By Cameron Drue, TIWP Student

It’s been seven years since the day I died. It is crazy to see how much has changed since my last real human interaction. Of course every few months I’m able to give small signs of my presence but usually they go unnoticed or are brushed off as a hallucination. At first, my transition to the afterlife was a little rough. I could hear and see everyone in my life suffering with sadness over my death but I couldn’t embrace them and tell them everything would be okay.

The hardest “goodbye” was my younger sister Taylor. We were the closest of friends despite the large age gap between us. I was 15 when a drunk driver took me out of the world that I was just starting to understand. Taylor was 10 at the time and waiting for me to come home and watch a movie with her as we always did on Sunday nights. In her eyes, I never came home. 

The pain of seeing her cry over my death was ten times worse than the pain of a car going seventy miles per hour on the freeway slamming into my body. As the years went on, I watched Taylor slowly grow into an amazing young woman. I watched every stupid mistake she made with boys and every time she laughed so hard she snorted like a pig. Honestly, watching her grow is the only reason I haven’t fully lost my mind. As blessed as I felt to be able to watch her and all of my family and friends grow, the pain of feeling forgotten ate away at me. I went from living in spirit in their minds twenty-four/seven to being a sad thought that is brought up every few months and quickly buried away.