Guardian Angel

24 April 2013

Louisville, KY – Andrew Quirante Malic, a twenty year old sophomore at Bellarmine University, died late Monday night after succumbing to his severe injuries from a tragic auto accident. The college student had been riding a bus back to campus when it was hit by a pick-up truck on Bardstown Road. Although many of the occupants had escaped with minor cuts and bruises, Andrew was pronounced in critical condition and rushed to the hospital. After battling his unconscious state for several days, he was eventually declared dead.

Those had been the opening lines of my obituary that appeared in the local newspaper two days after I died. It was short, made up of several broken paragraphs that had been hastily written. The man that had typed it out had done it as an assignment for work and, though it lacked emotion, I appreciated that he had taken the time to do it anyway. It was already much more than I could’ve asked for.

Looking back now, newspaper obituaries were archaic. Very few people bothered to pick up the paper anymore and of those that did, only a handful of them even read the obituaries section let alone mine. Plenty of innocent young kids die in car accidents around the country every day. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing made me any more special.

My friends and family described me as an average college kid. I got good grades, was actively involved with a number of extracurricular organizations, and was working hard to get into the Navy. If you couldn’t find me studying in my room or helping run an event for Bellarmine University Gaming, chances were that I was talking with a recruiting officer about the nuclear submarine program. My possible future in the military was of great importance to me, and I made sure to put it first before everything else.

The auto accident which would eventually result in my death occurred on the 10th of April, 2013. It was a Wednesday and that afternoon I had met with my recruiting officer, Senior Chief Bell, about joining the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program. Everything had been going smoothly. I had finished writing up all of my paperwork and would be doing a few make-up classes to bring up my grades over the summer. As long as I did well and came back to Bellarmine with full credits, I would most definitely have a spot reserved for me. I was excited. Finally, after several years of uncertainty, I knew what I wanted to do when I graduated.

On my way home that night, I decided to stop by a local ice cream store – Graeter’s – for a celebratory sundae. Graeter’s had become a popular place for my friends and I during our freshman year. We often went on Friday nights and catch over the various events that characterized our hectic school lives. These weekend trips grew more common as our schedules began to diverge and seeing one another during the weekdays became more difficult.

Since we were frequent visitors, many of the employees knew our faces and even gave us under-the-counter discounts, without the manager’s knowledge of course. That day, working behind the desk, was Josh Fowler who usually worked on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He was reading when the bell hanging from the door caught his attention as I walked in. Looking up, he shot me a smile. “In here on a Wednesday? What’s the special occasion?”

“I had a Navy interview today.” I said to him, walking towards the counter. “And it looks like I have a ticket in.”

“How are you so sure?” he asked as he ran an ice cream scoop through warm water. “Was there some official documents or something?”

“Not exactly. Right now it’s pretty unofficial. My recruiting officer told me that once I’m cleared for the VIP Trip there’s only one thing I can do to screw it up.” When he turned back around, I stared him right in the eye. “The Admiral Interview...”

It was a slow night at Greater’s – which was a good thing or else Josh’s boss would have yelled at him for talking to me for a good half-hour. Even after he had given me my sundae, I had remained by the cash register to talk, detailing the massive amount of paperwork required to register myself as an office of NUPOC.

Honestly, it wasn’t that the interview went well that made that particular day memorable. Instead, it was the unexpected phone call from someone whom I never thought I’d hear from again.

She was a friend of mine. I often used the word ‘friend’ very loosely whenever I referred to her. In truth, she was in fact my ex-girlfriend whom I had a very complicated and introverted relationship with for a little over half a decade. It had been nearly two years since last time we talked and – unlike her – I still had quite a bit of residual feelings for her which made it difficult to have a normal conversation. It was the primary reason why we stopped talking in the first place. I couldn’t get over her and it made her uncomfortable.

The reason she called me that day was to let me now her choir group was on tour around the eastern United States and that they would be making a stop in Louisville to perform at Bellarmine and spend the night there before leaving the next day.

I tried to keep myself composed for the two or three minutes we talked, which I naturally found difficult. She wanted to catch up a little over the phone, but I told her it would probably be better if we saved it until she arrived. We both agreed that talking in person would be best, especially given the wedge that had been driven between our friendship in the past two years.

There was a part of me that was glad she was coming and there was a part of me that wasn’t. I won’t lie, I missed her dearly and I always wished I could have had another chance to repair a precious friendship that I had destroyed with my inability to move on. On the other side, I had found a comfortable place here at Bellarmine. I was worried that seeing her again might trigger a plethora of deep emotions that might break me again and revert me back to a depressed state which I had worked so hard to pull out of.

