2 years ago today, I found myself in court…

Feb 10th i was in a minor car accident that left me with a court date over a month away. Never in my life had I ever been in an accident and suddenly this intensely minor fender bender was holding on to my license for a whole month.

At that time in my career, i was an nontenured teacher and in the 3 years prior I had only taken more than one day off after contracting salmonella poisoning, so for me to have to leave school was truly a rare occasion .

After i finished court i decided to drive up to Rockford to visit a very good friend of mine who had been getting progressively more sick for  years. He would text me frightening tales of not being able to breathe and i often worried he wasn’t safe to be home alone. Although, very young, a degenerative lung disease escalated to a point where he was becoming completely unable to breathe. Lungs of an 88 year old, brain of a 20 something.

He counseled me after losing a close friend only years prior and was a constant stable source of wisdom. When I wasn’t close to my family in college, I could count on him to pretend to be my dad at the awards ceremonies and go to him about relationship questions. Always having a greater vision of purpose, he set my mind at ease and continually reminded me that, “Everything you need is already inside of you.”

The day i took off and visited him in Rockford was the last day i ever saw him alive. During my visit he joked and teased me, made hilariously inappropriate jokes, and although he struggled speaking, he tried to so hard to keep up with conversation.

Over my own time here, I’ve lost many people to taxing illnesses where long goodbyes and realizations about life’s purpose and goals occur.  The long goodbye is an agonizing process of years which no matter how much we all know it will happen, we never truly are prepared for the emotional loss that actually happens when the person does leave.

I miss my friend a painstaking amount and keep little notes up in my classroom to remind myself of the things he was repeating to me because the lessons he taught me are ones I need to share and remind myself daily.

Going to court cost me a day,

but taking a day off and making time to say goodbye

is a lesson I will not forget.