Too Late

I close my eyes for the last time.

But it’s okay, because she’s all I see.

She’s the last thing I’ll ever see.

Sloan-44

Sloan

This feeling is nothing new to me. I’ve experienced living through the death of someone I’ve loved before. Horrendous, heart-wrenching, soul-crushing death.

It was one month before I turned thirteen.

I had twin brothers, Stephen and Drew. From early on I basically became their caretaker. Both my brothers had a lot of medical issues, but my mother used to leave all hours of the night, regardless of their needs. She would go through spurts where she could be the mother she needed to be. She’d get them to their doctor’s visits for the medications they needed in order to convince the state she was a decent mother. But then she’d leave the majority of their everyday care up to me while she went out and partied or did whatever it was she did until early hours in the morning.

The night Drew died, my brothers were in my care. I can’t remember all the details because I try not to think about that night too much, but I remember hearing him fall in his bedroom. He had seizures frequently, and I knew he had more than likely just had a seizure, so I ran to his room to check on him.

When I opened the door, he was on the floor, his whole body jerking from the seizure. I dropped to my knees and held him as still as I could, but since he had turned ten, it became increasingly difficult for me to help him due to the fact that he and Stephen were already bigger than me. I did my best, holding his head until it was over.

It wasn’t until the seizure had stopped completely that I noticed the blood. It was all over my hands and on my clothes. I started to panic when I saw the gash on the side of his head. Blood was everywhere.

When he had fallen from the seizure he hit his head on the door hinge going down. We didn’t have a phone, so I was forced to leave him alone in the room while I ran to a neighbor’s house and called 911.

By the time I returned, he was no longer breathing. I’m not sure he ever took another breath after the moment I had left him. I wasn’t aware at the time that he had died from the blow to his head, but I realize now that he had probably died before I even dialed 911.

I changed after that night. Before that moment, I still held on to a little hope for my life. I knew that no one could be cursed as a child with such awful parents, only to then go on to have an equally awful adolescence and adulthood. Until that point, I thought maybe everyone’s life had an equal balance of good and bad and the only difference was that the good and bad luck was dispersed to each person differently at different points in their lives. I had hope that all my bad luck had been dispersed early on in my life and that things would only get easier.

But that night changed my way of thinking.

Drew could have fallen anywhere in that bedroom other than where he did. In fact, the doctor said the location of his injury was so unfortunate, he could have fallen a mere six centimeters to the left or right and he would have been fine.

Six centimeters. That’s all that separated Drew from life.

The impact to his temple killed him almost instantly.

I obsessed over that six centimeters for months. Long after my mother had stopped pretending to grieve his death.

I obsessed over it, because I knew that if he had fallen six centimeters to the left or right, his survival would have been referred to as a “miracle.”

But what happened to Drew was the opposite of a miracle. It was a tragic accident.

A tragic accident that made me lose my belief in miracles altogether. By the time I was thirteen, anything labeled a “miracle” pissed me the hell off.

That’s one of the main reasons why I never partook much in social media. The amount of “miracles” seen in my Facebook newsfeed would make my eyes practically roll out of my head. So many people “cured” of cancer, thanks to the prayers of all their Facebook friends. “It’s benign! Hallelujah! God is so good to me!”

There were so many times I wanted to reach through my laptop screen and grab those people by the shoulders and scream, “Hey! Guess what? You aren’t special!”

Lots of people die from cancer. Where was their miracle? Did their Facebook friends not pray enough? Why did their chemotherapy not work? Because they didn’t post enough public prayer requests on social media? Why didn’t they get their miracle? Does God think less of their lives than those whose lives he spares?

No.

Sometimes cancer is cured…sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes people hit their heads and die, most of the time they hit their heads and survive. And any time you hear of a person beating the odds…that’s all they’re doing. Beating the odds.