Five years later

by Catlyn Ladd

Featured on THIRT33N Podcast, July 15, 2024

Five years later I stood contemplating the calendar on the wall beside the phone charger. I flipped to March: the photo showed a torrid, rain-drenched sky. The fourth day of March loomed like a gravestone at the beginning of every year. This would be the fifth year of My Life After Dream. I thought of it in capital letters: Before and After.

Four years, eleven months, and twenty-eight days ago, he died. When the policeman came to my door to tell me, my knees unhinged and I fell. I don’t remember falling, only that I became aware of the pattern of small blue flowers on the white tile floor. I didn’t remember the months afterward either, only glimpses like still photographs, pictures falling from an unbound book.

I remembered calling for the police report and the kindness in the voice of the woman on the other end of the telephone line as she explained: Dream had been driving late at night. He had fallen asleep and had crossed the median dividing I40 from itself. He hit a semi truck. At the time of impact Dream’s car had been traveling over one hundred miles an hour. The impact of his two-door sports car had caused the semi to flip and had put the truck driver in intensive care. Dream died instantly.

I looked at March’s depiction of nature’s tempest and thought about the cemetery in the middle of the Oklahoma waste where Dream lay interred. His tomb hung high in the air within a huge mausoleum of tan granite. I could barely touch the bottom of his headstone if I stood on tiptoe.

(photo from Freepik)