The high-pitched screeching of the smoking tires of the out of control car were the only sounds penetrating the still darkness of the deserted country highway in the early morning hours. The hot tires left dark rubber tracks as the small car slid sideways on the well-worn pavement before they lost traction sliding over the edge of the steep embankment viciously tumbling repeatedly to its final destruction at the bottom of the hill. Flinging its only occupant into the dew drenched,pasture out of the drivers door during the violence of the crash before forcefully coming to a complete and sudden stop. The object of the instantaneous stop was a power pole at the bottom of the incline, which the small car enveloped around crushing the roof of the vehicle across the driver and passenger seats. The small car wrapped so tightly around the telephone pole that the rescue crews had to kill the power to the entire community and nearest town a few miles away.
The single occupant flung from the car into the cool, lonely, dark and wet field was my eighteen-year-old daughter who died all alone that night with no one to console her if she wasnt killed instantly upon impact. This is one of the many thoughts and horrors that enter your mind for the first few of years of grieving someone you loved more than yourself, one of many what ifs and whys!
The early morning hour of my daughters demise unbeknownst to us at the time was one oclock in the morning approximately. A police officer from the city awoke me at two thirty that morning by pounding hard against the front door. At first the pounding scared me for a slight moment but then made me mad, so putting on a pair of shorts and grabbing my 9mm Ruger pistol I staggered thru the darkness of the house to the door. Standing just inside the door I called out asking who it was and upon the officers reply I set the pistol on the table and opened the door to find out what was going on and why they were pounding on my door at two oclock in the morning. As I stood in the door way the officer handed me a torn slip of paper with a phone number on it and told me to call it. Knowing it had to be something bad I ask him what it pertained to and he told me it was about the name of my ex-wife. Shaking my head trying to wake myself up I dialed the number and a female highway patrol person answered the phone, after explaining what had recently occurred she ask me how I was related to this person. I told her she was my ex-wife and she then explained to me that there was an accident and where it happened, she then told me my ex-wife was dead. Unsure what to do because I was still half out of it I called my mother and woke her up for advice. After explaining to her, the news I had received she told me to go to my childrens house and wake them up and bring them home with me and then tell them the tragic news of their mothers death.
Arriving at theirs and their mother s house at about three thirty, I beat on the door and to my astonishment; I recognized the voice of my ex-wife asking who it was. Shouting who I was thru the closed door, she opened it to ask me what was wrong with me! Gazing at her bewildered, I told her she was dead! Completely confused she asked me what in the hell I was talking about? Explaining to her what had just transpired at my house with the police I was getting mad thinking someone had played a mean practical joke on us when it dawned on me to ask where our daughter was. Telling me, our only girl child she had spent the night with one of her best friends, who lived in the vicinity near the afore mentioned accident had taken place, I derive a conclusion after putting two and two together! Screaming at the top of my lungs that our girl was dead I handed her the piece of paper the officer had given me and ran frantically down the road trying to keep my pounding heart from exploding and after what seemed an half of an hour I stopped and screamed once more in agony. God in his infinite wisdom numbs our minds at the beginning of a pain this terribly great to keep us from dying of a shattered and broken heart. So after a few moments of deep breathing I concluded, though my precious girl was in heaven with Jesus, my son of eleven years was still alive and he was really going to need us! Arriving back at his house I went into his bedroom and opening the door, he asked me what was going on because of all the women, which had already gathered to console my ex. I laid, down in the bed beside him and I swear to this very day I have never done nothing as hard as that night when I told him his big sister was dead. His eyes just went blank and he rolled over away from me to gaze at the wall. For a few minutes, I rubbed his back but he wouldnt respond to anything I was saying or doing. Telling him, I loved him and to try to go back to sleep and we would deal with it in the morning. Though he never shed a tear or said a word, I knew he was hurt because she was his mentor and only sibling and though it has been six years, he still seldom talks to me about her. He did what any young boy would do he cried with his cousins and his friends because he was scared he would upset his mother and me!
The confusion which occurred between the police officer and I was a misunderstanding because he wasnt sure how to pronounce my girls first name so he had called her by her middle name, which is the name of my ex-wife. The female highway patrol officer must have been truly confused when I told her that I was my eighteenyear daughters ex-husband. It is a night of painful, devastating horrors, which to this day haunt me but it was my girls birthday in heaven so I learned to live with that!
That was the longest and worst day of my life, a day of helplessness, loneliness, confusion and despair! What transpired on that day and the next few weeks to follow seemed to occur from close and far away, sort of an outer body experience. If my parents wouldnt have guided me through it I couldnt have managed it! Though I had known death from inside our family circle when I had lost a younger sister at the age of nineteen, she was only fifteen it didnt touch the pain and grief I was soon to bear! One consolation was the fact my daughter met my sister, her aunt whom she had never met because her death had taken place seven years before her birth. They met in heaven and this was a joyous happening during this terrible time of turmoil!
The That Was days are like the-what ifs or the only ifs, they are things to be remembered but better left forgotten! You see That Was the worst day of my life, but on the day of herand her brothers delivery That Was the best days of my life. Her high school graduation event That Was one of the proudest days of my life and hers, the day she accepted Jesus That Was one of the most glorious days of her life! One day we will all be gone from this earth and That Was days will be left behind in our wakes, let us only pray they are good That Was memories!