I wouldn't be shocked if my friends get sick of me around this time of the year. I get sick of me around this time of the year. Next Sunday (April 26th) is the nine year anniversary of the Taylor van accident. On the night of April 26, 2006, there was a van of nine people heading back to Taylor from Taylor Fort Wayne and a semi going northbound crossed the median into the van. Out of the nine people, five were proclaimed dead on the spot.
As time has gone on, I have healed from the grieving of friends and people that poured into my life but as time has gone on more things have been uncovered that I have to work through. It was one of the hardest times of my life to go through the loss of people that I looked up to and that poured into me in their own ways. The grieving of the loss of people was definitely something that took time and I was challenged by, but I never thought past that. I never thought of my family's involvement and the affect that it would have on us as a family. I definitely never thought that it would be something that I was struggling with nine years later.
The truth is that the accident itself changed my family in such a radical way. Before all of this happened my relationship with my father was terrible. I resented him for not being enough in my life and for always pouring into the students at Taylor way more than I felt he was pouring into me. That night he had been following behind the van but stopped off at the exit before he got home which pushed him further back. Had he been following them he could have been killed himself or witnessed something that would have scarred him even worse. This was a dramatic mood change for me in regards to my father. I could have lost him that night and even through all the resentment and pain I wasn't ready for that. This opened up a new road to recovery of a broken relationship and a lifetime of my own guilt that I had to sort through.
Aside from the relationship with my father, the accident changed the way that my family was in general. Before the accident, my dad loved his job at Taylor but because of the accident lots of things changed at Taylor. There were a lot of position changes in the administration that changed because of it and happiness for my father was very few and far between. Parts of the institution that always felt like a family to me were no longer filling that role in my life or in my own family. There was bitterness that was built up and that was passed on. To this day there is still bitterness when the subject comes up and it honestly is the most draining thing to go through. I love Taylor and I love the experiences that I had there, but sometimes that's hard to separate through the pain that I am still dealing with through this.
People always say that it gets better with time. That's not always the case. Things can be better with time, but the truth of the situation has to be admitted along with the desire to fix it. The truth is that the reason that parts of this time are still so intertwined in my life is because there is still bitterness wrapped up in the pain. There are things that I need to forgive, but forgiveness is easier said than done. This night changed my life and without it I can't say that I would have ever came to God, but it also is still a process for me. It's still changing me and it is still a challenge around this time. They say that it takes about seven years to grieve for one person and I have five along with the struggles of a family. Every year I know that I am one step closer to the closure and the end of the process, but I know that I have a long way to go.
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