When I was sixteen, I lost two good friends in a car accident, and a third friend was left in a coma and the doctors did not think he was going to pull through. It is the most tragic thing I can remember from my childhood. When I think back to when I was young, the memory of losing my friends is always the first thing I think of. It left me with some hardcore emotional baggage for years after.
There was a tight woven group of us. Half of us had been friends since elementary school. We were tight. The night that the accident happened, when Ben and Brad were killed, and Shawn was left for what we thought was dead, it was the most devastating thing that had ever happened to any of us. We all partied that night together. We were all drunk. And a good portion of the group drove drunk that night or got into a car with someone that had been drinking. We were young and stupid and it could have been any one of us in that car. Why them? Why not us? Why didn't we stop them? There was guilt. A TON of guilt.
At the time, we felt like we had lost EVERYTHING. Well, except for Shawn (left). We were all hanging on to the glimmer of hope that he would be okay because then at least we'd have something. He was in a coma for what felt like FOREVER. We were devastated. It was like a contagious sadness that circled throughout the group for months. Just as someone would feel better and start to laugh, someone else would start to cry. We all started drinking more, we all started to flunk out of school, and all we could talk about, was the accident. We were fixated on it.
When it first happened, someone came up with the bright idea, "Let's smoke a cigarette for Shawn every day until he gets out of his coma". Now, in a sixteen year old's mind, this made sense. Shawn was a smoker before the accident, and because he was unable to smoke while in the coma, all of us non-smokers felt we were perfectly able and willing to inhale smoke into our lungs for him, and somehow this would snap him out of his coma! A perfect idea. Okay, maybe only to a sixteen year old... but at the time, it was the only thing we could think of to get us through. Perhaps a prayer would have been better?
Here's a photo of me visiting Shawn at the Kelowna hospital a few months after the accident. I was so happy to see him because I didn't think I ever would. He was just learning how to walk again.
When Shawn finally made it back home safe after months of grueling rehabilitation, we were all ecstatic to see him. And we were all so glad he was okay.
BUT...
By this point, our group was addicted to nicotine. Because all along we had been "having a cigarette for Shawn" everyday. For what seemed like such a nice gesture for Shawn, turned into a life long addiction for so many us. Why didn't I quit after he arrived home? Ummm... well because I had smoked for so long already, it had turned into a vice for me. A form of escapism from the stress. It was something to take my mind off of things. I know it sounds stupid, but it's true.
I had a lot baggage from what I had just went through. I made the mistake of viewing one of the bodies. Bad idea. It left me so devastated that I slept with my TV on for the next seven years or so. I was so scared that if the room was dark, that I'd see his dead face again and I just couldn't bear the thought of that. I wrote letters to Ben and Brad in my diary for years and years hoping that it would help the awful thoughts I was having. The guilt, the loss, the dead body. I barely graduated high school because my grades were so bad. I couldn't focus and I just couldn't seem to recover. I can even remember crying myself to sleep in college years later. This event was life changing for me and I didn't get over it for a very loooooong time. And to be honest, it still haunts.
One thing that also stands out in my mind was the night that our group played weegee board. I think we were all so desperate from being in this deep depression for so long that we hoped that we could communicate with Ben and Brad for some answers. It turned out to be a really bad idea because the weegee board ended up telling us that we would lose another friend, in two years. The thought of this left me paralyzed. How could I possibly deal with another loss in two years? I can vividly remember the group of us going outside directly after the weegee board told us that, and lighting up. Again, trying to escape from our thoughts. Even though we didn't believe that it could be true, and that weegee boards weren't for real.... deep down, we were so, so, scared. I can remember smoking one after another until I felt physically ill, just to keep my mind off of thinking about what the weegee board had said.
So there you have it. That is the reason I started smoking in the first place. It was a tragedy that turned into an addiction. And an addiction that couldn't be broken because of too much emotional baggage. Tune in next Sunday to see what happened two years later. Was I still smoking and was the weegee board right?
