Here I am standing over you again, my head in my hands, the tears streaming down my face as I look at your name written across that grave. I often wonder what you would tell me if you were here today. Would you tell me that I’m a fool? That whomever you love will only leave you? Mommy and Alexa never left you, they were taken from you and you were left with me. So would you tell me that those you love will be taken from you in the worst of ways and before you can even see it coming? You would laugh at me and tell me it’s only a matter of time before I end up like you, alone, going through the motions of every day life. Then you’d wonder why I couldn’t be the one taken away? Didn’t you ever think I wondered the same thing every night? If I hadn’t been so sick, if I had been where I should have instead of lying in bed with the flu, maybe mom would have missed the drunk driver, maybe he would have hit someone else on that rainy night. Maybe he would have died and they would have lived. But life didn’t turn out that way.

The grounds keeper of the graveyard comes by me and hands me a box of tissues. Not one word from him, its so routine at this point it makes me sick and all I can continue to wonder is what you would tell me. Would you practically spit in my face and tell me I’ve made all the wrong choices? Would you tell me I should have never come home? It’s how we always got by, I stayed out of your face and you lived your miserable little existence without a reminder of the wife you once loved. “Why her,” you would cry, “why not you?” Yes, why not me? Because those aren’t the cards that fate dealt us. Because I have more willpower to go on living and I was too young to die. Because my life would still carry some meaning to it.

You wouldn’t believe any of that would you Dad? No, you would tell me I was wrong, misguided, that the lies I was fed by those outside were just to rid of me of the guilt I should have felt. But maybe you were wrong. All I know, is until I find an answer, I’ll sadly continue to come here, even if in the end, it breaks me.