Tonight is Senior Day for the girls’ volleyball team. This would be Shayna’s Senior Day. The coach of the varsity team has been amazing since Shayna’s passing. She has not only stayed in touch. She has come by the house numerous times. She creates mementos for us and the team. She invites us to the team’s special occasions. Tywana goes. i can’t bring myself to go there. I’ve only been back in the high school once since Shayna passed. It was for the honors awards presentations the first year after we passed when we gave out her scholarship. I won’t go back. The memories of her being in that gym and being announced number 16 in a class of over 600 are still too fresh. She was good friends with number 15 and told her she had her sights set on her. Walking through the door takes me right back to that night. Just two months later, she wouldn’t be with us anymore. We had no idea.
Shayna only played one year of volleyball, as a freshman. She had just started playing that summer. She not only made the team, she started. The varsity coach apparently had her eye on her because even though Shayna never played for Coach Kornau, she still remembers Shayna three years later. I’m glad this senior year is coming to an end. I appreciate the school remembering Shayna, but it just reminds me of what we are missing. Soon, her friends will graduate and be going off to college and that chapter will close.
Tywana goes to the volleyball Senior Day then out for wine club, I mean book club. Wine club was last night. One of Shayna’s teammates from her AAU team is on the team Lakota West is playing against. These days I’m home alone a lot. I eat dinner alone and watch some TV, anything to pass the time until it’s finally time to go to bed and drift into the bliss of sleep. I miss making dinners for the Tywana and the girls. I miss watching TV with them. I knew the empty nest thing was coming up. I just didn’t expect it this soon and I do not like it. Two years later, coming up on three and it’s no easier.
It’s late September and the air is getting cool. The kids are back in school. The leaves are changing and beginning to tumble to the ground. It used to be that, autumn depressed me. I hated to see the summer go. I don’t like the cold of winter. That’s different now. Fall, winter, spring, next summer, the days cannot pass fast enough.
