David George Wright Stringer
David George Wright Stringer
August 21, 1992 – May 08, 2010
David Stringer, you were the most amazing person. Your antics and jokes were the reason a lot of us got up in the morning. You shined like a star in the musical at Merivale High School, and it’s so hard to believe you’re gone. Your outlook on life and you’re genuine spark will never ever be forgotten, and so many people miss you. David died in a car accident on Saturday, May 8th 2010 on Albion Road with his friend Jonathan Jackson. May both of them rest in peace
♥
He was a great man, and an amazing friend.
Ice on her lashes
It’s crushing you. You don’t even understand how you’ve done it, but you have. Another day has gone by, but it feels like it’s been years. You haven’t slept, you don’t eat. Food is tasteless and sleep is elusive. You aren’t sure which is worse; the waking world that forced you to face the reality or the nightmares that plague you during what little sleep you do manage to get; those ones that take what you know as truth and twist it into unbelievable horror and place you right in the centre of it all.
Time is meaningless. You don’t remember much anymore, you start tasks and forget about them. The laundry is unfinished, the hose remains running in the garden, the water still boiling on the stove. And yet you remember everything from that night in vivid detail. You remember every word, every thought, and every minute it happened. From the moment it started to the point where your life started spiraling violently out of control. You remember how your mind turned off; in hindsight you know you knew something was wrong, but your brain refused to allow you to acknowledge it. And then when it was an undeniable truth, you recall that space where you suddenly seemed removed from yourself; that moment when you were able to take a step back and tell yourself that life with never, ever be the same again.
And then you have to watch as your family is torn apart. You have to sit there and you have to call out for help. That means telling people something you don’t even want to believe yourself. It means putting to words that which you deny with every fibre of your being. You don’t want to say it, because if you do it makes it real. You’re waiting for someone to jump out and laugh, to tell you it’s all a sick joke. You wouldn’t even be angry; you’d just be relieved. Maybe you’d even laugh along. But as this new, horrible truth is repeated and you find it increasingly harder to grasp at the threads of your former life, and you don’t know how you will make it through the next hour, let alone the next day.
Except that you do. You go on.
Oh Annie
I will think of you each time I see the sun
Didn’t want a day without you
But somehow I’ve lived through another one
Those days slip into weeks, and those weeks slip into months. You don’t understand how that happens, because you don’t want it to. Each day is a day farther away. Increasingly he becomes only a memory. No longer is it ‘yesterday I talked to him’, or even ‘last week I talked to him’. That last conversation is burned into your mind forever, and you cling to it desperately. More and more realities hit you as he’s not where he should be. You walk through each ‘first’, dreading and resisting them with everything in you. They only prove to relentlessly drill this new reality, one without him in it, into your head and you hate it. But you get through it.
Those firsts become seconds, and you hate them even more. You hate them because now you have an anniversary that you never wanted to have. There’s an empty day on the calendar; the day he was born is now overshadowed by the day that he died. They are different, but it doesn’t matter. Every holiday is now a reminder of the gaping hole in your family, the one that you want filled but know you never will. The knowledge is at times strangely comforting, because you know that nothing ever could fill it. You don’t want to fill that hole because it means erasing him from your life. All the pain you feel is a result of all the love you had. And yet you sometimes do wish you could just plug it up; you wish you could stop that dull ache that is constantly there. Each new memory is now tainted by the fact that he will never again be there. You want a quick fix and yet you are afraid of letting go. There is a fine line between living perpetually in your pain and trying to put a plug in that hole, and you’re not sure if you’ve got it figured out.
Above and beneath it all, you miss him. You miss the things you never thought much of; the little things. The sound of him shuffling in his room while he sleeps, because it’s right next to yours. When he’s away you miss having to get up and turn his alarm clock off at six in the morning on a Saturday. You miss offering the other beater to lick when you’re making cookies, and you miss dragging him to the movies because you know no one else will go with you.
You’ve talked to other people who’ve lost loved ones, but you miss something you never anticipated. You miss the things that will never get to happen; you miss the years that were erased. He will not be at your wedding. You won’t get to meet his wife and kids. Your children are now void of an uncle, and will only know him through pictures and videos and stories. The slideshow of his life that should have been played at his wedding was shown at his funeral instead, and you hate that. You hate that he only exists in the past; he was supposed to have a future.
Before you know it, another year has gone by. Time moves so quickly as you race farther and farther away from the moments when his life intersected with yours; those moments that were supposed to be intertwined for many years to come. There are no more firsts, only seconds and thirds, until his absence almost becomes commonplace. And you hate that it’s come to this.
But you go on.
Oh, Annie
I will think of you each time I see the sun
Didn’t want a year without you
But somehow I’ve lived through another one
— written by Christina Stringer, David’s sister
Song “Ice on her Lashes” by Brook Fraser
Missing you with all our heart,
Thomas, Christina, Dad and Mom.
The Compassionate Friends 