GOOGLE, I HATE YOU

Google.  This website browser is set on my home-page so that every time my internet is opened it is the first thing I see. It is a tool I use regularly to search almost anything, it has created a link between me and nearly anything I want to know or learn.  Up until eleven weeks ago, I considered google a friend of mine but our friendship was abruptly disrupted when my once-was-friend leaked a secret I wasn’t ready to know.  Google told me my father was dead.  Google.

For ten hours and fifty six minutes my father was no longer alive and I had no clue, none of us did.  Newspapers had already printed articles for the following day, the story had been broadcasted endless times on every news television station across Canada, pictures had been released, media was calling the house, our neighbourhood was a buzz.  It seemed the people who mattered the most were the only ones blissfully unaware of the tragedy which had already taken place.

Since my fathers death I have often wished I could go back into moments of time and stay frozen there.  Favourite childhood memories, moments of my life that were impactful, important, or even simple or mundane; endless, endless moments shared with my father that I wish I could permanently return too.  But a more realistic moment I would love to go back too would be the day my father was gone and I didn’t even know it.  You see living in memories of the past with my father is impossible but what isn’t impossible is having my world shatter without even knowing.  I want that back.  Hours before I found out that my life was forever changed I was watching a movie Ghost Town (which is ironically about the dead trying to communicate with the living), playing Uno with my boyfriend, and talking on the phone till late in the evening with my sisters.  I want that moment back, the moment where my greatest loss had already happened yet it coexisted with the gift of ignorance.

In my favourite game of “would you rather” I have asked myself a million questions “would you rather know your Dad died right away, or would you rather have the slowest team of people imaginable trying to contact a family after a death”?  The later option (although frustrating at times) always seems to be my choice.  I would rather live my life simply unaware.  I would rather have gone to bed believing my Dad had a busy day and forgot to phone to see if I had made it to Eston safely, that he was too busy to return my calls, that he was just too tired to pick up the phone because he was already safely tucked into bed sound asleep.

I could have waited, I knew an officer was coming to the house, one more minute, a half an hour, who knows how long they would have taken, but it would have given me more time.  More time of hope, more time of not knowing, more time of believing my Dad was still a part of my world.  Instead, I opened my trusted google, I searched “Calgary news” and read “Sundre plane crash, three victims, no survivors” and I knew.

Google, who would have thought it would be the one to tell me that the most important man in my life was forever gone?  I suppose you can google anything now-a-days, even the exact moment your heart breaks in a million pieces and the world as you know it forever seems broken.

Image Source: GOOGLE…of course!