Crashing noises and then eight seconds of silence ended Sara Pecina’s final conversation with her boyfriend.
Pecina and then freshman pre-business major Blake Taylor tried to talk on the phone every day to make their long distance relationship work. This included Jan. 13, 2013, when Taylor was driving back to Muncie after spending the weekend with his dad. He was talking to Pecina through headphones.
Forty-five minutes into their conversation, Taylor’s car hydroplaned off the road, landing upside down in a ditch that was filled with flood water.
The police found his car near Fairmount, Ind., on the side of State Road 26, completely submerged in water. He was taken to Marion General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead early Jan. 14, 2013.
Pecina, who said everyone knew they were going to get married, began sobbing hysterically when she found out.
“I couldn’t form thoughts,” she said. “The entire world seemed to turn black, and I simply couldn’t comprehend the fact that he died.”
It has been a year, and Taylor’s family and friends are still grieving.
After Taylor’s death, Pecina continued attending classes at Western Kentucky. The transition was difficult and a week after she returned to school, she ended up in the hospital due to stress-induced gastritis.
To cope with the loss, she wrote letters to Taylor in a journal. She started writing the night after his funeral and has filled one and a half books.
“One of the most crushing realizations I had was that I no longer will get to have my nightly conversations with him, so I decided to write to him,” Pecina said. “Even though it’s now a one-sided conversation, it simply feels good to know I can still communicate with him.”
Blake’s dad, Danny, has a similar coping method.
“We talk to him a lot,” he said. “Whether he is here or hears us or not, I talk to him every day. I just go in his room and close the door and talk for about five minutes.”
For him, the shock and pain has not subsided.
“It’s still just as raw as that first 10 minutes [after Blake’s death],” he said. “It’s just surreal. Nothing for the last year has been really real, if something like this could happen to somebody like Blake out of the blue. It never gets easier. It hasn’t yet, not at all.”
He described Taylor as unselfish and “the light of the family.” His son liked comedies and played baseball at Northwestern High School. He was planning to join Ball State’s baseball team as a sophomore. He was always smiling and willing to help others.
Childhood friend Jillian LaDow will always remember how Taylor gave her his pillow when she forgot hers on a camping trip around the age of 5. In high school, Taylor would come over just to help LaDow study for math.
LaDow, a Ball State sophomore music education major, said she mostly thinks about Taylor when she is driving home from school, taking the same road he died on a year ago. On her keys, she keeps a bracelet his mother made for people in his honor, just to remember.
Similarly, Pecina’s favorite memory of Taylor was after she got a wart cut out of her foot in December 2012 and was bedridden. He came over to spend time with her every day. One day, he surprised her by calling off work and showing up to her house unexpectedly.
Taylor told her, “I called off work today so I could come take care of you because isn’t that my job anyway — to make you happy?”
His mom, Kim, said several people came to tell her stories of times when Taylor had helped various people.
“He would always go out of his way to help you,” she said. “He was never too good to stop and help anyone with even the smallest thing.”
For her, one of the hardest things about losing her son is not getting to see him experience all of the things that come with getting older, like college graduation and getting married.
His sister, Kaci, said she still believes Taylor is there with her.
“The cartoons he watched, I watched,” she said. “The games he played, I played. There isn’t any ‘hardest part’ about it. Life is hard without him.”
Pecina hasn’t stopped mourning and said she never will. She said she tries to be happy simply because Taylor would want her to be.
“Everything is different,” she said. “What people don’t understand until they experience such a tragedy is that there is no way through grief. Many people will say, ‘I know you will get through this’ or something of the sort, but such a thing does not exist. You can’t come out of this on the other end of some tunnel because there is no ‘out.’
“You do not gradually return to normal. You find a new normal.”
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