I grew up in a newsroom. Not literally, as I was 22 when I started working at The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, first as a two-year apprentice and then as a full-fledged staff writer whose beat was the east side of Toledo and anything in the surrounding communities.
What I mean is, I actually became an adult in the newsroom. Because I was there, I could no longer be blissfully sheltered against the real world in my tiny community of Lambertville, Michigan. In the real world, people kill each other. Rapes occur. People abuse the elderly and the young. They lie, steal, and cheat.
And some are even on their cell phones with their lawyer literally minutes after hitting a child, only concerned with themselves instead of the child they fatally injured.
Ironically, I think it took a kindergarten student to strip away the rest of my innocence and open my eyes to the real world.
Remember the time I lost my childhood and was forced to grow up?
Dameatrius McCreary. Even after seven years, I still know how to spell his name, and can visualize the exact shade of his white-yellow hair and his trying-too-hard smile, even though I never actually saw him alive.
Both times I saw him, he was dead. The first time I saw him, he was under a sheet near a yellow-taped-off area wearing white socks and just one shoe. The car that killed him had hit him so hard it literally knocked the shoe off his left foot. The photographer who had accompanied me to the scene had to explain this fact to me, as I never knew the phrase "knock your socks off" had some sort of truth to it.
I was at the scene because the accident that blared across the police scanner near the end of my shift occurred in Oregon, an eastern suburb of Toledo, so I was responsible for the story: A woman who was distracted by her cell phone somehow missed the flashing red lights of the school bus and hit the boy as he was crossing the street to get home the day of Easter break.
After the ambulance left, I was shakily interviewing Dameatrius’ uncle when he got the call that he was dead. I wish I had looked away as the news sank in and hadn’t had to see his face shake as hard as his voice did as he screamed “oh my God” and exploded into inconsolable sobs.
Though it wasn’t over an actual loss, I too cried the entire drive back to the office, but composed myself enough to walk into the newsroom and update the editors on the story. That composure was short-lived, as I went right back to crying as I was transcribing my notes from a passer-by who saw the accident and described the gruesome way the small-for-his-age kindergartner bounced off the hood of the car after he was hit.
My colleagues were concerned, but understood that it was my first first-hand experience with the real world. I only later learned that it was an especially harsh way to be introduced to the real world’s cruelty, as many of my colleagues who were parents said they would have had to refuse to cover the story, as it would have been too hard for them. And this was coming from newspapermen with decades of experience covering the real world.
The nightmares about that day only intensified after attending Dameatrius’ funeral. Those who know me are well aware that I am not good at funerals, and never have been, as I just don’t know how to handle death.
Yet for my job, I was told I’d be attending a funeral for a five year old.
It was an open casket funeral. For a child.
Nothing could have prepared me for the child-sized casket filled with stuffed animals, including an oversized Spongebob Squarepants right near a small child’s too-white face.
I spent the funeral in the very last pew of the church, clinging to the photographer who was assigned to the story muffling my sobs into his plaid shirt during a photo montage. Afterward, before we drove back to the office, we went back to sit in his truck. Neither of us wanted to be alone in that moment, yet neither of us had anything to say, so we sat in silence lost in a loss that wasn’t really ours, yet felt like it was.
I was still at a loss when I finally made it back to the office, and, for the first and only time in my career, admitted to my editor that I literally was at a loss for words. I had a notebook filled with quotes and observations, yet just couldn’t find a way to begin or formulate a story about a five-year-old’s funeral. Five-year-olds are supposed to be outside getting dirty and fighting imaginary bad guys, not inside a coffin near people fighting grief.
He gently suggested trying to paint a picture of who Dameatrius was, which I couldn’t answer myself, but found later while struggling with this story that I could do through his loved ones’ remarks about his love for his family and strawberry milkshakes.
Dameatrius was only a child when he was killed, and ironically, it took this tragedy to force me to grow up and realize that the loss I was feeling on that day was the complete loss of my innocence.
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