Wow, okay. Now that I've taken probably the hottest and most relaxing shower I've ever been able to get in this house, I can tell you what just happened.
By the way, is it just me or does anyone else sit down in the shower?
Today my mother wanted to talk to me about something that happened to me and my father a while back. Driving to my Grandparent's house one morning, my father was struck with a sudden seizure with me in the passenger seat. We were barreling down Indian Head Highway at around sixty mph. I remember telling him about Pokemon. The game was relatively new then and I was explaining the intricacies of the card game. It was at that time the muscles in his face seemed to tense and contort and he began making a noise I could only describe to the nurse as how Chewbacca sounded. We ricocheted off the center guard rail and darted across three or four lanes of traffic and an intersection where we jumped the curb into a parking lot where we plowed into a parked car sheltering a family.
Years later I would be snooping through a box of my mother's keepsakes. Me and my brother's birth certificates, news articles and a cassette my mother had recorded of my father's message left from the answering machine. I believe she wanted us to always have something to remember his voice. I played the tape on an old stereo we had in the sun room of our old house. I must have been 16 or 17 years old here. After a brief introduction by my mother, there was an eerie dead air in the speakers. I know I was about to hear my father's voice by I didn't know exactly what to expect.
"Hello, You've reached the Whetsell residence..."
It wasn't familiar. I know tape recordings distort voices to a certain degree, but this wasn't distorted. It was clear but I couldn't fit his face to the voice I was hearing through those speakers. I played it a few more times over before I set it back in the lock box in my mother's closet. That was when I came across the police report of the accident. The report mentioned some small traces of marijuana found in my father's blood tests. As I read on I learned about the Mother who was left a widow and the children left orphans. This news was a very tough pill to swallow at the time but I've come to terms with that reality.
I feel a need to post this tonight not because it serves as any sort of therapy for me. I've long since come to terms with the death of my father. First, I write this out of a strong respect for the documenting of life, especially the tragedies held within it. I'm writing this for my mother. Because when she came to speak to me earlier she wanted to know what I'd thought as everything was happening. I told her I didn't want to talk about it. It's not a tough subject for me, I'm only exhausted of running through the story. After all the counselors, after all the family members, I don't feel any more need to talk about it. However, it became more and more apparent to me that my mother was blaming herself for what had happened this day. I poured my heart out to her. I explained that she could have never anticipated such a thing to happen and she shouldn't blame herself. She kept saying she felt responsible so I suggested that perhaps she had some issue with the accident. She got up quietly and walked away.
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