Skip to main content

TIFU by opening a video after a notification on my phone popped up

My 20 year old son, Sage, was killed on August 26 of this year. While we are from Seattle, he was off at college in Prescott AZ. He'd joined the AFROTC, and they often did long, brutal hikes, and would generally party to celebrate after. That night, like so many before, a bunch of the kids piled into a jeep and were doing donuts in the empty lot next to the party house. Sage, ever the adrenaline junkie, was hanging out the window. There were a couple of his friends in the car who wanted to do the same, but since Sage outranked them, he told them no, it was too dangerous. That asshole knew it was dangerous but did it anyway.

The jeep rolled, and since he was hanging out of the window, it rolled on top of him. He was awake and alert for twenty minutes after, but they weren't able to get him to the life flight in time.

We chose a funeral home up here - he told me composting would be cool while we were having a conversation about what to do with bodies post-death... a conversation that occurred because 10 days before he was killed, his grandmother, my mom, had died. Hers was not unexpected, but it did lead to the conversation. A couple of weeks ago, the place notified me that his final effects had arrived and I went and picked them up, the second hardest day of my life (the first being the day we were notified). It wasn't much, just his phone and wallet and contents of the wallet.

I got home, plugged in his phone and went about my day. Now, ever since middle school, I've had his gmail account on my phone, though by 8th grade I started asking him if he wanted me to take it off. He always said no, just leave it in case he needed a backup. I respected his privacy, never went through anything without asking, ignoring the popup notifications of his photo activity.

Well, this time there was a popup tht said a new video was ready to be viewed. I didn't look at the account it was from, I just opened it, and for the first ten seconds I didn't really undertand what I was looking at, not until the scene started to rotate, then I realized he had been holding his phone out the window with him and caught the last few seconds on video. I stopped watching after I saw the initial tilt. I can't bear to look at the last 18 seconds. I'm also 100% sure that others at the arty were filming - 18- 22 year olds? of course they were.

But it sent me into a panic attack and even deeper grief for a few days. I don't want to delete it because it's the last thing I have of him.

TL;DR: Opened a video on my phone that showed the accident causing my son's death.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TIFU by forgetting my purse and attempting to get fuel

Not the craziest story but hey. I'm obligated to say this was a few months ago but I cringe every time I go past the petrol station . My petrol was getting low, not dangerously so but it said 27 miles left, (oftentimes it then suddenly drops to about 16 for example, and then 5 and then 0 very fast) I didnt have my purse on me as I just didn't need it... Picked my daughter up from school and then went on to collect my 2 stepdaughters from across town and then set off for home. En route the gauge went to 7 and then suddenly it was 1 so I stopped at the petrol station near our house. The petrol was on 0 as i pulled up to the pump and that's when I realised I had no money. I left the kids in the car at the pump and went in to talk to the cashier, it wasn't mega busy but there was a queue, I'd heard that they can help you if you can't pay for fuel. Like keeping something of yours as security. It was an elderly man and he basically refused to help. At this point i...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU - Don’t do what I did

On Sunday morning Aug. 24th, I awoke to discover a large blind spot in my right eye, which turned out to be what is called wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). It has resulted in a very significant, permanent loss of vision in that eye. Although I maintain good peripheral vision, whatever I focus on at best is very blurry, and mostly disappears. I can barely make out the large E at the top of the eye chart. If this happens to my left eye I’ll be unable to read or drive. It turns out that I missed the opportunity that I had to prevent this from becoming a serious problem because I failed to report what appeared to be minor changes in my vision. In the weeks prior to August I had noticed that what I knew to be straight lines appeared to my right eye to have a little waviness. I also noticed that the color of my front lawn, which I could see through the window from my recliner,  was subdued, looked almost gray, in my right eye. So I scheduled an eye exam, which revealed the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU by getting suspended for 2 days by my front office in school.

I (13M) am an African American student at Jeannette junior high who had got suspended for 2 days here. I was in math class minding my business until my teacher had told me to go to the main office, which posed no problem to me. As i went down there, the people of the front office had stopped me and made me get a new ID (yes, we have id's.) so i had asked them if i could maybe do a different alternative and call my mother to let her bring the Id here, even then, the Id isn't that important. So, although i was talking to them in a calm manner and not showing any signs of rebellion, they had threatened to call the police on me without thinking twice before calling my parents. This is where i started getting angry, and even then now the black peers agree that could have been a racially motivated action. They then told me to sit in the office conference room because of that, leading into more anger. They had then called my mother who had came over to the school didn't even let ...
Post a Comment
Read more