A few hours before that that, I decided to show her a music video for one of my favorite songs. She watched and intensely told me how awful and sexist the music video was. I think my face fell, because she said she was sorry for "Britta-ing" the song we were listening to. I thought this was a humorous reference to the tv show, "Community", that she had been watching recently. There was a genuine sadness to the apology that I didn't understand at the time. (A week later, I would hear that show on the video I found on her computer, while she stared listless, then clearly struggling with something inside her, then enraged, into the computer camera while "Community" played in the background. There was an intensity of pain in her that I never saw when I was with her. Then my son yelled from upstairs at something in his room(on his video game) and her whole body jerked, fearful and shocked, and she stopped the video.) It was the last real conversation that we had.
My daughter is gone, one month and 10 days before her 23rd birthday. All that's left is computer images, ashes and boxes upon boxes of things that when I look at them, time stops, and I see the remnants of the life of the beautiful, smart, quirky girl who had everything ahead of her and I break apart again. She has left us with questions that we can never have answered and a huge cavern in our lives where she belongs.
2568 hours ago, we sat outside the house, shocked, crying, choking on the pain, seconds ticking by like hours while the paramedics, police and finally the coroner invaded our house, sent us out, and told us she was dead.
I can't stop time and the increasing distance from her that each second brings. I get stopped in those moments when she was still here. I am there with her, wrapped in her bathrobe, looking at the plants that she planted in the yard for a moment, then punched in the gut with the realization that she is gone.
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