june 15

so...i have to go to a funeral today. one of our students was killed in a car accident this past weekend-he was 15. i worked with this student in the office with his grades and talking about what he wanted to do in life. he wasn't a bad kid, just lazy and didn't want to do school work. i keep thinking back to when he was in here and what he was thinking when i was asking him what he wanted to do in life. i am pretty sure that dying over the summer didn't even cross his mind. if he knew though, would he have done things different? breaks my heart. i shouldn't be going to a funeral for someone who is 12 years younger than me-i don't want to cry but i know i will.

since all of this has happened, i have been having dreams of my friend amy who was killed in 2001. we were best friends in high school and had lost touch after i moved away. i called her one day while she was at work and she was going to call me later. when she did, i was at lunch at pizza hut so i didn't answer. i said that i would call her back later. well, later that night my dad called to tell me that she had been injured very badly in a car accident and that she probably wasn't going to make it. i was living in the quad cities at the time and dad said not to come home because she was having difficulty dealing with everyone coming in and it would be better for her recovery if she didn't have a lot of visitors. a few weeks later, i came home for her funeral. the other night i had a dream that she was mentally retarded from the accident and she walked into the school i was working at with one of her friends. i was in disbelief! amy went to the bathroom so i asked her friend if that was really amy and she said yes. when amy came out of the bathroom, i told her who i was and asked her if she remembered me and she just hugged me and we were bawling. then a counselor took us away from everyone and i woke up. i had another one this week, too, but i don't remember it. really makes my heart ache for her and me and her family. i really need to get back and go visit her at the cemetary. but it's so hard. don't think i have been back for at least 3 years. not because i don't love her and miss her, but because i still don't know how to handle her being gone. same with my grandpa who died the same year. i can count on one hand how many times i have been back to his grave-haven't stepped foot in his house since the funeral even though grandma is still there. just isn't the same with him gone-he understood me, didn't care that i was a city girl along with the country, farm girl. nobody else understands in that fam...just him and he is gone.