The deceased are frozen in time

Does Mum and Dad being killed still seem like a bad dream to me even after five years?  Yes it does but not all the time. I think if the initial horror had gone on unchanging and unchangeable for years it would have been unendurable. 

These bad dream moments don't usually come on birthdays or anniversaries. They come quite suddenly and so are even more painful. They might come when I'm finishing a race and I look up into the stands to where the two of them used to sit to watch me compete or when I see one of their favourite books on a library shelf or when I visit a town that we had visited as a family years before. 

Now my university life is behind me I'm starting to think that it is those "before the accident years" that are a dream and that my current life is my reality. 

Sometimes a noise takes me by surprise and just for an instant I think that I have heard Mum or Dad coming back from work and that in a minute I will see a familiar loving face again. But I know, deep down, that they have gone for ever. They are frozen in time - locked in my memory as they were when I was 17 and still at school. 

I'm a different person now. I have moved on while my memories of them have not. Five years seemed to have rushed by and yet in the middle of night when sleep is eluding me time trickles passed exceedingly slowly. 

Sometimes it is hard to escape the feeling that "moving on" can only happen by me forgetting the fine details of Mum and Dad. And yet they are inside me, they made me what I am so forgetting isn't an option. The love they gave me so freely became the key to let me back into society once they had to leave this world. When I do something that I know would have pleased them it brings me hope and peace that somehow they know that I'm still living the life they prepared me for.