Tragic

Death has left my life mercifully unscathed up to this point; I've never had to deal with any real sort of tragedy. I still have three of my four grandparents, and the fourth died when I was about eight or nine, and I wasn't nearly as close to him. As a result, the magnitude of what happened didn't really strike me at the time. I still remember my cousin and I playing in the basement of the funeral home while some sort of service was going on. Good friends of mine recently lost their father. I knew him pretty well, and he was a great man. But he had been in pain for so long, his death, while tragic, was somewhat of a blessing. A friend of mine from high school died in Iraq two years ago; I had lost touch with him for years before that. I went to the funeral, and it was quite sad, especially because of how young he was. But still, it wasn't close enough to really hit me.

Yesterday I received news that my ex-girlfriend's younger sister, Candice, was killed in a car accident recently. Now, we were never all that close. A fair portion of the time, I couldn't stand her. Much like my ex, and even moreso, her sister was everything that I was not. She smoked, she drank, she'd done drugs, she was a bit promiscuous, she cared little for school, she was loud and reckless and self-destructive. I thought she was a terrible influence on my ex, who at the time I was dating her, was in the process of turning her life around. Yet, Candice was a nice person. She could be pleasant and caring and fun to be around. As a result, I asked her to participate in the second Saturday Night Live show my friends and I put together. She jumped at the chance, and (unlike my ex) was actually pretty funny. Even after I broke up with my ex, Candice still participated in the taping. I mean, we were never really friends. But...you know how it is. You've got people in your life who piss you off most of the time, but for some reason, you still like knowing them. That was Candice.

News of her death saddened me, not only because of the fact that she died, but also for her family. That situation is beyond tragic. Two parents, five children - all step siblings, all between the ages of 15-20 (when I knew them). Not poor, but not remotely well-off. The oldest child, a boy, was autistic. The girls, all teenagers within two years of each other, were always fighting with each other or their parents, always getting into trouble. It was a depressing environment; as a result, the parents were incredibly pessimistic people. They had already had hard, crappy lives, and now their children were doing the same. Before I met her, my ex got expelled from school for drug use. One of the girls got pregnant when she was 18, and is now raising her child as a single mother; her younger sister got pregnant when she was 16, and I don't know what happened there. Every week there was a new catastrophe; every week the floor fell out from one cataclysm or another.

Perhaps the biggest came when my ex drove her car into the ditch and crashed into a telephone pole. She suffered serious head trauma, and the doctors had to induce a coma so she wouldn't injure her spine. She was in the hospital for forty days; when she got out, nothing was the same. She had been working two jobs, but both were gone. She couldn't concentrate in school, and ended up unable to go back the year she should have graduated. When she did go back, she dropped out after a month. She had been enlisted in the army reserves, and was going to use that to pay for college. After her brain injury, she could no longer serve. She never went to college. She became completely dependent upon me, she started smoking again, and she got depressed. She had been the only one in the family with direction; by about a year after the accident, she had none.

Now this. Candice had been drinking at a local bar, until she had too much to drink and was cut off. She drove home drunk, around the same road as my ex, and lost control on the same curve, flipped into the ditch, struck a tree, and died. The kicker? The bartender that cut her off was her father. He told her to go home. So she did. But she never made it.

The point of all this? Well, in one sense, I'm glad I turned out to be who I am. I'm glad that, as a teenager, I devoted my free time to creative enterprises like SNL rather than getting wasted all the time and messing up my life. But I didn't write this to extol my own choices. And I'm not seeking sympathy. I don't want anyone telling me they're sorry; this isn't my loss. This is just another tragedy for a terminally tragic family that I'm not a part of. I almost have the urge to call her father and express my sympathy, but I doubt it would mean much of anything. Not when his life and the lives of everyone in his family is in constant freefall.

I know death will strike closer someday. That's inevitable. I love my grandparents dearly, and their health is deteriorating more and more each year. Of course, tragedy could strike anywhere, anytime. I have no idea who I may lose, and I don't know how I'll handle it.

But for now, every day I thank God for everyone in my life, and for everything I've been given.