How is it that a single moment in our past can determine our
future?
Emotional baggage we cart around continually restricts us in
different aspects of our lives.
Lamentations concerning missed career opportunities, failed
relationships and other occasions gone awry spill forth when it
comes time to reminisce.
How is it that a single moment in our past can determine our future?
Emotional baggage we cart around continually restricts us in different aspects of our lives.
Lamentations concerning missed career opportunities, failed relationships and other occasions gone awry spill forth when it comes time to reminisce.
The infamous “what if” can drive a person crazy – to the point where they’re living so much in the past that the present becomes a delusion of relentless shoulda, woulda, couldas.
I shoulda got better grades in school so I woulda gotten a better job so I coulda bought a new car.
They are things that keep you awake at night, wondering how differently your life could be if you had the insight to change one action, one behavior, one moment.
Several years ago, I had an experience that changed my life. It altered who I was so totally and completely that for years I felt like a stranger in my own body.
It stemmed from something I’d done a million times before, inconsequential and routine, nothing to stress about.
But the ramifications of one action, one fleeting moment, proved to outlast the immediate effects infinitely.
I said goodbye to my boyfriend as he left my house to drive home to his, and never saw him again.
The tragedy of the car accident that took his life on that brisk March morning was too much for my young mind to wrap around.
How do you understand forever, and more important, how do you convince yourself it wasn’t your fault?
What if I had made him stay a little while longer? What if he’d never come over in the first place? What if I was in the car with him?
Death can be an insatiable rapist of hope when an innocent life is suddenly snuffed out without reason.
I’ve spent years grappling with the age-old mystery of mortality. His death came with such fluidity and speed – what does that mean for the rest of us left behind?
Does it mean that one day as I’m walking across a street with a cup of coffee and a bagel in my hand I can get hit by a car and, poof, just like that it’s all over?
What about the dramatic part of a movie where the main character’s relatives just barely make it to the scene where he dies so he can say that last, tear-jerking goodbye? What about closure?
How can something so final be so quick and unexplainable?
I’ve been asking myself these same questions over and over for a long time now, and while I still don’t have the answers to them, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I probably never will.
We live in a society that answers everything with quick, succinct and preferably politically correct answers, except for the biggest question of all: What happens when we die?
Fortunetellers, soothsayers, psychics or whatever you want to call them, make huge profits off people who are desperate for this answer.
So does organized religion when you think about it.
But I think this is one question that was never meant to be answered. It’s the one thing our inquiring minds will simply have to do without until it’s our time to know.
Ben’s passing has become a personal landmark. The catastrophe of his death, however, taught me the importance of life.
The bad grade in a class because I partied a little too much that semester, the fender bender that was my fault, the extra five pounds (or 20, but who’s counting) I gained since high school – they don’t really matter.
What matters is that you realize what matters in your life, whatever it may be.
Family, friends, love, dreams …
On Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, Ben would have turned 24 years old.
Happy Birthday, Ben. Thank you for teaching me what’s important.
You are still missed.
