Fellow millennials, did any of you have the classmate who passed? What’s the story?

I unfortunately had four during my school years.

First was middle school kids liked to jump down the stairs but the challenge was grabbing the ledge above and hanging on then dropping down. One of my classmates ran and jumped, missed the ledge and came straight down on his head. He passed a few days later.

Second was early high school. Got in the car with his friend. Not impaired or anything just driving way too fast on a rural road. Took the turn too fast and rolled the car and passenger side hit a telephone pole.

Third also car accident. Actually my sisters boyfriend. Similar situation, driving way too fast lost control and hit a tree, car actually burst into flames.

Fourth was cancer. That situation was the worst. Turns out him and his siblings were all born with some genetic issue that made them very susceptible to cancer. All his other siblings had passed before they even hit high school. He beat it and was in remission. I’ll never forget I was at a party and he just sat there I asked what’s wrong? He said “it’s back, I can tell by how I feel”. He was gone probably eight months later.

Edit: something I wanted to add because it just kind of came back to me. The middle school classmate after he passed the art teacher did this beautiful mural on the cafeteria wall that had these cool things he liked as well as “in loving memory”. A couple years ago there was a public event that was held at the middle school.

I went and in the cafeteria you could see the mural had been poorly painted over that you could still make out some things under the white paint. The feeling I got was it was just some kid who died a long time ago that no one working there now knew. Just kinda hurt, like I guess yeah twenty some years ago is a long time but there are many of us in town that were his classmate. But it’s like the impact of that is why all our stairwells got these metal panels blocking the railing areas, so there is no where left to jump and grab to.