Surviving a Car Accident That Should Have Been Fatal

My two girlfriends and I were weeks away from our 21st birthdays when life, as we knew it, changed forever. A drunk and speeding driver crossed three lanes, came at us head on, and killed my closest friend, Michelle. Our other friend, Lori, was in the backseat of the Volkswagon convertible. Of course, decades after this happened I still harbor contempt for people who think they have a right to risk other people's lives by drinking and driving, or by speeding.

What I've recently discovered is that it is only after so much time has passed that the survivor of a fatal car accident truly sees the long-term impact of it. Over time, I've become aware of the things that nobody ever told me I should expect. I thought that my decades of hindsight may offer more recent survivors of fatal accidents some useful information.

Michelle and I had grown up together. People would often joke about how they never saw one of us without the other. She and I often talked about what a great friendship we had. Not only had we shared all the events two young friends share, but we'd supported one another through some difficult times. Michelle and I had so many silly times together. One afternoon as we sat on a wall, waiting for a bus, she and I discussed the song, "Both Sides Now" and how we liked it.
In a moment of youthful silliness we decided to sing the song together. We pronounced it the "waiting for the bus song", and somehow it became a very special song to both of us.

Lori became our close friend when she transferred from a girls' school in tenth grade. Unlike Michelle and me, who were very much two peas in a pod, Lori was the different one. Lori was always complaining that Michelle and I were "too deep". We were all close, though, and we enjoyed talking about how one day I (the one known with leanings toward writing) would write a "three girls" book. Since Michelle and Lori, more than anyone else, seemed to see some potential in me, they would often steer the conversation into how I'd one day write a great book and go on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Correctly enough, I wasn't sure. We did, however, talk about the dress I would wear decades later when all this fame happened.

Through hours and hours of conversations we developed images of our futures: Lori would marry a hard-working guy, have four or five children, and live in the classic cottage with a white picket fence. Michelle was less traditional. Since Michelle's real-life plan was to move to Arizona, and since her tastes leaned toward Native American art and fashion, we envisioned Michelle marrying (or living with) a free spirited, educated, Hippy and deciding to have just one child. (It would be, we imagined, a son. ) Michelle and her attractive Hippy would travel, but when they finally settled into one home it would not have traditional architecture.

Michelle and Lori, ever the contributors to my self-esteem, envisioned for me marriage to a wealthy professional, probably not a business man. The home they envisioned for me was a beautiful, large, home - traditional but not antique. They imagined three children for me, probably two sons and daughter. My dark-haired, eyeglasses-wearing, husband would be handsome. I would write wonderful books, they told me, and I would make some difference in the world somehow.

Realistic or not, the perfect future we imagined ended as we headed home from a restaurant.

I saw the speeding headlights heading right towards us, and I had enough time to hope my parents wouldn't feel too bad when I was killed. When I looked over at Michelle and saw her trying to react to the oncoming car I "knew" we would all be killed. When I temporarily came to I had no idea what had happened. Someone told me "you were hit down the road". I didn't know what they meant by "hit", but I knew that Michelle was already gone from the car. So was Lori. I was put in the ambulance with my two friends, and it was clear that Lori was probably ok. Michelle was not. In one split second I was vaulted from the "it can't happen to me" thinking of being young to the "what will happen to me next" insecurity of being both shocked, wiser, and suddenly mature.

Lori and I had our injuries - fractures, breaks, big lacerations. I had a head injury that left me unconscious for a day and nauseous for several days. Even though we couldn't really believe that Michelle was gone, Lori and I made a vow that we would get through this together; and we did.

We had to deal with missing Michelle. We had to deal with mourning the future that Michelle wouldn't get to have. We were aware that Michelle's family, especially her mother, who had lost a baby years earlier, were the ones who were suffering the most. I didn't really let myself think about my own grief at the time. The one thing that did stand out for me was trying to imagine life without Michelle. Michelle and I had built some sort of shared identity (or something like that). I needed to figure out who I would be without Michelle. Of course, at the time, I had injuries to overcome as well. I vowed that the accident would not take more from me than it already had, and I dealt with what there was to deal with in a way that as I saw being tough, strong, and sensible.

Even as a young person, I was able to step out of myself and ask if I was adjusting properly. I had no reason to think I wasn't. I had a lot of common sense, understanding of myself, and skill in figuring out ways to process things.

Life went on, and Lori and I went on. It took some time, but we pretty much got over it. After a while it became something that would always be a part of us but not something we thought about all the time. A laceration on my head left me with a long scar that only shows before my washed hair is dry, so years after I was well over the loss and the accident I did have that one daily reminder that I would never be quite the same as I had been.

Five years after the accident I was doing my usual errand-running in the car. From out of the blue came an almost silly realization: There, in my car, it just suddenly hit me that with all the facial cuts and neck cuts I had, I did not lose one tooth. Until then, my teeth's survival had not occurred to me. I had been well aware of the way lacerations turned just above and below my eyes, but somehow, in all the ruins of the accident, I had forgotten my teeth. So, on a sunny afternoon years later I took an hour or so to be thankful that all my teeth had been spared.

Lori went on to marry the hard-working guy and have her version of the classic, cozy, home with the picket fence. She only had two children. I went on to marry a brown-haired, eyeglasses-wearing, biomedical engineer/software designer. Our first home was not nearly as impressive as the one Lori and Michelle had envisioned for me, but I did become the mother of three children - two sons and a daughter.

