It was in early February of 1993 when my mother's brother was killed in a high-speed car accident, leaving behind his two young children and pregnant wife. The magnitude of the tragedy was terrible, and much of the family expressed a great deal of anger as well as distress. I was a child of eight at the time, and was pulled out of school to go to the funeral in North Carolina with my family. The somber circumstances of the trip were paralleled by the dreary weather, but the experience didn't affect me the way I had expected it to.
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