I stayed outside for a few minutes before deciding to call my closest friend at Bellarmine, Sadie Shafer.

Sadie was a piano pedagogy major and I had met her doing orientation our freshman year. We were both quiet and shy, which I often like to think was the reason we got along so well. She had a very motherly nature about her and it reflected whenever any of her friends were down. Sadie was one of those people who you could tell anything and feel safe because she wouldn’t judge you for who you were.

Among my college friends, Sadie was the only one who knew the full extent of my past history and she probably knew more about this girl than anyone else I had met. Her attitude towards it was sympathetic, very unlike the other condescending personalities that had very often put me down for being in love with someone for so long. I knew that not everyone would understand.

Sadie did.

When I told her about my ex-girlfriends’ incoming trip to Louisville, she committed with coming with me and keeping me company. It would take me a while to understand that this was both because she wanted to meet her as well as serving a supportive role for me in case things got out of hand.

With all that had happened that day, I had a lot on my mind when I boarded that bus. It had never occurred to me that I would never be getting off.

***

There was a man, a middle-aged construction engineer, who was driving home that very same evening. His name was Will Carter. That night he had just as much on his mind as I did, if not more. What he thought had been a simple and joyful life began to crumble when his wife had approached him with divorce papers that morning.

He had decided to leave work early that day so that he could go home and talk things out with her. It was raining, and only after he had turned on the heater did he realize he had left his coat hanging on the rack back at his office.

The darkness outside reflected his grief. Will had no idea what he was going to say to his wife. A divorce had never crossed his mind and he had a feeling there were much deeper issues that he had yet to identify that had affected their relationship. All he could think about was where he could have possibly gone wrong.

The road he was driving in was mostly empty and he had seen only a few cars running back and forth on the blackened streets. Will’s muddy Nissan Titan moved through the wet and cold air swiftly, its bright lights cutting through the night.

He was about halfway home when it had happened and by the time he saw the bus in his peripheral vision it was already too late.

***

I remember very clearly what had happened. My eyes were closed and my mind was racing. The sounds of screeching brakes, tearing metal, and shattering glass suddenly filled my ears.

At first, I thought I was asleep and dreaming. But when all the sounds of the world went away and the bus that I was sitting in did not come back into view, I knew something was terribly wrong.

There was an eerie silence. A deathly quiet surrounded me and I remembered how I felt so alone. I tried opening my mouth to scream, but there was no sound. Nothing. Darkness had engulfed me. I couldn’t see anything or consciously feel my own body. I felt myself floating slowly away.

‘Lost’ was the best word I could use to describe what I was feeling that day. I was lost and didn’t know what to do or what was going to happen to me. As the time went by and seconds turned to minutes and minutes turned to hours I finally realized that the bus I had been sitting in was not going to come back.

Small sounds eventually caught my attention. They were first just tiny whispers which slowly grew into jumbled murmurs. After a long period of nothing but darkness, I was finally able to open my eyes again. Everything was blurry. I couldn’t make out one thing from another; it was all an amorphous mass of dark colors.

Blinking, I let my eyes adjust to the light until I could make out a single halogen tube illuminating the room I stood in. It was a hospital room with its furniture and all too family smell of medicine and sanitization chemicals. I didn’t understand why I was there.

It was quiet and I was forced to strain my ears to hear every sound in the room. There was the medical equipment attached to the person on the bed, the constant buzz of the light, the sound of the air conditioning fan, and finally the slow inhale and exhale of a sleeping person.

I looked around the room and saw one of the atypical hospital couches that had been constructed into the wall. On top of it was a girl. Focusing my eyesight, I looked at the sleeping form. It took me a minute, and a double-take, to know that everything about her was familiar from the clothes she wore to her mousy brown hair.

It was Sadie.

Why was she here? In a hospital?

I tried to wake her up by tapping her shoulder, but my hand came in contact with nothing. I watched helplessly as it passed right through her. Reaching my hand out again, I made another attempt to touch her cheek. I still felt nothing.

Where was I and what the hell was going on?

My stomach cringed painfully as I turned towards the person who was lying motionless on the hospital bed. The light was at an angle in which I could not see the person’s face from where I stood. As I slowly walked towards it, a sickening feeling passed through me. For a moment, I thought to myself that it would be better not to know who was lying there. But my curiosity and uncontrollable need to understand forced me onward.

What I saw shook me to my very core. The person on the bed was me, immobile and comatose. I realized that I wasn’t actually awake and that my consciousness had escaped the confines of my physical self. At that moment, I understood that I was a spirit caught between the tiny fabric of life and death.

