Dying Young: Death Teaches Lessons

It was a raw, cold day when we said goodbye to them… the wind was bitter but we at least were spared the snow. For the one burial that was in town, even though I was offered several rides I walked from the church to the cemetery (a significant distance, especially in that cold weather) because I needed to burn off some of the rage I felt but could not express.

Young people are not supposed to die

They were, as I was, 10 feet tall and bullet proof.

Weren’t we all? Thoughts like prepping never entered my head, because I was convinced that all would go as I planned and dreamed; that bad thing happen to other people, and that the world owed me and I had yet to collect on that debt.

True, my grandparents on my father’s side had both passed in recent years, but they were old and that happens to old people, or so my 17 year old self believed.

When I first moved to town, in 7th grade, one of the first people I met was Robin, and she was nice to me. Over the course of that year, I developed a super-big crush on her (the kind of crush that only somebody who is 13 can have). She knew about it and the feelings were not mutual, but she was a very nice person and she treated me decently. By my 8th grade year, my “crush” had dissipated and we actually got to be friends (although we were never close).

The world falls apart

I heard about the accident from a classmate. They say you can’t really remember the feeling of pain, and that may be true, but I do remember there was pain. My pain, their families’ pain, our classmates’ pain, their close friends’ pain…

For me, as horrible as the loss of two girls I had known for years and who were friends and classmates was, there was also something more elemental. I, and a lot of the rest of the Class of 1980, lost our sense of invulnerability.

We learned… REALLY learned… that we are all just human, and that being young and vivacious and active and loved and liked and respected just doesn’t matter when the car starts to slide on a narrow icy road….

I miss you Robin. I miss you Lila. We all do, and we all have since that horrible January day so many years ago.

You are not forgotten.

From every failure, lessons are taught… the key is to learn them

In a sense, I started down the road to prepping following the death of my friends. No, I didn’t know I was prepping… but I started doing things to help keep me alive.

Like most youths, I had played around with cigarettes, but even back in this day we knew the health risks of the cancer sticks, so I ended my flirtation with them for good. 

I’d never worn seat-belts before; they were uncomfortable… but following the girls’ death, I started wearing mine… and I can, without a doubt, tell you that I am typing this tonight specifically because I was wearing a seatbelt one cold winter’s night about 15 years after Robin and Lila passed away. 

I started thinking about things like “do I really need to drive on this ice”, and “what’s the safest route I can get there, not the quickest”.

Driving a safer route or wearing a seatbelt most definitely doesn’t sound like prepping to a lot of people, but it very much is. Prepping is all about preparing to keep you alive and healthy, for anything from a national Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF) – The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) all the way down to an extremely personal SHTF moment. 

I was inspired to do more with my life

I’ll be honest: I was a very, very bad student until my senior year of high school because I had zero interest in education. When Robin & Lila passed, it gave me a wakeup call as I got to thinking about the lives they would never lead. Both had huge plans for their future, whereas I was just planning on getting out of school and finding some menial job around town to occupy my time.

What I realized was “that’s not good enough.” I decided to go to college, attend a local junior college (the only school I could possibly get into with a GPA well below the Mendoza line). 

I used the tragedy as a personal wake-up call in many ways.

The bottom line

The bottom line is this… we never know when our time is up. We never know when the drunk driver in the other lane will swerve across and hit us. Just as Robin & Lila never suspected that a trip to shop for dresses would be the last thing they did on this Earth, we just don’t know.

But there are things we can do that we probably aren’t doing to keep us safer than we are. We can walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, we can park further away at the grocery store to get in some extra steps to help out the ole ticker. We can lose that 15 pounds, we can always wear the seat belt even if we are going 4 blocks. 

Additionally, we can take that Red Cross first aid training, AED instruction, and we can take that firearms training course. We can concentrate on rotating in better, more nutritious food into our storage pantries… there’s just so much we can do…