When Bobby Died

I have only spoken about Bobby a few times on my blog; she was one of my best friends from childhood along with Patty. We all grew up together and our parents were also close. On one occasion when I was staying at Bobby’s house because my parents were away we decided to go and see a concert. She was going with her boyfriend Steve, and I was going with mine, who turned out to be the biggest jerk in the world. Anyway, before we went I went to his house for dinner while Bobby and Steve went to wash his car for the evening out. We were sixteen. I received a call from Patty telling me that Bobby had been killed in a car crash and that her brother Mark had been one of the firemen who went to the accident that is how we knew before anyone had been notified. Bobby and Steve had been driving over the summit road when the car’s brakes failed and they went over the edge. Steve didn’t have his seat belt on and so was thrown out of the car but Bobby stayed in to the bottom. Steve tried so hard to stop the car that his foot actually went through the floor of the car, which was the only damage he received. I decided that I must get back to Bobby’s house to tell her parents. When I got to the house a few minutes later, lots of people were there, all crying. It turned out that one of the neighbors was a policeman and had been listening to the police radio while playing cards with a friend, so he rushed over to tell her parents. Since I was staying at her house it was the only place I had to go. When I walked in and saw all of the people I started to laugh, uncontrollably, I knew Bobby was going to come walking through the door any minute and say what was going on. It was a shock too much for me to handle. We were going to college together and her aunt had just died leaving her a house right next to the college so we had been having garage sales and getting the house ready to move into. It was going to be our first grown-up experience. I couldn’t accept the fact that she had died but the next day people came into our room and started clearing out all of her stuff and a lot of mine with it. I kept asking them why they were doing that and they said the memories would be too much for the parents and so someone had to clear out her room. I went to the funeral but I never believed that she was dead. I tried to continue my classes but drove to college and then turned around to go home. It just wasn’t the same because we shared most of our classes and I couldn’t go by myself. It took me almost two years to come to grips with her passing. I think that the first year I was just in a state of shock and lived in a dream world and the second year was coming to grips with reality, one I couldn’t accept. We had done everything together and now she was gone forever and at such a young age. I finally pulled myself together and started to live again and went away to another university where I shared a room with our great friend Lisa. Lisa and I were roommates for two years until I changed universities and went to Sonoma, where my long time best friend and neighbor was. His name was Rob and had lived across the street from me in one of our many houses. Rob lived at Lundblads Lodge for a while and then got into some strange religion with a girl called Cathy after a rather bad drug experience where his dog HashiMoto died. He finally escaped the hold Cathy had on him and became a Baptist minister. I have tried very hard to make contact with him by writing to his parents but with no luck, I think he tried to break all ties with his past life. For many years after Bobby’s death I had dreams about her. I knew she was dead in all of them but she would come and visit with me and we would talk about everything and go places together at the end of every dream she had to be somewhere to leave and we always had a hard time finding the place. I think it was because I didn’t want to wake up and find that she was gone. I miss Bobby very much.