The Lovely Bones – a novel by Alice Sebold – had been one of my favorite books back on Earth. It was then, as a helpless soul trapped in that hospital room, I came to realize that Sebold had been right. There existed an ‘Inbetween,’ but it was very different from what I had imagined it to be. I was hanging over a precipice, the edge between life and death.

As I waited, I explored the other floors of the hospital, listening to the nurses on my floor for any news of my condition. They spoke little of me; however they did mention the young woman who had rushed to the hospital to find her friend bedridden and unresponsive.

From what I gathered, Sadie had been one of the first people to call about my accident. As my parents lived almost six hours away in Memphis, they had informed them of Sadie who they knew was my one closest friend. The moment she found out about what happened, she made it her priority to get to the hospital.

Sadie was the closest person I had to family in Louisville and the first person to be able to check on my condition. Whenever there was nothing left for me to see, I would sit on the window sill and watch her sleep. She had sacrificed her schedule for the next few days in order to keep an eye on me, contacting her teachers to inform that she would like to be her when I recovered. Up until that point, I didn’t realize how much she cared about me.

Time went by slowly; it felt as if everything was moving in a form of motion-picture slow motion. I didn’t have a true concept of time. I never got tired and I was never hungry. As a spirit, nothing truly did make sense to me and everything I had taken for granted in life was no longer there. All I could do was watch. It was painful to simply sit and look on as an observer, unable to do anything. I wanted to be by her side – but as nothing more than just an apparition – I could do nothing.

The young woman stirred slightly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she looked around the darkened room. She felt like she had been asleep for hours only to check the clock and find out it had been twenty minutes. Sitting up, Sadie looked over at me lying on the bed. I could feel the worry emanating from her.

She got up and went to the bathroom, filling up a glass of water for herself and then one for me, which had been sitting empty and idle on my nightstand all night. She returned, placing the glass where it once was. A tiny sigh passed between her tightly closed lips, looking at me with a worried look on her face.

I stood behind her, trying to hug her in my arms and tell her that everything was going to be alright.

She gently ran the back of her hand against my forehead and then her fingers through my hair. “Andrew,” her voice was soft and full of worry, “if you can hear me, I want you to remember that there are a lot of people here who really care about you. You need to come back for everyone.” She forced a smile. “You need to come back for me.”

For the first time in years, I was speechless.

***

The next morning, several of my friends came to visit. Each time a new person would come in to see me, Sadie would inform them on how well I was doing and what the medical staff was planning in order to help me as best they could. In my comatose state, all that the medical personnel and doctors could do was simply keep an eye on me.

My parents made it into Louisville on the afternoon of the same day. It was strange to see my parents in such a panicked state. I had never seen them act that way before as opposed to their normally calm and cool-headed state of mind. When they found out what room I was in, they came in anxiously.

Sadie stood up when they entered, giving both my mother and father big hugs. She was thankful that they had finally arrived. My parents asked her what had happened and she filled them in on as many of the details as she could recall. I couldn’t help but notice that she was still dressed in the same clothes she had gone to bed with yesterday evening.

It was still hard for me to grasp just how much she cared and – honestly – I didn’t think my parents fully understood either. They offered her to take a break, but she flatly refused. Sadie stood there firmly and told them that she’d stay here until I made a fully recovery. My parents had nothing further to say.

Later that day, as my parents held their own vigil over me, Sadie managed to call her boyfriend and asked her to bring several fresh sets of clothes to my room in the hospital. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be there, but she asked for enough to cover several days.

My parents, in their ripe age, no longer had the stamina to stay the night in the hospital’s room. They entrusted Sadie to care for me in their absence, and knew full well that she was more than capable of doing so. Before they left, they made sure she knew that if there was anything she needed she could contact them.

Alongside my parents, I had my older brother. Vincent was a quirky, but awesome guy who tended to see himself as an eternal student. Because of that mentality, my brother lived off of the scholarships and grants that people would give him to study the various strange things that he studied. He had very little money.
When my parents informed him that I was in the hospital, Vincent told them that he would do his best to get to Louisville as soon as he could. Even if it meant borrowing someone else’s car and using what money he had to pay for gas.

Thinking back on the relationship I had with my brother, I could honestly say he and I never had any problems. I attribute to our difference in age. Vincent was eight years older than I was. We avoided the sibling arguments that most people had grown familiar with.

My brother was always mature for his age and as my role model it rubbed off on me. As I was growing up, parents would often comment on how mature I seemed for my age. I can thank Vincent for that.

***

Every day I was in the hospital people would pray for me and every time they did I could hear them. Even people I barely knew were hoping that I made a speedy recovery, but something deep down told me that was not going to happen.