chazzf's Journal: How Sad It Is

Having one's mortality brought home is not an easy thing. Death is, for me, a very abstract concept. Yes, people die, but they're usually older or unknown to me. I can therefore ignore it, and treat life as a game, where one has repeated opportunities. What an amusing fantasy.

Today I learned that over the weekend a high-school classmate of mine was killed in a car accident. I didn't know her particularly well, yet the shock of the accident has been overwhelming. Death has been brought home to me. No longer abstract. She was 19 years old, for God's sake! Her whole life was ahead of her. She had a job, she went to school, she probably had a significant other...all of that taken away in the blink of an eye.

Today I finished a long road trip. How easy it would have been to make one little mistake, or for someone else to, and that would have been it. Charles Fulton would be another obituary. And it would note that he was attending college, worked part-time at various places, loved to travel, had hoped to be a professor...and so on. All of that now just words in a newspaper, not to be.

That's a goddamn scary thought. I don't like it much. And so I mourn Erin Hamblin, because she was denied her future. And in doing so I mourn my own innocence, for I fear that it may have died with her.

~Chazzf