This article was forwarded to me by a friend - I hope if you are reading these comments you find some comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your situation. I had to burry my boyfriend after a 4 year relationship and a long stuggle with cancer. the thing I learned most was to love freely and not hold anything back. I've now been in a great relationship for 3 years and it has made us stronger. The best thing you can do is to be open and honest and hold nothing back. After all, you have already been through the worse that can happen.
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Remembering the Perfect Boy
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The other two boys in the car were fine, eventually. Nick had been driving, and his side took the worst hit. His parents called me at 1 a.m., and I rushed to the hospital. I shut down after the fifth time his mother told me Nick was a strong boy and was going to be all right. My father held me close and said he'd always thought of Nick as so grown up, but that lying there on the gurney he looked so young. That was when I decided I had to go home. A few hours later, I got a call saying that Nick was gone.
In the weeks after he died, I stuffed two years' worth of our e-mails and IMs into a drawer. His texts are still on my phone. There are some I go back to over and over, some I can't bear to read. It was agonizing to change my relationship status on Facebook. For months I left it as "in a relationship"; finally I just removed the option completely.
A year later, I'm still trying to move on. And the good signs keep coming, telling me that maybe I was damaged, but not irreversibly. I've found Aaron, and there are so many things to thank him for. When he wanted me to meet his family on parents' weekend—and I didn't mention mine—he didn't push me. I didn't want to explain how attached my family was to Nick. How over the summer my younger brother, nestling into the couch, told me that it was his favorite spot because it was where Nick used to sit.
I now hold people closer and try to live without regrets. But still I worry. "He is Aaron, not Nick," I often tell myself. Something so horrible happens only once in a young girl's life, if ever. It couldn't happen all over again. Could it?
I try to imagine what it must be like for Aaron. One day we'll be all over each other; the next I'll hold him at a distance. I think he just accepts it as part of what makes me who I am. What he can never understand is that I wasn't always like this, that I'm a more somber and mature person than the Sara who came before.
Aaron will never know me as that girl in high school whose boyfriend died. His opinion of me didn't change when I told him. Maybe I should let that story grow up with me, rather than hold it so tightly as a secret.
Harari is a contributor to “Red: Teenage Girls in America Write on What Fires Up Their Lives Today.” She lives in Boston.
© 2008
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