What Can Happen in a Second - Trina Wood

Life as you know it can change in one second. Years of shared family jokes, holiday dinners where mom’s turkey is too dry again, hot August nights taking turns at the handle of the ice cream maker on the back patio, making our younger sister scream and pee her pants when we insist there is a spider on her back. Twenty three years of sibling rivalry finally distilled into something that promises one day in the not too distant future to be friendship—the kind that only forms once kids are grown enough to make their own terms beyond the boundaries of mom, dad and the rest of the gang.

One second and it was lost forever. Life thereafter becomes divided by an invisible filament of time, before and after Andrew was a tangible part of lives, before his helmet failed to protect him from “massive head trauma” listed on the coroner’s report. One second—I always wonder whether he knew that on impact with the side of that van under the glare of a setting sun that he was living in the last second of his life. Did he have time to contemplate his mistakes, his joys or was it so fast that one second there was light and the next second it was dark?