A few days after my return from Spain, my friends and I were casually playing beer pong and having a good time in our apartment parking lot in Iowa City. This was pretty much the first time I had seen them since school ended, so we wanted to celebrate. My phone was dead of course, so I had left it in my apartment to charge. I decided I wanted to snap chat a picture of my friends' and my festivities, so I went into my apartment to go get it off the charger. I knew something was a little off right when I looked at my phone and saw I had approximately 10 missed text messages and a couple missed calls, so I decided to sit in my room and see what was going on.
"Dakotah Collins passed away today in a motorcycle accident."
This was the first text out of the ten that I read. I couldn't move, I couldn't speak, I simply just sat on my bed staring at my wall in shock and disbelief. I honestly could not even tell you what I was thinking at that exact moment in time. Dakotah was a boy who went to high school with me and was a couple of years younger than I am. I had also dated him (kind of) for a few months, but that's beside the point. After blankly staring at my wall for a few minutes, I was able to snap back to reality with memories and thoughts crowding my head. Someone, younger than myself, whose snapchat story I JUST looked at the night before, was no longer living. Someone's parents, who woke up that day thinking they'd see their son and hear the sound of his voice again, wouldn't. And the many people who interacted with Dakotah in school, sports, parties, etc., would never get to live another experience with him. My tears began to pour out of my eyes.
This incident was all I could constantly think about for a solid week. I was scared, frustrated and most definitely confused. It was very hard for me to grasp why God would take such a young soul and what was even harder for me to grasp was that as all of Dakotah's peers grow up and live to be 40, 60, and 80 years old, he would forever be 19. He would never get the opportunity to experience marriage, graduate college nor experience the pain and beauty that come with growing old. It just didn't make sense to me and didn't seem fair. It was also scary and mysterious to me why his unlucky experience resulted in death, when in reality, it could have been any single one of us. Why did God not decide to take me at age 18 when I was driving home from a Morningside college visit and I wasn't paying attention to the road, which caused me to swerve into the other lane as a truck was coming? I don't know.
Death is such a painful thing to deal with and I think that it's partially due to the uncomfortable thoughts that come with it. It was very uncomfortable for me to think about how it could've been one of my sisters or close friends that got called home that day, and it was even more uncomfortable to think about the mystery of the after life because truly, we are not certain what happens to people after they die. I didn't like the consequence of Dakotah's accident and I surely did not know how to deal with all of my questions and uncertainties that came along with it. I still don't. However, I do not think that this is all bad. I think that when an unfortunate event like this happens, it forces us to reevaluate our own lives and the people in it. It forces us to reflect on whether or not we show our loved ones our appreciation for them enough and also forces us to think about, had we been in Dakotah's postion, could we have said we were content with the life we had lived and had no regrets.
I think that the bigger picture of every life experience is that we are only humans and just don't know. And what we do know is so very minute to the unknowns of the universe. We don't know why some individuals get called home sooner than others, but we also don't know why Steve got the job promotion and you didn't.We simply don't know why things happen the way they do and that's scary to us. Do things just happen or is their purpose behind everything that happens? That's the age old question, folks, and I cannot tell you that I have the answer because I don't. I'm just as simple minded as the next human being trying to grasp the very intangible concept of "why." What I do know, though, is that within every negative experience there is some beauty and that in the greater scheme of things, everything seems to work out one way or another. We don't know how or why, but it does. We know so very little about our universe and heck, we may never know. We can only hope for the best and have faith that everything will work out in the end. We can keep questioning and wondering, but we also need to keep living and experiencing new people, events and ideas because this may be the closest we come to ever knowing anything.
I would like to dedicate this blog post to Dakotah Collins, along with his close friends and family. <3
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