15 years of school.
If you count PreK3 through their senior year, that’s 15 years of school. And that 15th year is supposed to be the payoff for us, parents!
We earned it!
The 15th year is the celebration for the time, tears and sweat you put into guiding them through the other 14 years. Some of us didn’t get that 15th year. Some of us didn’t get year 14 or even year 13. I didn’t get that 15th year with Ellison. She died in the month of August at the end of her 1st week as a senior in high school.
We didn’t get her senior year. We didn’t tour college campuses carrying big dreams and we didn’t get her freshman year of college. We didn’t get that first summer home visit with a girl who had a taste of the world on her own and we don’t get to experience all the other milestones every parent looks forward to.
It’s over.
I wonder how many years will pass before I stop picturing her in a way that wonders how she’d be experiencing life if she were here. Soon, I fear, enough time will pass that I won’t be able to imagine her experiencing these milestones.
This time of year is especially hard for those of us who lost a teen or a young college student. “Back to school” is so painful. New notebooks, new pens, new backpacks… I have those empty notebooks we bought for her for her senior year. They only have notes in them from the first week of school. They held promise. But that’s where they end.
Ellison, you died when I was still in parent mode. I used to look forward to the day when you were an adult and we could look back on silly childhood and adolescent things and laugh together about how ridiculous you were or how out of touch I was. But you left before we could do that and now it just seems cruel that I can’t laugh with you about how we both were just doing the best we could.
Those are the things fentanyl steals. Ellison was a trusting kid experimenting by taking a pill from a “friend.” Should she have done that? Absolutely not. But should she have died from that? Absolutely not.
Milestones mark significant change. We may have been cheated out of future milestones with our children; but we can still accomplish significant change by sharing their sweet stories over and over until there are no more new stories to share and the poisoning of our younger generations ends.
Ellison Bryde 11/26/03 – 8/20/21
Submitted by Kari Clay