When I adopted my first son about seven years after the accident I found myself longing to have Michelle around, so I could talk about what I was going through. When I had a second trimester miscarriage a friend came to stay with me one afternoon, and I kind of wished it could have been Michelle. When my second son was born six weeks early, I thought of Michelle and wished she could have seen that his hair was dark - just as she had imagined it would be. When I began doing some newspaper writing I wished Michelle were around to tell. When I completed my family with the birth of a little daughter who was exactly the kind of little girl Michelle imagined I'd have, again I found myself thinking of her often. I asked myself if I were truly over the tragedy, and I reassured myself I was. It was just that when things Michelle had predicted came true I wished she could have seen that.

Of course, as my life fell into place I was no longer imagining what Michelle would not get to have for herself. From time to time I'd think of the life I'd built, the joys I'd had, and the dreams I'd begun to formulate for still later in my life; and the reality of what Michelle would not get to have would hit me.

Even though I very much felt over the accident, each year on the anniversary I would think of it. I'd be a little spooked about going out at night that night, and I'd think of "Both Sides Now". As the fifteen anniversary approached I realized I didn't think much about either Michelle or the accident, although I did hold an intense resentment toward people who speed in cars. I wrote a "Thoughts to Michelle" piece and sent it to a group that deals with fatal traffic accidents. It was my way of both saying, "good bye" and honoring, Michelle. The accident had grown farther and farther away to me - an event that was clearly in the distant past. I no longer started thinking of the anniversary a month before it would arrive. By this time it was more a matter of realizing the anniversary was coming a week before. On the anniversary I no longer got "the spooks" about being out at night, and once the day was actually upon me I'd often forget it was the anniversary.

I had several years of not thinking much about the accident, so I was surprised to discover that when my own children got to driving age brand new issues arose. All parents are scared when their teens drive, but my fears were over the line when it came to my teens' driving. Being a generally well adjusted person, I tried overcome some of my fears and hide those I couldn't overcome. I explained to my kids that I knew I had some degree of inappropriate anxiety and was working on it. I tried to step out of myself and not let what bothered me affect the ways I related to my children. To be honest, I never quite got over that anxiety, but as each child gained experience and got a little older some of the anxiety died down. As my first child got closer and closer to the age that I was when the accident occurred, though, yet another new issue arose.

I suddenly became aware of what having a child that age feels like, and suddenly thoughts of Michelle's mother haunted my days for about a month, maybe longer. What was worse, though, was that I suddenly realized that the young woman I had once seen as "equally grown up" with me, I now saw as equal to the children I so loved. No matter how close two young friends are, nobody values and treasures the life of another the way a mother values and treasures the life of her children. Awareness of how they'd grown, and of all the time that had passed without Michelle, became combined with a painful awareness of how young twenty really is. People twenty usually have no idea of how young twenty is. How young Michelle had been, how treasured she was by her family, how much life she never got to have, and what seemed like the true depth of the tragedy all hit me all those years later.

That would make sense since someone twenty years old just doesn't have the frame of reference that a middle-aged mother of grown kids does, but still I found myself surprised to be dealing not with ancient-history grief, but with a whole new kind of it. Somewhere over all the years I had stopped seeing Michelle as my peer and grown to see her as the young girl she really was. No longer was I thinking of a friend. I was thinking of Michelle as being frozen at an age beyond which I'd grown so far. A little thrown with all of this, I tried to imagine what I'd say to Michelle if she could somehow come back. I realized that I wouldn't feel as if I knew her any longer, although somehow I thought she would still me know. I knew I'd still talk to her as an equal, but I also knew I would see her from a mother's eyes. As all the issues had before, this one took some processing. The most surprising thing was that it felt like fresh, new, grief. That was, I suppose, because it was.

What I discovered was that even though it was fresh and new, this late-coming grief seemed intense but "smaller" than the original grief was. As such, it didn't take all that long to get past it. After several weeks (possibly more) of making peace with the new issues and new sense of sadness I came out the other side wiser than before.

At this point I can look back on that secondary stage of grief and see it, too, in the past. I was, however, left wondering whether at some other stage in my life yet some new awareness will show up again. There was a time I believed I was completely over it. It was just such a long, long, time ago. I never expected those late bouts of grief to come out of the blue, although I now know they must have been incubating all those years when I was growing older.

I don't think of Michelle much these days. It feels to me as if that last unexpected awareness of loss may have been it. I do have "Both Sides Now" on my Mp3 player. Sometimes I'll listen to it. Sometimes I won't. That song has the line, "something's lost but something's gained in living every day". Sometimes, though, something's just lost and nothing's gained. When Michelle and I enjoyed that song we were way too young to have "looked at clouds from both sides now". My young friend did not live to look at clouds from sides, although I suppose if there's a Heaven she has seen some side of clouds that I've been spared.

The anniversary is coming around yet again in a couple of weeks. All these years later I'm way past worrying that if I go out that evening some horrible thing will come out of the night and kill me. I'm pretty much past thinking of all the things Michelle never got to see go on in my life. I even kind of ran out of steam when it comes to thinking of what she never got to have. I am not, however, past sitting in the dark at around midnight (when she died), playing the "waiting for the bus" song, and imagining Michelle right next to me, if only for a brief moment. Somehow, after all these years, and in spite of honestly believing I'm over the whole thing, I still need to imagine Michelle here, - in the future that she once so lovingly and naively imagined for for both of us.