A Nightmare Within A Nightmare

I have come to realize that the only way I will stop writing for good is if I am no longer here physically, or too sick to type, or have gone totally insane and can no longer do so, but even the insane part may not keep me from writing so who knows what this will evolve into…or not. But for now…I write, but good, or for bad, for maybe I should and maybe I shouldn’t, the fact is…I write. So here is the thing today…..

When Kaitlyn was a senior in high school the day of February 14th came, Valentine’s Day. I remember the day vividly. It was in the morning before she went to drive herself to school. She came to my room to tell me goodbye because I was still in bed. I was off that day from the job I had as an RN on a medical/surgical floor at the hospital. She came to me smiling all excited and had her valentine’s gift with her to give to her boyfriend that day. I remember her kissing me goodbye and telling me she loved me. She left and only a few minutes went by and my brother in law called me (he lived right across the road) to tell me that Kaitlyn had gotten in a wreck right at the intersection a few yards from my house. The terror that filled my heart is indescribable. I got up, threw clothes on and went down there.

The ambulance and some people were already there amazingly. I looked and there she stood, pale and scared with only a speck of blood on her sweater from some tiny scratch she got from the wreck. I looked for her car, I didn’t see it anywhere until someone pointed it out to me. It was in the middle of the huge field that is across the road from that intersection. Kaitlyn refused to go to the hospital no matter how hard I tried to get her to go on the ambulance, but she would not saying she was fine. I walked out to the field where her car was and the horrible damage done to her car caused me to be amazed that she did not get hurt. The car was absolutely totaled. Air bags front and side deployed.

I took her home. I had someone (my husband was working out of town) get the car out of the field and tow it home. After I called my husband and told him, he told me to call the Insurance company and so I did. They said they would come assess the damage that very day. I told them it was totaled, and so it was. We went out there to clean all the things out of Kaitlyn’s car before they arrived. I remember going into her trunk and taking out the picture she had drawn of a church, all her things that she had for church, her DVDs, various books and while I was doing that, a horrible thought came to me. I could have been doing this after her death. By the grace of God my daughter was saved and I was not cleaning out her things, the story of her life, out of her car after her death. She was alive thank God.

I wondered then if she had died how I would have been able to stand it, how could I ever go on with her not in my life and dying this way. During that entire day, instead of feeling bad, I was SO very happy because Kaitlyn was ok. She was still here and her being alive was a miracle due to the damage sustained to her car. She had accidentally pulled out in front of a truck and her car was T-boned.

Last night I dreamed about Kaitlyn. But unlike the other 5 dreams I had about her since she died 5 years later at her own hand, it was not a visitation dream from her. I know this because I only saw her, and not well. She seemed kind of foggy to my vision but she had long blond hair and looked to be about the age of that wreck…18. But I could not feel her, smell her or anything and I could not feel her presence like I did in those other dreams since her death. So, it was a regular dream.

I dreamed that she had died in that accident. And I experienced all the horror that I have gone through since Kaitlyn died 4-11-13. But in this dream I dreamed that I woke up and she was not really dead, that it was just a nightmare. I remember we had gone to her school, where apparently everyone else thought she was dead too and I told them “see, she is NOT dead after all!!” We were all so happy and Kaitlyn was happy.

And then a horrible thing happened. In the dream I dreamed I woke up yet again and it was not a nightmare, she was really dead.

What a cruel dream. My only escape from my pain is the nothingness I go into when I go to sleep, unless I am blessed with a visitation dream from Kaitlyn once in a long while. But this dream was just as horrible as what I go through every day….still waiting to wake up from this nightmare.

I’ve always thought that Kaitlyn was spared because she had too much left to do, too many amazing things to do with her life, so much of a difference she could have made to the world. So she was spared for 5 years of school; two and a half years of undergrad and 2 years of medical school….only to kill herself. Though I am so happy to have had 5 more years with her, why was she saved only to be so unhappy that she wanted to die later? All that work. All that hope. All that adventure. All that love, gone within the few minutes it took to take her life that would plunge me forever into darkness and to feel the dread even 100 times greater than the time I cleaned out her car realizing she could have died.

Again, the ironies of this world never cease.