Personal Narrative: Death Will Allow Teenagers Into Adulthood

One beautiful, quiet Saturday night in September I was tossing and turning in bed which is quite surprising for me. I didn’t think too much about it and eventually I managed to drift off to sleep. Little did I know that this would be one of the last nights I considered myself a kid and that in the next twelve hours I would be thrown unexpectedly into adulthood. When I was woken by my mom gently shaking me awake, my groggy eyes noticed she was accompanied by my brother and my dad. A very unexpected occurrence. My brain didn’t have time to process what was going on before my mom hugged me and said, with a choked voice, that my best friend Marquis had died. With those words, my youth was terminated.
My heart sank and my family tried to comfort
me, but it was a momentous loss for all of us. We considered him a member of the family and he was more a brother to me than a friend. Normally I pride myself on being a tough, unemotional guy who buries his feelings and doesn't get upset; I was wrong. A vision of a bleak, empty existence loomed in front of me as I contemplated a life without him. I had to have been in my bed for thirty minutes straight, crying like a child that lost it’s favorite stuffed animal. Then my dad told me to go take a shower and soak this in. Even with all that water running over my body, I could still feel the tears rolling off my cheeks. I cried so long that my eye sockets felt like the Sahara desert.
Once I finally willed myself out of the shower and made it downstairs to face my family. they convinced me that I needed to get out of the house and get my mind focused on something else. Before I could leave, my emotions started going haywire and my sadness turned into a fiery rage. My face was red and I felt like there was steam coming out of my ears. Not being able to take it any longer, I started hitting walls, pillows, chairs, anything inanimate in my way thinking that it would take my pain away. It didn’t help. All I got out of it was a bruised, swollen hand. As my brain was processing the day’s events, one minute anger, the next sadness, the house phone was ringing, my cell phone was buzzing. People who knew Marquis were calling to talk about him and what happened. We were all confused. Marquis was very healthy, he was going to be a marine, instead he life ended because he had a cramp while trying to swim across a lake with his buddies. After I found out how he died, I got even more angry because I know that drowning is a horrific way to die. Thoughts of him trying to fight and yelling for help were circling in my head and I kept having visions of his body on the bottom of the murky quarry.
My Mom finally forced me out of the house and I went to the gym with my best buddy Emanuel.
Once we got there, we were surrounded by Marquises’ friends and we started telling each other how we found out what had happened. We also started telling our favorite stories about him to finally get a smile out of each other. When we were laughing about how much of a goofball he was, I realized It hadn't been more than twelve hours since a part of me died. Until that moment, I never realized how death can throw teenagers into adulthood when they might not be ready. I sure as hell wasn't. Losing him destroyed a part of me. I felt like it completely changed me as a person and ever since that fateful day, I'm afraid to lose things.
Undeniably death makes teenagers grow up faster than expected. I lost my best friend and it made me deal with an adult issue when I wasn't ready. I don’t know if anyone is ever ready to accept death, but life throws us under a bus sometimes and makes you deal with it. When you are grieving like I was, you will think, I wished I never knew the person so I wouldn't have to go through the pain, but, “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” (Tennyson, Alfred). No matter how sad Marquis’s death was, I’m glad I had the chance to know
him.