The week of Thanksgiving is always a bittersweet week for me. I always enjoyed the shortened school week, and the general feeling that the holidays are upon us. I don't like the bombardment of Black Friday ads on radio, TV and the internet, though, but that shouldn't take away from me eating like a pig on Thanksgiving and otherwise not having to do anything (though I do have to work on Black Friday, but luckily for me, I don't work in retail).
Thanksgiving has also become kind of a sad time for me, as a very tragic event happened to my family 5 years ago. About twenty minutes after midnight on Thanksgiving Morning 2005, my cousin Tyler was killed by a drunk driver. He was just four days shy of his 19th birthday, and his passing has opened up a floodgate of emotions for me that took a long time for me to deal with (and I still have not fully made sense of this tragedy, nor do I accept it).
I would have been devastated by Tyler's death anyway, as he and I were the closest in age out of all my cousins and when we were younger we were close. But at the time of his death, he and I had not spoken in over 5 years. I don't want to get too much into the details about why, but basically when I was 13, in early 1999, my parents divorced. My dad had a pretty bad alcohol problem and my mother had attempted suicide shortly beforehand. I'm not going to sit here and say who did what and what was said and all that, but as a result of this, I pretty much lost contact with my dad's side of the family There was a schism in our family, if you will. My mother was an only child and by the time her and my dad had divorced, both her parents were dead. My dad was one of four children, and they all had kids of their own. My dad's older brother, Robert, was Tyler's father. For the most part, my uncle Robert stayed out of our family mess, and he did have the advantage of living 300 miles away from us (he lives in Northern Virginia, literally a hop a skip and a jump away from Washington D.C.).
After that, the only time I ever saw Tyler again was in October 2000. I had been asked to help my grandparents move to their new house, I guess as a way of them extending an olive branch, and I agreed to it despite my reservations. My uncle Robert, my Aunt Nancy and Tyler had come up from Virginia to help out as well, and before that, it had been at least 2 or 3 years since I had seen any of them. For obvious reasons (distance and jobs and all that), they didn't come up too often, maybe twice a year, and since the rest of my family lives in Connecticut, we didn't make it down to Virginia too often either. But it was like no time had passed when it came to Tyler. The first thing he did when he saw me was throw a football at me, and we played catch for a while. I don't remember the rest of the day too well, but I also had no fucking idea that that would be the last time I would ever see him. I always think of that scene in Forrest Gump where he was talking to his friend Bubba, who had been mortally wounded in Vietnam, and Gump (while narrating) said "If I had known that this would be the last time me and Bubba was gonna talk, I would have thought of something better to say." Well, that's true for me and Tyler.
Fast forward to five years later, on Thanksgiving night 2005, my girlfirned and I went out to dinner and we were at my house watching a movie. The phone rang. It was my Aunt Diane. Out of everyone in my extended family, she had always kept in touch with me and my sister. She was (and still is) probably the only one in my family who could be flat out open about our family's history of alcohol abuse (my dad is an alcoholic, so is my grandfather, and so was his father), so I thought that she was naturally just checking in on us (which I'm sure she was); the rest of my family tends to keep their problems to themselves, which I guess I can't fault them for. So it started off like your nomal "Hi, how are you? Happy Thanksgiving!" type phone call you would expect from a relative or friend. And then she broke the news that Tyler had been killed, which, as probably expected, she burst into tears after trying to keep her composure for the first minute or so into our phone conversation. And I just went cold. I did the whole "WHAT?!?!?!" thing, and I think I started cursing for like a minute straight trying to take in the news that my cousin was dead. It was hard. I did not take the news of it well at all. For the rest of that week, I hardly spoke and I was really depressed about it. I didn't cry about it; I couldn't, for if I did, my tears would never stop.
It had already been a shitty week to begin with. I had lost my job at some restaurant I was working at, and that year in general was just a shitstorm and a half. The part that really bothered me (and still bothers me to this day) was that the night before Thanksgiving, around 11:30 PM or so, I was driving hme from my friend's house, and out of nowhere I had this pang of nervousness and instability. I had some starnge feeling that something was wrong somewhere to someone I knew. Tyler didn't come to mind; In fact, NO ONE IN PARTICULAR came to mind. It could have been my mother, my sister, my girlfriend, or some guy I used to be friends with. This feeling wore off by 1 AM, but upon hearing of Tyler's death (which happened at 12:18 AM that morning, probaby as I was pacing around my house listening to music), I knew that I had felt that for a reason. Good ol' intuition. It never fails.
Three people I knew died in 2005, all of them around the same age as me. The first one was in April, this guy Brian, who was a friend of my girlfriend's brother. He was no angel; basically spent his teenage years rebelling against his overly Christian family by doing drugs and all that, and ended up overdosing. Less than a month later, this guy I went to school with, Jon, was killed by a drunk-and-high-on-pills driver. I wasn't close to any of them, but still. They were the same age as me, and it instilled the truth in me that I could die tomorrow too.
One of the most tragic elements about this story is all my cousin had to persevere against throughout his short life. He was born with some birth defects involving his back, and had to endure 5 operations before his 2nd birthday. These setbacks never stopped him from anything, and judging from what I know about his life up until it ended, he was well on his way to becoming an incredible person. He was studying Criminal Justice at a community college at the time of the crash, had legions of friends from all corners of the nation, and was just your typical American male teenager. And honestly one of the kindest people I've ever known in my life.
In October, I went down to Virginia for the first time since 1997; I couldn't make it to Tyler's funeral in 2005, even if I desperately wanted to. My Uncle Bob and Aunt Nancy seem to be doing OK, meaning that they're able to smile and laugh and leave the house and all that, but they're still mourning (and they probably will for the rest of their lives). They're able to talk about Tyler, filling me in on details that didn't make the newspapers or that I kind of avoided to delve into, but there is that element of insurmountable sadness there. Nancy is more outwardly stronger in talking about it, as I always thought that she was very much a strong-willed person, yet Bob still appears as if he could start crying at any time (and I don't blame him). It was creepy being there though. The last time I was at their house, Tyler was still here obviously. They redid their house, which looked fantastic, but they showed me Tyler's bedroom; his possessions untouched, supposedly in the same place they were when he left his house for the very last time. In the guest room Amelia and I stayed in (which I swear was Tyler's childhood bedroom; he must have switched rooms as he got older), there was this wreath on the wall, surrounded by some of his old toys. I had fun on that trip, but it was also very emotional for me as well. I held back a lot. I guess at the end of the day, I just don't know how to tell my aunt and uncle how sorry I am that it happened and the tremendous amount of guilt I felt towards it, even if I had nothing to do with it. I guess there's a part of me that felt like if I had stayed in touch with him, somehow his life would be spared, like if I had emailed him that day or called or whatever, he would have left his house a few minutes later than he had planned, and the pickup truck that crashed into him would have passed him. I was always encouraged to keep in touch with him from my mother, and she was right that I should have. I also had no clue in the world that he would be dead before he was 20. I always kind of envisioned that we'd meet up for a beer one day as I travelled across the nation and I stopped in Virginia or something like that, but obviously that can never happen. And that's one of the biggest regrets of my entire life.
BTW, the guy who did it (who was actually an illegal immigrant from Mexico, which is my only argument AGAINST illegal immigration) got 10 years in jail for vehicular manslaughter. He also attempted to flee the scene. But once he gets out, he'll be sent back to Mexico. Glad he didn't get off.
Well, have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Be safe and happy, and if you do drink, I urge you to make the right decision when it comes to driving.
R.I.P. Jonathan Tyler Bentley (November 28, 1986 - November 24, 2005)
I Got Published
14 years ago
