburban, we argued at as low a volume as we could stand. With each sentence, our voices had risen and our tempers shortened.

You'd think that that would be as bad as it gets when you die with that being your last moments. It wasn't.

When we rounded the corner of the mostly empty road, heading onto a tiny bridge over a river, and run right into the moving truck, both vehicles going about 60 MPH, I had no idea what I was about to say because it all left my mind when I saw the headlights. I heard the brakes screech and the kids scream and I covered my head instinctively. Our truck flipped over the railings and landed in the lake upside-down. Somewhere along the way, I think my seat belt had snapped off (it was always screwing up). And when the shock had worn off and my air supply became limited, I had turned to the kids. The youngest was Dina, then Nathan and Peter, the older two. They were all frightened and prying frantically at their seat belts. I don't even remember when my mom had started keeping a pocket knife in her gove box, but I was glad she did. It was all a blur as I cut them loose and Peter helped his younger siblings swim out the open window in the back seat and up to the surface.

I had been so distracted by that three that I had completely bypassed the fact that my mother was still limp in the driver's seat, blood contaminating the water around a wide gash on her forehead. I had cut her loose without thinking, overestimating the time I had left before my brain lost too much oxygen. Peter had come back for us, by then, and he had an even smaller lung capacity than I did at his lone age of ten. It was a difficult task for us to get her into the back seat and out the tiny window, and by then, the car had already sunk to the bottom of the river. I had already dragged her up twenty-five feet with Peter's help when the lack of oxygen got the best of me, with my lungs burning more than they ever had, before. I think the last thing that I saw before my heart stopped was another person swimming down towards us all.

No. The worst part of dying wasn't that it had been a bad day. Wasn't even the fact that it had been a bad week, in general. Fights with my friends, my boyfriend, and even fights with my dad hadn't made that the worst part of dying.

The worst part about my death was waking up with new air in my lungs. My heart had stopped for a full minute. I had died and after only a few minutes of being back in the land of the living, I was wishing I had stayed dead.

While saving me, the person who had been driving the other vehicle hadn't had the time to save Peter, who had taken on the task of getting our mother to shore even as he was too small to carry the weight. Dina and Nathan couldn't swim well enough to have helped him. And while he had gotten both my brother and mother to shore after getting me, he hadn't been able to save them.

So, the worst part of my short-lived death was that I didn't stay dead. That the man who crashed into us hadn't saved them instead. That even as I attempted CPR on both my mother and brother while Nathan called for an ambulance and the man helped me try to revive them, their hearts stayed still and mine was beating louder than the thunder that crashed overhead that night and I felt like I was still drowning.

The worst part about Jillian Gates dying was that she didn't die alone.