The phone call.
-Marsha Abbott
It arrived on a sunny Sunday morning. Shortly after I answered the phone my heart began beating 5 times faster than usual, signalling extreme stress. My brain began racing, "How can I fix this. What can I do?". My voice sounded animal-like. It didn't sound like me at all. What was the guttural wretched sound coming out of my mouth? Was this the sound of agony? My spirit began trying to reach God with repetitive prayers, "Please save her. PLEASE SAVE HER. I will do anything if you will save her." But nothing could be done.
When my phone rang September 27th from a hospital with news that our 19 year old daughter had been accidentally shot by a gun, they prepared me for the worst and told me they would call back. My world stopped turning. Time stood still. Then another call. She didn't make it. Everything went from color... to... black and white. Her future was gone. Our future with her was gone. My God, it was over just like that. She didn't have a chance. No warning. No opportunity to say goodbye. A huge vacuum of helplessness and despair.
My mother was the first one to reach our house and witnessed my raw emotions. The meltdown of my insides, my soul. Stripped of all sense of decorum, I endlessly wailed in pain. When my husband and daughter arrived we fell together in a heap of tears,holding one another, each of us searching for a way to make this tragedy untrue. Could one of us wake up and tell the others this was just a nightmare of the worst kind? No.
Molly had just been married 6 months prior. She had enrolled in college, fell in love, married and was working to help pay for their first home.How does a family process this sort of news?. This sort of thing just doesn't happen.
We had no guns in our house when she lived at home. We couldn't get our minds around an accident such as this. She had just started to accompany her husband for target shooting in the canyons. He was teaching her to shoot a gun. He had used guns for several years. This was new to her. How could a gun fall out of the car and shoot her? Kill her?
She came from a regular American home. A big sister and two parents who loved her dearly. Organized soccer on the weekends. Birthday parties. So many pictures of vacations,friends, family,memories. She was beautiful both inside and out. I couldn't make sense of an accident such as this. The girl who played on the tennis team, skied, went to football games, had an infectious laugh, was so full of life....how could she lose her life this way?
Now I know one of the true definitions of pain. I've learned you don't always get the answers to your most important questions. A senseless death is unimaginably hard to accept. It slices the heart like a knife. Pain is not loss of things, jobs, friends, or opportunities. Pain is the inability to breathe life into your lifeless daughter.
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One of Marsha's two daughters daughters (19 years old) was killed in a gun accident in Sept ‘09. She maintains a facebook page titled A New Journey, dedicated to helping grieving parents. She lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest.
