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His Death Changed My Life

October 19, 2003

I woke up feeling off. It was a Sunday morning around 10 a.m. and I felt strange. Instinctively, I knew something in my life changed. I wanted to brush it off as depression over the break-up. Six years together, three months since the break-up.

I sat on the edge of my bed trying to work through my feelings when I heard my mom at the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh my god, CeCe, I’m so sorry.”

He’s dead. It was all I could think of. Why else would his sister call? We did get along, me and her, but we didn’t chat.

I opened the door and watched my mom walk up the stairs, unsure what I was feeling. I wasn’t told anything yet, maybe I was wrong. But I knew I was right. Mom told me to sit down, CeCe wanted to talk to me. I reached for the phone.

“Amanda? It’s CeCe. Are you sitting down?”

No, I wasn’t, but I knew her and my mother wanted me to, and that would get the news out faster, so I sat down.

Then she told me he died. Her voice was raw and heavy, it was incredibly difficult to say those words. They were close, but she was the oldest, her mother was distraught, so she took on the heartbreaking task of making the phone calls. We apologized to each other for the loss. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to hang up, curl up in bed, and be alone.

I finally asked, “What happened?” How? How did this healthy twenty-two-year-old man I loved for six years of my life die? How was he gone, just like that? I talked to him two weeks before, saw him at the end of September. The last time I saw him. We tried to hang out, be friends, we missed each other. We loved each other. But we were no longer in a place where we could be with each other.

CeCe told me he collapsed at a bar, he was out with a friend. He wasn’t a heavy drinker and had only had one beer, so they were positive it wasn’t the alcohol. They did CPR, the ambulance got there quickly, but he didn’t make it. They didn’t know until December what happened to him.

After both of us apologizing for the loss and getting information about a get together to write up the obituary, and that they’d like to see me, we hung up. Mom tried to console me, I understood she was worried, but I needed to be alone.

I don’t know if it was me who called my best friend or someone else. Early in the afternoon, he came over, we took the dogs for a walk to the top of the street and ventured into the woods. There was a stone fence that had no real purpose, it just split up the trees that surrounded it. We sat on that fence, watching the dogs on their leashes sniff around in excitement. There wasn’t anything we could think to say. We silently processed, walked back to the house, and he left.

Things get blurry at this point. I remember sitting in his house, unsure how to speak to his mother. She crawled inside herself, so distraught she barely said a word. I felt guilty for grieving because me and him broke up. What right did I have to grieve?

I wanted to help, but as they worked on the obituary, I felt useless, sitting in a room by myself not knowing what to do. I remember a Viking ceremony because he used to joke about wanting a Viking funeral. While that wasn’t going to happen, his family thought it would be nice to make a small, wooden boat, put his picture on it with a few other small, burnable things, and send it off on the lake in flames. It was freezing.

I remember my best friend, someone I’ve known since I was twelve, call me after we hadn’t spoken for two years. At the time she worked as an in-home nurse for elderly patients. One of her patients liked to look at the obituaries, and she saw his. I picked up the phone when it rang, knowing without knowing how that it was for me.

“Amanda? Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”

I broke into sobs hearing her voice, so grateful she reached out to me. I can’t say I was thinking about her at the time, but I had missed her a lot over the years. When I wasn’t with her or my other friend, I was alone in my room on my computer, taking solace in internet friends and falling asleep in the middle of talking to them. I wasn’t sleeping well, I’d stay up all night, sleep most of the day.

I remember his funeral. His mother was hunched over in the front seat, sobbing, lost, not a word to anyone that tried to hug her and tell her how sorry they were. I saw his body from afar and couldn’t bring myself to get closer. I didn’t want to see him like that. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember him.

There were giant cards signed by his students, he’d only been teaching for three months but they loved him. He had a big personality. I saw friends of his, friends of ours, I even got a sympathy card or two and felt strange that someone would give a sympathy card to me.

When I built up the nerve to go to the casket, my parents flanked me. A few years later I learned how worried they were about me, and how they weren’t sure what to do to help me. It was hard for them to see their daughter grieving.

I wasn’t sure how to grieve, or if I was even allowed to. I felt bad every time someone from his family or one of our friends told me they were sorry for my loss. I thanked them and gave it right back, not wanting to be rude, but feeling more and more guilty every time. I wrestled with my right to grieve, not coming to terms with it for a few years that even though we broke up three months prior, not only was I still trying to heal from our break up, but now I needed to heal from his sudden loss.

I didn’t like seeing him in his casket, in a suit I went with him to help him figure out what to buy. He wore a watch I gave him. The company had sent the wrong watch, but let me keep it and sent another one, so he got two. There were pictures all over him. I added mine, a picture of him holding his dog, who was hit by a car and died the month prior.

I felt guilty again. I had a dream that September. Black and white, a man and his dog. The dog stepped out into the street, a car came, the dog disappeared. The man stepped into the street and disappeared. Two weeks later his dog got loose, was hit by a car, and died. He called me to let me know. I was scared and told him about my dream. It freaked him out. I told him it had to be a coincidence, it was just a weird dream.

