Living With The Regret

Lacey Hutchison
Professor McCaffrey
ENG 100
October 6, 2009

As the song Watching Airplanes by Jason Aldean was playing on my voicemail, my eyes started tearing up because I knew it was Jamie. We were fighting once again. I couldn’t keep going back and forth with him. Either we were together or not. But, we could never make up our minds to be apart. We were never happy apart. So, these fights always ended happily together. A week of contemplation went on.
On October 8th, a week later, I was sitting in a Glasgow High School cheerleading meeting discussing nationals. The meeting started at 5:30 pm and was suppose to be over an hour later. Of course it was now 6:50. We were finally leaving. Saying my goodbyes my phone was receiving call after call, but I kept pushing the ignore button. That conversation could wait.
Obviously, Brittni needed to talk to me because she called my moms phone when we were on our way home. I was driving down the road and I could hear Brittni crying on the other side of the phone. Mom handed me the phone because she couldn’t understand her. Being as close as sisters I could usually make her sentences out. Putting the pieces together, I heard her say car wreck, Jamie, and not making it. Enough was said. My stomach dropped. Tears started flooding my eyes. I lost it. Pulling into the house, I was numb. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t have the strength to walk. I couldn’t think of what I needed to do. I couldn’t function. My step dad had to remove me from the car and place me on the couch. I laid there mute with tears rolling down my face. The only thoughts were this couldn’t be true, and I had to get to him.
Moving me back to the car, now in the back seat, I had to be at the hospital. I was reciting everything in my head and what needed to be said. (Jamie you are everything I want and more. You are my first, true, and only love. I couldn’t imagine being without you.) As we were pulling up to the hospital I felt like I saw the whole town of Glasgow standing around just waiting for answers. I just wanted to hear that he was alive. He couldn’t leave me with a little fight. It was so stupid and pointless. I just wanted to be hardheaded. But now in my situation I am trying to remember the point of being hardheaded. I walked through the double doors of horror to find Momma Sue, Papa Jack, and Jackie. Nothing could ever explain the dismay I saw in their teary eyed faces with the sounds of hysterical screams. The coroner was standing outside of his room. I wanted reasons, answers, and explanations. I wanted to know why my Jamie wasn’t here with me to help me through this like he always had. Trying to pull myself together, the coroner starts to tell me that two guys called in…
“One driver swerved to miss the impact. Jamie swerved the opposite. At that very moment, the wheel was taken over, unfortunately not by his hands. Jamie’s vehicle began a series of flips and turns. While the vehicle was crashing in on him, he was thrown out and forced onto the ground. When his body skidded across asphalt, and tumbled through the grass it made it hard to recognize his facial area. From all the flips in the vehicle, then being ejected from the vehicle, it had crushed his skull. He didn’t have a chance at life.” Jamie was demolished finally after the world stopped turning around him. The coroner pronounced Jamie Adams dead on scene at 6:36pm on October 8th, 2007.
Once again in tears, I didn’t know where to begin. In less than a two hour period I saw my whole life crumble before me. This all came about over an unconscious fight. Five years of my life just disappeared in an instant. The thought of that stupid fight just kept flashing in my head. The thought of never being able to take that fight back. Life was short and taken so soon. Now, two years later, I still live with the memories, the hurt, and the regret.


Lacey Hutchison