The wedding is over, my family and friends have all gone back to Massachusetts and I am married to a wonderful man whose family can’t stand me. Most of my allies boarded a plane and now were going to be over 1800 miles away. We packed our bags and moved to an apartment an hour away from my in-laws but that was not the only good thing about moving. Both of our jobs were closer to our new apartment than where we had been living, before we had over an hour commute to work every day so this was going to be great.
Our first few months being married was great, we had no real contact with my new in-laws. Honestly no one in my husband’s side of the family called the house so it helped. There was a night about 5 months after our wedding when an in-law did call. We thought it was weird maybe they were starting to realize they missed my husband; maybe they were going to start acting like a family should.
The reality of the phone call was much worse than we could have expected. The call was from my sister –in-law she was calling to tell my husband that one of his friends had been killed in a car accident. We had just seen the news of the accident on the news but we did not know it was someone we knew. This was a friend of the family who was in his early 20’s and they had known for years. A car hit him head on and both drivers died on impact. I was still a new wife and I really did not know how to comfort him and help him through this grief. The only other time I had to comfort someone when a friend of theirs died was around my high school graduation when a friend of mines friend committed suicide. I did not know what to do then and I did not know what to do now.
I comforted him to the absolute best of my ability, I held his hand at the viewing and it was very hard to attend that for someone who was so young. There were things done at the viewing that I still do not understand, like when the pastor lifted the veil off the coffin so people could see how he looked. That still makes me upset there was a lot of damage done by the accident so the veil should have stayed in place. That alone caused nightmares for my husband and there was nothing I could do to remove that image from his head. The pain that he was experiencing was so intense that it truly broke my heart.