November 10, 2015, just another day in my life. It was a Tuesday morning and my husband had just moved to New Orleans two weeks prior to live with me from Dallas where we had lived for 17 years with our children. We have a 25-year-old, Big Bubby, 21-year-old, Million Dollar Brother, and 17-year-old Baby Sis.

It was early, sometime around 7AM, and my husband’s phone either beeped with a text or actually he received a call. I can’t remember at this point. It was our oldest boys best friend asking if we had heard from him that morning, my son’s Foreman was looking for him because he hadn’t shown up for work. His Foreman had seen an accident on the way in with a truck that looked like our son’s but it didn’t look like a bad wreck so he didn’t stop.

That was unusual for our son because living in Dallas, he worked in the Sprinkler Fitters Union, and would work at different job sites around Dallas and Fort Worth. He drove a lifted truck with ranch hand bumpers on the front and the back, his baby as he called it. He would leave from his home on the north side of Dallas to get to work early to get a good place to park then sleep until it was time to go to work. We all started calling his cell phone trying to get a hold of him. I was slightly frustrated with him because I know him (lived with him 20 something years) and know that he can sleep hard and not hear things but for him to miss being at work, that bothered me.

Slightly irritated, I left for work and told my husband to start calling hospitals in the area to make sure he hadn’t sustained a possible head injury and was unable to contact us. At this point I called his wife as well and she started trying to find out where he was.

As we all started trying to track him down, we looked at traffic reports for the morning and found a pedestrian DART bus accident in the area of where he would have been but didn’t think anything about it since he should have been in his truck. It wasn’t until my daughter-in-law called me at work and told me that she was on her way to the Dallas Medical Examiner that it started to sink in that something horrible had happened that morning on the interstate.

I was at work, luckily had coworkers who were willing to bring me home so that I didn’t have to drive myself. By the time I got to the house we had found out the Medical Examiner needed identifying marks (tattoos) to be able to identify my son. He was also fingerprinted to confirm.

A parent’s worst nightmare was coming true in front of my eyes and I couldn’t stop it. My husband and I immediately drove to the airport where Southwest Airlines quickly got us on a plane, but the one hour and twenty-minute flight to Dallas had to be the longest of my entire life.

Since my husband had moved a couple of weeks before to New Orleans, our daughter who was graduating in December was still in Dallas. We asked a family friend of Big Bubby, Million Dollar Brother, and us to go pick our Baby Sis from school and tell her that Big Bubby was never coming home. She had already somewhat figured out something was going on because her best friend had told her not to look on the internet.

As we landed in Dallas, things started falling together with what happened. Our son’s truck rear end locked up on him causing him to hit the center median and bounced back into the lanes of traffic. As my son being the type of person he was, he was more concerned with others being injured than with his own safety. There was a security guard that stopped to try to help. He said in an interview with the news that the only thing that Big Bubby was worried about was others safety not his. Unfortunately, a semi swerved to miss them and a DART bus following the semi didn’t miss my son and killed him instantly.

And so begins my journey into shattered dreams and shattered faith. I will be journaling my experience through the grief of losing my child in a sudden tragedy and how I am surviving never seeing my Big Bubby (my baby boy) again.

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