Partly the reason you haven’t been hearing from me on my blog for a while is because of a disaster that has happened that has indirectly concerned me.

Of course, the other half of the reason is that school has started. But one morning when I got onto my dad’s car and buckled into the middle seat in my dad’s car, he told me something.

“You are going to need to buckle into one of the side seats.”

I moved over, but still, I wondered why he told me that. I’ve sat in the middle seat for maybe as long as I can remember. What was the deal?

My dad told me there was a big disaster. A car crash. I wanted to ask more, but we had already arrived at my school with 2 minutes to spare.

That afternoon, my mom solemnly told me that a disaster happened.

“It’s about the car crash, isn’t it?” I asked my mom. She looked at me through the rear-view mirror surprised, but quickly resumed driving.

“How did you know?” she asked. I told her Dad had already talked to me a bit before. She explained it clearly.

“Some friends from Toronto were coming back from a vacation. It was already pretty late, so they didn’t see the red light and they went ahead and made a left turn. From the other direction came a car, and then…”

I felt like my mom was a bit sniffling now. We arrived at home without another word. I guessed what had happened by myself, because it was pretty obvious.

Crash.

That night at dinner, my father clarified. Two people had died. The father and the son. And the sun was inside the middle seat. The only strap on the belly crushed him immediately upon impact.

The father was not paying attention too well, because, it was nighttime and they wanted to get home quick instead of finding another hotel or something.

As I write this, the mother is inside the hospital, recovering from several broken ribs and bones.

From the other side of the impact (the oncoming car going straight), there was one death.

My dad also declared that he would be flying to Toronto to make the emotion (the sadness, the crying, the kneeling, and probably the this-is-impossible stuff) a bit better.

I dropped my chopsticks back onto the table. “WHAT?” I nearly shouted.

My dad calmly explained that his airplane would take off on Friday and land on Labor Day. He would be gone the entire weekend and I would stay with my mom.

At first, I was almost speechless. My mom hugged me and explained that there was a life depending.

An hour later, I found out that my dad would not be going to the funeral. He would instead be with the wife of the now-mostly-dead family, comforting her as her calmness medicine slowly would fade away.

Today, a few people from our church came to our house and donated us about five-hundred dollars to help with the trip. Each of them said a farewell, “Have a good and safe trip. God be with you.”

Death is a strange and curious thing. As they drove off, I stood there wondering that even though death is a very abrupt thing to the user, to the rest of us homo sapiens living as we confront this is simply horror.

I really do hope something like this doesn’t happen again. Even though I see on the news every day about someone dying in a car crash or something, it is another emotion to have it happen to a relative, friend, or my own family.

I took a breath after I strangely realized that I was holding my breath, and walked away as the car drove away and could not be seen anymore, and as my dad came in, holding an envelope.