I was 17. I woke up to a phone call from Aunt Julie and she kept saying that Marc had died. She had to repeat it over and over before I could finally make sense of what she meant. I stumbled out of my room, crying for my mom trying to tell her what happened. She was outside drinking her coffee. She thought I had a bad dream, a nightmare. She said it over and over again. I don’t know what made her realize it wasn’t a dream. I completely shut down, became nothing more than rage tangled with confusion. Jt picked me up to stay with them for the weekend. We were all together, except for Marc. We were all babies together. We grew up together, terrorized each other, protected each other, needed each other. Chris and I just sat in the dark crying and staring off into space and then he would start shouting about how unfair it was and walk out of the room. He’d come back a few minutes later and we would do it all over again…hours and hours lost in the fog. My dad watched us desperately trying to feel our way through the dark, incapacitated by the grief and the confusion and the fear that you can’t escape from when one of your best friends dies. He wrote a song about it and started a donation fund in Marc’s name. The video came later, when things weren’t as raw, when the tears had started to come less frequently and we’d grown used to the wounds, could live with the pain. My dad made damn sure everyone he could reach knew Marc’s name, knew his story. He couldn’t stand there and watch us all hurt the way we did without doing something. He helped us start to heal.
It’s been 5 years.
I’ve never stopped missing you.
Posted in Little Holidays 3 Comments
3 Responses to “
”Leave a Reply
What a wonderful tribute. Though you die,surely you shall live. Jesus
[...] don’t want to be in that place today, the place where I wallow in tears and darkness…the tragedy that never seems to heal [...]
[...] they see, what they feel there to stay with them for a long, long time. They’ll never know Marc, but they’ll grow up knowing his name and what he died for….what they’ve all died [...]