Day Twenty-Eight: This Year in Great Detail

Ha! This should be really interesting! I was thinking about this post while I showered this morning and realized how very little of the past 7 months I remember. I'll give it my best shot, though.


January - I have no clue how we rang in the new year. I want to say that we had MM's Mom over, but I also seem to recall lying in bed by 11:30 that night. Not much else went on in January. It tends to be the coldest month here, so there was a lot of movie watching, hot chocolate and hot tea drinking and cuddling going on.

February - The biggest event in February was that we went to Gruene to take family portraits in celebration of my paternal grandparents' 50th Wedding Anniversary. It was a lot of fun to see that whole side of the family together and we got some really great shots. The pictures ended up being Valentine's weekend, so we had a nice, quiet Valentine's celebration the week after. We had our usual menu: steaks, asparagus with bacon and lots and lots of wine.

March - March was MM's birthday month, but we had been keeping a really close eye on the budget, so it was really low-key. He got several gift cards from Cabela's, including one from me, so he went wild with the online shopping. We started getting the garden plot ready by amending the soil with organic manure and tilling everything up.

April - We had a very simple April this year as well. I honestly can't think of anything that necessarily stands out about April. We booked our hotel for our trip to Corpus Christi that was going to be in May for MM's little brother's high school graduation. We had also recently started talking a lot more with Crystal (MM's step-sister whom we had lost touch with) about the upcoming trip. She was going to be there as well and we couldn't wait to see each other and for everyone to be together like in the old days.

May - This was a pretty horrible month. It started out peaceful enough, but on May 22, things turned upside down. I was just getting ready to leave the house to meet Crystal in Midland for a day of shopping. We both needed dresses for a friend's wedding and we were going to make a big day of it. I was literally walking out the door when we got a phone call from Nathan, MM and Crystal's little brother that she had been in a head-on collision. I jumped right into my car and headed for the hospital in Odessa. MM stayed home because he wanted to wait until I got up there to assess the situation. I don't think he was ready to face the emotional aspect of what was happening. I got to the hospital and Crystal looked terrible. She had suffered severe head trauma and had a crushed pelvis as well. MM joined us later that evening and we all sat and waited and waited. By the following Wednesday, she had improved greatly and the neurologist felt that her head injury was no longer life-threatening. Nathan was scheduled to graduate that Friday, and it was the trip we had all been planning on enjoying together. It was decided that Nathan would go home and graduate and that MM and I would go on our trip as planned while Crystal's Mom, Step-Dad and brother stayed behind.

On Thursday, MM and I headed down to Corpus Christi. While we were on the road, we received a phone call that Crystal had taken a bad turn. We were concerned, but still hopeful. We prayed and prayed and prayed. During one conversation with Crystal's Mom, I got the very definite impression that Crystal was already gone, but I still stayed as positive as possible. That night in the hotel room, MM stayed up with Nathan, who decided he wanted to stay with us while all of this was going on. I went to bed that night and gave MM my phone. I didn't want to be the one to answer the call I suspected was coming. At around 9:15 a.m. on Friday, May 28, we received the call that Crystal was gone. It was heartbreaking and what hurt the most was watching her brother react to the news.

But, we still had the joyous occasion of a graduation to attend to and that night, less than 24 hours after his sister had died, Nathan made us all proud and graduated from high school. It was such a bittersweet event, but we were glad to have been there.

June - June started off just as rough as May ended. We laid Crystal to rest on June 3, 2010. She was buried in a beautiful place overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. MM was a pallbearer and I was so proud of him for stepping forward and doing that for Crystal.

That evening after the funeral, we headed over to Owen's house. Owen is MM's best friend and was also Crystal's boyfriend at the time of all of this. It was hard to be around him and MM and I tried to keep our distance since we knew how much it hurt Owen to see couples interacting.

The next day was MM and I's 6-year anniversary, but it pretty much passed without notice considering the circumstances. That evening, we went to a wedding for a good friend of all the guys. It was a nice celebration. The party really got started after the wedding when we, along with a few other wedding guests, headed back to Owen's. We were all an emotional wreck and probably imbibed a bit too much, but we were all in one place to stay, so there was no risk of drunk driving. It was really a great time.

After the hectic start to the month, we just wanted peace and quiet, and that's just what we got. We spent the rest of June not doing too much. We just enjoyed each other's company. It was all we could do to keep moving forward.


Wow. That ended up being a hard post to put together. I'm sure it'll be even harder to proofread. There is so much that happened that feels like it was so long ago, but the memory of it all is so very vivid. I think that it has been healing to get out, though and I'm glad it is.