by Rachel Smith
On a day nothing like today, I made a mistake. This mistake caused my world to temporarily freeze while life continued as normal around me, completely oblivious.
Only two years prior, on behalf of my parents, I met a new friend named Emily. She was a tiny Lhasa apso that beamed every time she looked into my eyes, and in hers I saw infinite life. When we develop a connection with another person or an animal, the thought of life being temporary is a distressing thought that I believe most individuals (including myself) have trouble grasping the reality of. I personally believe that our brains aren’t naturally meant to do so, and I can confirm that the thought of this never entered my mind until later on. Emily became my best friend and, deciding that the name Emily didn’t quite fit her, I began to call her Maisy. She knew well that her name was, in fact, Maisy.
When time stood still, I had been five years old growing up on a 7-acre plot of farmland in rural Nebraska called Sunnyslope Farm. Of course, the farm was no longer in use as its owners were hoarders and had bouts of mental illness. My parents were often absent which did not bother me but granted me the ability to explore parts of the acreage alone. I was never truly alone because Maisy would follow me everywhere accompanied by my six other dogs trailing not far behind. We would venture out to the creek, cornfield, apple orchard, and as our radius grew alongside our confidence, we began to glance toward the mysterious slivers of light jutting through the trees of the orchard that undoubtedly led to the highway. I cannot confidently say that many unsupervised children wouldn’t have done the same at such a young age.
On this day that didn’t feel quite like any others, Maisy and our other friends mustered the courage to step onto the highway. My older sister, who was and has always been a mother figure to me, had previously advised me to never play near the highway, but the call of the unknown was too tempting for me. We felt the cool breeze come on with scents of new flowers and sensations of open space and freedom. As a matter of inconvenience at the time, a shadow appeared over the top of the highway nearby that indicated that we needed to get out of the road. I turned around, followed by only six of my dogs unknowingly and, after turning back around a few steps later, watched on as a colossal yellow semi-truck pushed Maisy through the air. I blinked, and as she appeared on the road lifeless, I knew that I must have been dreaming so I held my head in my arms as loud breaths and beats began to echo in my head. As reality set in, I felt a palpable sense of inevitability, brevity, and silence at which point I turned around once more and ran through the woods as far away from this reality as I could, feeling tears on my face but still somehow unable to cry. The coming night was the first night I laid in bed unable to sleep, and repeatedly thought “My friend died today.” There would be many nights to come in which I would hear haunting roars that reminded me of the death that I caused every time a semi-truck would pass by the acreage. I told my sister that I had seen the event from afar, not wanting
to be in trouble for venturing out too far, but in the following weeks she pried and eventually got the truth out of me. It was then that she expressed disappointment at my poor choice, and we never spoke of it again. Time soon unfroze, reality continued, and life went on.
The ongoing guilt from bringing my dog into a dangerous situation stuck with me for a very long time until I acknowledged that we all must learn to forgive ourselves. As unfortunate and preventable as the event was, I retained a strong ability to forgive those around me because we all harbor a sense of guilt in some shape or form. An example of this could be something as seemingly menial as forgetting a friend’s birthday. This is something I have done that I dwell on more than I should (even years later), but we are truly only human after all, and it is critical that we find the will to forgive.
I went on to experience more instances of time stopping, such as my father’s unexpected death 20 years later, and throughout the way with the foundation of this experience I realized that the connection between death and guilt is inherently intertwined. We are all unwittingly unified in the process of grief which, although it varies widely, appears to carry universal components in most cases. These may include deep feelings of shock, regret, denial, dissociation from the event, anger and/or frustration (toward oneself or the individual that passed away), dreaming of the event, and profound sadness. We must all do our best to be kind to ourselves and accept that mistakes are inevitable parts of life, no matter how painful those mistakes may be.
Leonardo Magazine 