It’s a Sunday afternoon, gray and gloomy. They always die on days like these. We get the call right after church. I’m looking out the window when I hear my mother scream and feel the car jerk.

“What?!” she yells into the receiver. Somebody has died. She sounds like that when somebody has died.

My mother pulls over into a parking lot and stops the car.

“Momma, what happened?” I hear my sister say.

She pauses for a while.

“Morgan is dead.” I can hear the tears in her voice.

Although I hear what she says, I can’t process it. I just can’t believe it. The little girl who was always talking, always laughing, always the social butterfly is dead. The little girl whom I tickled about a million times on Christmas and who took forever to finally laugh is dead. The little girl who always gave me a hug whenever I saw her is dead. The little who pronounced yellow like “lellow” is dead. The little girl who was the manifestation of the sun itself is dead.

I look over to my sister and see tears silently rolling down her face. She looks completely broken.

“I was just with her,” I hear her nearly whisper. “How could she be dead?”

My mother is crying openly now. She can’t drive, not like this.

We sit there for a while. I don’t know how long. Eventually, my mother wipes her eyes and starts the car.

“We have to get to the hospital.” None of us are enthusiastic about that.

We drive in almost complete silence, with a few whimpers and sniffles here and there. The ride is agonizingly long. I stare out the window, trying to focus on the other cars speeding past on the highway, trying the imagine how wonderful their lives are at this moment, and trying not to focus on the hours to come.

We finally make it to the hospital, the same hospital my uncle died in the year before. As soon as we walk in, we are greeted with the sad faces of Morgan’s immediate family. Her mother, Crystal, looks empty, and her eyes are puffy and red. There are  also many of our relatives, mourning in their own ways, trying to grasp the reality that is now.

We make our way to the family room where many of our cousins are sitting, tears dried on their faces. My sisters and I all sit together on a small, hard couch. I look around to see several faces in emotional anguish, many heads shaking, many tears rolling. I feel like crying, but I know I have to be strong. I can’t cry. I won’t cry.

My mother is outside in the hallway, asking, “What happened?” and “How?” in that teary way that makes me want to collapse. I look up at my sisters and see tears rolling down their faces. My nose is burning, and my lips are quivering, and my vision starts getting blurry. I finally let the tears spill out of my eyes as I cry silently. My shoulders are shaking and I know I look like a mess, but I cry anyway. I feel an arm curl across my back and I lean into my sister and cry on her shoulder. We stay like that for a while. More relatives arrive and I cave in gradually as I hear the same sentences over and over again.

“What happened?”

“How did she die?”

“Why?”

I just want to shut it all out and go home, but I know I have a long night ahead of me. We leave the hospital, but we don’t go straight home. We make the long trip to my cousin’s house to pay our last respects to her daughter for the night. We step into the small house and are met with dozens of pictures of Morgan. I want to cry all over again, but I can’t, so I just put on a brave face and hug Morgan’s mother. I can’t say anything. Not an “I love you” or a “Stay strong”. Nothing.

We get home late that night. I’m too tired and too sad to even take a shower, so I just change into my pajamas and get into bed. I try not to think about how I just spent half of my Sunday, and try to focus on the inky blackness of sleep. I don’t rest at all. The next morning, I’m reluctant to get out of bed, but my mom makes me get up and go to school anyway.

“We just have to deal with this right now, okay?” she says, with a glassy look in her eyes.

I almost start crying on the bus, but I can’t even keep a brave face long enough to make it to my first class. Tears are rolling down my face during advisory, and everyone is giving me concerned looks. By the time I get to my homeroom,  I’m overcome with so much emotion that I just breakdown and throw a bit of a tantrum.

“I can’t do this anymore!” I scream. “Why did she have to die? She was only two years old!” I throw my books all over the floor, startling the teacher, and I slump down in my desk and just cry.

I get sent to the counselor for my behavior and I almost get sent home. The counselor calms me down enough to get words out of me. She asks questions like, “How do you feel?” and “Do you want to go home?” I choose to stay at school. Although I’m suffering through pain, school is very important.

She finally asks me the agonizing question.

“Did they ever say how she died?”

I weakly nod and manage to croak, “They said it was a cold or something. And she was going outside without a coat, and it got really bad.” My voice fades to a whisper so that I won’t start another bout of tears.

“Do you want to go home?”

“No,” I say. Although I’m suffering through pain, school is very important. My friends try their best to cheer me up, but their attempts failed. No one talks to me, and I talk to no one. I’m sure if I open my mouth I’ll start crying again.

I finally get home and we go over my cousin’s house again. It’s like this all week until the funeral, which is on Friday. I am miserable throughout the entire service. My mother isn’t there and my sisters aren’t strong enough. We go up to the casket together. In the moments we are looking at a once happy, smiling, bright face, I realize that this little girl is really dead. She’ll never go to school, never make new friends, never have her first crush, never graduate high school, never go to college, never get a job, never do anything ever again. Any of us can go at any given moment, and we will never be able to return. Just because many people die because of old age, or a terminal illness, or a terrible accident doesn’t mean people can’t die at a young age.  I realize that we will all die and we can do nothing about it.