My mid-teen years were not only troubles by issues at school and in my personal life, but also by many deaths. In the span of about three and a half years, several people who were in my life or apart of it at some point met their untimely demise.

The first death came during the summer after the seventh grade. Grandfather John was always an incredible man in my life. In the early years of my life, he was a father-figure to me and was such the kindest man to me. Throughout the 90s he slowly descended towards his death through a series of several strokes and heart attacks. In the late 90s he would come to my home every Sunday, in the morning, and just talk with my mother and I. Still a happy man, but slightly more cynical. He grew up during a racist time in America, and because of that he used racist terms. "Damn that nigger can play golf!" or "Look at that tall chink shoot hoops!" But he never discriminated against other races; he just didn't use proper words.

His final days were spent at Mercy Hospital with less-than-kind care from the nurses. His dignity was ignored for the most part. He wasn't awake, but rather in a deep coma. The night of his death, I spent my time in his room at the hospital with my mother and family. My mother and I went home after dark, and I just went straight to bed. The dream I had that night was nothing short of creepy. I was in this building made of steel with steel grating floors. Walking across them would make that metal clang noise like if you were on a ship of some sort. I was in a room, behind a desk, and I could hear this distant noise. It was something running on the metal grating, and it was getting closer. It kept getting louder and louder, and I was getting more and more freightened by what was coming. So I hid beneath the desk. When running was as close as ever, it slowed to a walk, grabbed the doorknob of the room I was in, and opened the door. At that exact moment, I woke up to my mother saying, "We have to go. Dad died."

I was one of the people who carried his casket out of the funeral home and into the car, and then from the car to the place in the cemetary where he was to be laid to rest. I didn't cry at his funeral, even though I had an incredible urge to do so. Flowers everywhere. I do remember the flowers.

Two years later, the next person to die would be my God Father, Tom Bowdich. Tom was the nicest man on the planet. He was a family man with strong family values yet an open-mind to the views of other people. He was always kind to everyone he ever met, and his courage followed him all the way to his death. Tom developed an extremely rare form of cancer starting in his left arm after taking a prescription drug to try and lower his cholesteral. About a year into his chemo treatment, he went into remission, and every was so incredibly relieved. Zero particles of the cancer could be traced anywhere in his body. About six months later he relapsed with his bone marrow crawling with cancer and a tumor growing in his brain.

Shortly after my mother and I moved out of the city and into my mother's dream home, Tom came out to see what the house was like. He said to us, "This spring, we'll tuck the cement, paint the house, and do this and that." He was so excited about a house renovation that he was just shivering. But he would never get the chance to come back that spring. He died just a few days later.

About five or six months after Tom's death, one extremely unexpected death happened that shocked both my mother and I. I mentioned that Laury Wrenn had a daughter, Jamie. I never became friends with Jamie, but I did know her. It was a cold october night, and Jamie and one of her friends were driving up to another town to pick up their senior photos. Jamie realized that she was speeding, and before she had the chance to slow down, she hit a guard-rail at a curve in the road. After the car rolled several times, Jamie was sent through the driver's-side window, through a tree, and into a near-by cornfield. She had split the tree with her head. A man was driving behind them when he saw the accident. After calling 911, the paramedics took Jamie's friend out of the car and loaded her into the ambulance. The paramedics didn't realize that she wasn't the driver. They assumed she was because she had been thrown into the driver's seat. Jamie's friend said to the paramedics, "Where is Jamie? She was driving the car!" Jamie was found, alive, and taken to UW Madison ICU.

Laury called my mother about an hour after she got to the hospital, and we drove up to Madison as fast as we could. After waiting in the waiting room for an hour, Laury came and got us. Jamie was awake, but she could barely move. She broke her back, both of her legs, fractured her skull, broke both of her arms and wrists, and basically any bone you can break. She communicated by writing very short words. The doctors told us, "She has a very long road ahead of her, but she survived the accident, and that gives her very good odds of survival." A few weeks later, on Thanksgiving 2001, Jamie suffered a massive stroke and died from brain failure. A microscopic hole in a blood vessle in her brain had been slowly bleeding out over the course of several weeks and eventually formed a clot which stopped her entire circulatory system. At her funeral, I could recal seeing almost the entire senior class of Parker High School show up.

The next year would prove to give me the most shocking death I've known to-date. My Great Grandmoter Lucy Olin had always been the most lively and up-beat woman I've ever known. Even at the age of 93, she was cracking hilarious jokes and jumping into people's laps like it were nothing. She was a very fit woman and quite agile for her age. One day, she fell and broke her hip. While at the hospital, two doctors both missed her broken hip and sent her home without treating it (the X-ray tech later pointed out that he easily saw the fracture). After three days, we got a call from the assisted living center. "Gail, you better get over here quick. Lucy is out of her mind in pain," Mary told us. Mary owned the assisted living center, and was close friends with my mother. Upon ariving at the hospital, it was found out that her hip had become severely dislocated on the fracture and was causing mind-numbing pain which made her go crazy with pain. In order to fix this, they had to perform emergency surgury on her. This is where everything went horribly wrong. Great Grandma was on heart medication which could NOT be lowered beyond a certain point. Doing so would put her into heart arrest and kill her. The surgeon completely neglected this and pumped her with pure blood. After thirty minutes, her medicine level was 0, and she went into heart failure. She died on the table.

The final death came near the end of my junior year in High School. On March 22, 2003, Pfc. Sean Schneider was driving north of Bahgdad, Iraq, when the hummer he was in flipped and crushed his body beneath it. Why did the hummer flip? The person driving the hummer fell asleep, drove off the road, and fell into a ditch. The armor on the hummer was not even as thick as a soda can and crushed just as easily.

I grew up around Sean. My mother and Kim Schneider worked together in the operating room at Mercy Hospital for many years. They became great friends because of it. Because of this, I would always be at Kim's house playing with her son Myles, who is four years younger than I am. At the same time, Myles' brothers Sean and Phil would always pick on us like the older kids would. Sean was four or five years older than I was, but he did like me. Two years before his death, Sean offered to help me with the effects of my thyroid disorder. Being the self-concious person that I am, I turned him down ... and to this day I regret it. Sean has my respect and forever will have it.

I know it may not seem like much, but some important people did die in my life, and within close proximity to each other. It was enough to leave a lasting impact on my own life.

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