With that thought, I lie back on the back seat of my father’s car, with a broken heart and tears rolling down my face. I did this.
I don’t know if the magnitude has hit me yet, but it will. I mean my best friend is dead… dead. She just graduated from high school. She hasn’t lived enough life for this yet…
Chapter 8 – Garrett
The Funeral – 2015
This week has been a blur, a blur of activity with my head barely screwed on, but somehow, I made it. I don’t know how I got my shit together, but being the rock for my mother has helped me. She has been an empty hole since her daughter was killed by a drunk driver and so I haven’t had any choice but to take over.
Funeral planning… I shouldn’t be funeral planning. I certainly shouldn’t be planning the final goodbye for my younger sister who should be going to college, not going in the ground. It doesn’t make any sense. This a fucking nightmare.
“Sorry for your loss.” Over and over again. People might mean well, but if I have to hear those God damn words one more time, I am going to fucking scream. No one understands, no one gets it, this is more than loss.
Sadie. Every time I think of her, I expect her to grab me and laugh about this. Tell me that it’s some sick practical joke of hers and that I shouldn’t have been fooled. But I saw her. I saw her dead twisted mangled body on that road. I saw what that fucking guy did to her, and there’s no way that anyone could have lived through that.
I can see the drunk driver clear as day. Some older guy, not from the party. Just some random guy on the way back from a friend’s fiftieth birthday party where he had too many… far too many. He shouldn’t have been behind the wheel. He was bashed up too, but no one is mourning at his funeral. He’s still in the hospital, licking his wounds, waiting for his court case. But at least he is still alive. Like me, for whatever reason. Why am I still here?
I shouldn’t be living, he shouldn’t be living. Sadie is the only person who should be alive and she isn’t.
Mom nudges me a couple of times, trying to shake me from thoughts, but it’s impossible. I know that I’m supposed to be shaking hands and thanking people for coming. But at this point, I don’t know what I’m doing. Not that anyone can tell me how to behave today, how to grieve. I’m not a fucking host at this event, this isn’t a party.
I do my best for my mom, but I’m not perfect. Not when everything is shit. I can’t really be anything for anyone when I feel like an empty shell of nothingness. I’m hollow, gutted, destroyed on the inside.
Jill. Oh my God. I haven’t seen her since that night when her dad took her away from me. As he lifted her up and literally carried her away, I felt betrayed. It was like she ran out on me and left me to deal with the consequences of both our actions. know now that Mom told them to leave, but it’s still hard.
I’ve been too busy to talk to her, too wrapped up in grief to even see her, but I don’t think that I would have bothered even if I could have functioned. There is now a chasm of distance between us. It wasn’t just me in that barn, in that secret relationship, it wasn’t just me who upset her, it was both of us. But now, I’m drowning in guilt, alone. I don’t think there is any coming back from this.
Jill looks at me and I stare right back at her, through her. We both freeze outside the church just staring at one another. I don’t know if she wants to come towards me and I’m not sure that I want to go towards her either. I don’t know what to do. I just know that the intense guilt is swirling through my system because of what we did will never go away. We hurt Sadie.
Before I know it, my face is wet with tears. All I can do is turn my body sharply so she can’t see me weeping like a fucking baby. Plus, looking at Jill right now is like staring into the sun. She’s hard to look at because she’s the only reminder of what we did. We are responsible for putting Sadie in her fucking grave.
Sadie had so much promise. She could have done so much with her life. She was going to be someone incredible, someone that could have changed the world. And now because of our mistake, she had her life cut short. She’s gone, forever. I don’t want to hear all that ‘oh, we will carry her in our hearts’ bull shit, because it isn’t the same.