I was wrong. It took me years to come to terms that in the end, there wasn’t anything I could have done. In December, his family was still waiting on autopsy reports. All of us desperately needed closure. It came down to a faulty heart valve and turned out it was a fairly common, albeit rare, occurrence in people his age. And it was genetic. He never knew about it because his father, who wasn’t a part of his life, knew he had the defect but never told his family, so they never got tested for it.

This was something that could have been avoided if he only knew. It was devastating, but closure.

I was going to community college and close to graduating. I don’t remember finishing up college, but I think I must have gone to classes, at least until my semester ended in December. I didn’t petition to graduate, I didn’t see the point. I didn’t plan on going back, I didn’t see the point.

I spent a lot of time in my room. A lot of times not knowing what to do with myself, deeply depressed and fighting against my grief. There are a few moments I remember. A Halloween party, the point I stopped dressing up for my favorite holiday. I sat around for a while until my friends pulled me out and tried to get me to have some fun.

I remember one night, I couldn’t sleep, so I visited his grave at three a.m. and sobbed for a good ten minutes, wrapped up in a coat and shivering from the cold. I heard a voice in my head, his voice, telling me to go home. So I did.

Then there’s this blank space of time until sometime in the spring or summer when my mother told me if I wasn’t going back to school, it was time for me to work. She had me garden outside, a full workday with set hours and a lunch break. I was upset but went along with it. I didn’t know how to help myself, I needed help, so I let her help me.

She got applications, brought them home for me to fill out, and dropped them off. I got a job at a grocery store and begrudgingly worked for eight to ten-hour days. I hated the first few weeks. A girl went to the high school I went to and heard the announcement. I didn’t really know her, but she knew I had been his girlfriend. She hugged me and told me she’d always be there to talk to. I thought it was sweet, but I didn’t want to talk to her.

After some time I met someone who worked in the store. I thought it was about time for me to have a fling, since it had been about a year. What was meant to be a fling turned into a relationship that lasted over a year. I got tired of my job and my manager and quit to go back to school. I moved to a dorm two hours away and lost myself in school, trying to figure out how to be a student again.

One, where I answered a call, the number was all zeros. It was him on the other line. I asked him how he was doing. He said he was okay, but when he first got there, he was sad and hungry all the time. Someone, a woman, perhaps his guardian, told him all he had to do was think about the people who wronged him, to think about forgiving them, and he would feel full. He said it was taking some practice, it was hard, but he was getting the hang of it.

Another dream, the worst one, he was sitting in my sink at school, only his legs were gone. His body was decaying, there were bugs and really, it’s just too macabre for me to even want to describe. It horrified me. I now wonder if I dreamed such a thing because I often hated the fact that he was rotting underground. It constantly bothered me.

There have been other dreams over the years, but those are the two I remember the best.

I struggled in college, but I enjoyed the environment. My anxiety and OCD made some things hard, but after two years I got my bachelor's degree and moved back home. I left home again soon after that, jumping into a relationship that was very bad for me. I can fill a book with stories about abusive relationships. After that relationship was over and I moved back and forth again, I landed in another relationship that I ignored the red flags for. But this relationship was when I learned to love again.

It took nine years, a lot of self-loathing, a lot of figuring out my feelings and letting myself learn that I’m allowed to grieve to get to this point. It was a huge turning point because up until then I was positive I would never love anyone the way I loved this guy. That he had been my soul mate, and now that he was gone, I could be in relationships where I loved, but never as deeply as I loved him.

This new relationship taught me I could fall deeply for someone, and though it didn’t work out, it helped to heal me.

I still got depressed every October until the past two years. I still get sad and think about my deceased ex a lot. I’ve gone to metaphysical classes were a medium told me she saw him, sitting cross-legged on my right side, opening and closing a small box, saying he was sorry, and telling me he’d be with me until I didn’t need him anymore.

There were parts of my relationship with him that weren’t pretty, but he was my first love, the first person I was with romantically, the first guy I lived with. He has most of my firsts. I don’t remember most of that first year after he died, and any time I watch a TV show or a movie where someone loses their significant other, it brings back the pain I felt when he died. It’s something that scares me, the potential of feeling that pain and loss again.

I’m mostly healed now, I’ve moved forward, and I’m starting to like October again, I’ll never forget what that loss felt like, or what it did to me. I’ve made a lot of bad choices, but I believe it all had to be for a reason. I’ve grown, I’ve healed, and I’ve moved on. I know how to love again, and I know that there is a lot of love for me to give.

While I remember him frequently, he’s always on my mind the most in October. I learned a lot from him, in the time we shared together, and how I learned to heal after his loss. I may not be where I want to be in my life, and it took me a long time to heal and learn these life lessons, but I’m more at peace now than I have been in a long time. I will always love this person, though I know we never would have gotten back together. He was a big part of my life for six years. His death has forever changed my life, the way I view the world, the way I live, the way I love, and the way I process.

(Though only one name is in here, it’s been changed. Thank you for reading.)

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