Life seems so fragile sometimes; it takes so much to live a happy life, and so little to utterly destroy it...
Last weekend, while reading the newspaper, I read a little footnote describing a car accident near my hometown. I didn't actually pay much attention (as usual for such articles), since the chances of people I know being involved in it are very low.
Two days later, I received a call from my father. He told me that a good family friend of ours was involved in a serious accident, and had fallen in a coma. It took me about 2 seconds to make a connection with the article I had read. He didn't have any other news at that time, and promised to stay in touch.
When the phone rang a few hours later, I had a bad feeling before answering. It was my mom, calling to tell me that our friend, and more importantly her *close* friend, had died from severe head trauma. We talked a bit about it and then she hang up to go to bed, still crying.
I'm still in shock. On one hand, I wasn't that close to her, since I live an hour away from my parents and thus I didn't get to see her much during my infrequent visits. But still, a few years back I and the rest of my family had more frequent contacts with her and so I guess I should be crying right now, but I can't. It just... seems unreal right now. In fact, it might not totally sink in until I attend the funeral and my hugging brain finally realizes and accepts that yes, she really *is* gone. But it just feels weird right now.
It feels like the premise of a movie; after visiting a friend in the next town, she decided to drive home late at night while it was extremely foggy outside. Of course, she said she'd turn back if it was too hard to see on the road, but like most people do in a situation like this, she kept going, being sure that some fog wasn't going to stop her from coming home. And like a twisted turn of fate, her car crashed somehow, leaving her body practically intact but causing massive head damage.
It all feels unfair really. Back when I was a kid, she along with her kids were good friends of the family (the husband was a total asshole though, even if he was always pleasant with us to save face). Eventually we stopped hearing from her due to the fact that said husband, a local artist with a huge ego, kept treating her like shit, beating her, telling her he would gladly beat her into her grave sooner or later, and cutting herself from all her friends. That, plus he kept living the big life with the local wealthy class with frequent visits to his mistress (my hometown is pretty small, so everybody knew about it) while she stayed at home fully aware of his actions.
It took over twenty years for her to finally manage to ask for a divorce (after getting separated and accepting him back several times), that is enough time for the kids to move out and for her to feel ready to begin a new life single (and even then, it was a huge effort for her considering how emotionally dependent she was). Of course, because of various dealings of his, she was left with hardly any money. He manage to pay her using mostly paintings of his, evaluated to large amounts by expert "friends" but without much resale value for a woman with no connection to the art world. Then she had to find a way to earn a living, which isn't easy when you're a woman in her 50s with an outdated medical assistant diploma with no practical experience in 20 years.
In short, the last few years, she had to spend fighting to get whatever money she could in addition to trying to overcome her emotional dependency issues which, while she had found a nice and loving guy to live with, where still keeping her attached to him even though it was becoming clear that it wasn't working out in the long run between them.
My mom told me tonight that she wasn't really happy at the moment, and I can understand since all she went through made her depressive. It just seems cruel that, while she was working as hard as she could to try and put her life back on tracks, something as stupid and final as a car accident would come in and casually put a stop to all that.
It's hard to see all that makes a person what she is, all the pains, all the dreams, the happiness, the challenges, the memories, everything that she is, just vanish so suddenly. All that is left in the wake are the people who cared about her, of which there were many but in those case there are almost never enough.
I guess I wrote all of this to try and remember who she was, and yet I didn't even talk about that yet. Well then, this is who she was: she was a kind woman, a warm person, a good mother and a trustworthy friend. She was a hard worker and sadly she had much more potential than what she actually had time to exploit.
Farewell Lucette. You'll be sorely missed. May you finally find the peace you were never afforded on this Earth.
Incidentally, I've been feeling kind of down this week because of that, so I won't be posting much for a little while. Hopefully, the service on Saturday should help me with my grief and finally making me realize that she's gone forever so that I can finally cry and express my grief.
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"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard
B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me
