Heartbroken and reeling

I've been fortunate enough in my life to only have brief encounters with death.  My grandfather passed away when I was 10, and my great uncle passed away last October.  I truly can't put a finger on many other deaths that have affected me.

So I write today with a broken heart.  My college roommate, a girl who I lived with for four years, has lost two of her three daughters in a tragic car accident.  Olivia, 6, and Emma, 3, sustained fatal injuries, and my roommate, who was also life-flighted, survived.  Her 4-year old daughter was home with her dad, thank God.  

Death is a part of life, but that is much easier to accept when the person has had a chance to LIVE that life. These precious babies did not.

In college, we dreamed of our future families, our future weddings (to very different men than we ended up marrying!) our future careers.  As girls do, we talked about everything.  Late night bunk conversations that turned into conversations over a good bottle of wine, and now conversations we're lucky to have through email and messaging.  But we never talked about grief, never imagined that something so tragic could happen.  And why would we?  We live in a world of rose-colored glasses, whether we adorn those glasses by choice, by circumstance, or by happenstance.  When these tragedies do happen, how do we cope? 

I keep replaying the conversation I had with her mother in my head, when she told me that the 6-year old who there was hope would survive wouldn't make it.  I am trying to take comfort in the fact that B was holding both her girls as they became angels. I just don't think there is any comfort in the loss of lives cut so short, lives just blooming and just beginning to be lived. 

Please, however religious or non religious you are, I ask that you lift up this family.  I'm not sure how you move on from such a tragedy, as the mother, father, or middle sister.  I can only pray that B has the strength to make it through the next hour, the next day, and maybe, the next year.  

I remain heartbroken.

If you would like to donate to the family (he is a college prof, she is a SAHM), here is a link to do so.  Their medical expenses and now funeral expenses are already exorbitant as the little girls will be flown home to Maryland to rest in peace.  God bless the little angels, Olivia and Emma.

Becca and Sean