Never forget

I hate the build-up, the constant reminders, the videos, the news coverage. I hate it all. I understand why it's recalled annually, but it feels like a wound that never truly heals. We all experience death and loss, but to have to relive that day every single year sucks. I try my best to avoid most news and some social media around this time, but it's basically impossible to miss it.

To this day, I cannot recall the 3-4 months following the event. I recall the first week in vivid detail, a memorial in December, my Chemistry teacher calling me a selfish brat, and nothing in between.

The anger that I have yet to truly express lurks. It rages, I rage. I don't want sympathy or pity. I don't want the "I'm sorry for your loss" or the aftermath that happened with our heightened security and hatred/bigotry. At times I do want to smash everything and scream it all out.

Debatable. But there are times it numbs them, or dampens them, other times they flare up as if it were yesterday. It's been over twenty years - 2 decades, 8,035 days...a part of me still doesn't feel healed, and another part feels I've grown and healed quite a bit.

I'm 16 again, it's a bluebird day, witnessing it on tv in school as it happens, the phone call pulling me out of class, the terrifying night, the day after being found wandering the hallway of the school crying. Endless hospital database searches, a moment of hope, a moment of realization that somebody at a hospital entered a name wrong, numb.

One of the few people who "got me" in a family who really didn't know what to do with me, gone. The others taking it as an opportunity to proselytize and guilt me in the midst of it all. Thinking how cruel people can be.

A fatherless girl with an exceptionally tiny list of father figures losing the one who was there the most. I was no stranger to loss, but this was on another level. How do we collectively process tragedy and grief? It broke me in ways I didn't know I could break. My friends couldn't relate, some had dealt with loss but in very different ways. Grief often feels like an island.

Who would I be if this one moment didn't occur? Countless decisions were impacted by this day. A personality shift occurred from this day. What would the makeup of our family look like? It's impossible to know these answers, just as it's impossible to pull apart all of the pieces of my personality and decisions that are a result of other traumas. But something to ponder.

He was generous, loving, family man. His life was his two sons and my aunt. He loved the outdoors: biking, golfing, boating, their lake house, and anything active. His undergrad was in engineering, but his masters was in business, and he was excellent at his job. He'd talk politics all the time, and gave me crap for my beliefs but in a lighthearted way. He genuinely wanted to know about me (and others), and would often invite me along to my cousin's games or other events. He had a phenomenal sense of humor, something both of my cousins have certainly inherited from him. He was loved.

I don't have something profound to say. Just remember we only get a short period of time on this Earth - make it count in a way that matters to you.