Crash

Crash Page 16

by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

  From the beginning the drunk driver took no responsibility for his actions. He tried to claim he wasn’t driving, even though an off-duty firefighter had witnessed the rollover of his SUV. He even tried to pretend he was noble, telling the arresting officer, “I won’t rat out my friends.”

  For Trista’s family, the hate started early.

  I didn’t have room for the hatred that first night. I didn’t have time for it. I needed to put all my energy into helping my boy get better. He had a total of three CAT scans to monitor his bleeding brain. His acute confusion and agitation gradually gave way to chronic memory loss, personality changes, and depression. He had two operations on a leg that wouldn’t heal. He was on painkillers, antiseizure medications, and antidepressants. I was a little busy.

  But if in the beginning I had no time for the hatred, in the end I just didn’t feel it. Later I did my part to get the drunk driver convicted. I took time off from work to make his every court appearance. I argued for a lengthy sentence. And when he didn’t get one, I showed up at every parole hearing to plead for his continued incarceration. I felt I owed that much to Neil and Trista. But do I owe it to them to hate? Do I have to carry that hatred around inside of me? Do I have to wear it like a badge? I hope not, because I can’t. I cannot pin all my hopes on justice. I cannot let my healing depend on getting this guy the sentence he deserves. I tried my best, I showed up, but I cannot let his sentence define my peace.

  I’ve heard a definition of revenge that goes something like this: It’s like taking poison then waiting for the other person to die. Trista’s parents’ hatred was poisonous. Understandable, but chilling in its matter-of-factness. Mary talked frequently in those early days after the accident about running the drunk driver over with her car if she ever met him on the street after he got out of jail. She added that before she hits him, she will knock back the nip she keeps in her glove compartment just for the occasion, because “obviously if you’re a drunk driver, you can get away with murder.” I suspect she was only half kidding.

  Trista’s father, David, once told the judges at one of the drunk driver’s parole hearings that justice will only be served when they cut his body down from a pipe after he hangs himself in his jail cell. He broke down as he said it. Mary comforted him. “Don’t say that, David, don’t say it,” she soothed. They really did seem to want this young man dead. Would I if he had killed my son? Should I because he changed Neil’s life forever? It’s been some time since the accident. Perhaps the Zincks’ position has softened.

  The drunk driver has never shown any remorse. Remorse first requires that one understand the pain and damage one has caused. The drunk driver has never made this first step. In his small mind and with his concrete thinking, he seems to believe that he cannot be held accountable for events he cannot remember. He did not make parole at any of his three attempts. He was inarticulate, shallow, and unintelligent. When asked by the judge why he should be let out of jail early, he replied, “So I can get on with my life,” like killing someone was just a minor inconvenience to be waited out or stepped over. He took an alcohol recovery course in jail to chip some time off his sentence, but he seemed to miss the whole point of the program. Asked if he had a problem with alcohol, he answered, “I guess I don’t have a problem in here because I can’t drink in here.” It sounded like a bad Lenny Bruce joke. But it didn’t fill me with anger. It didn’t fill me with anything at all. It left me empty. Astonished at this monstrous lack of humanity. Completely mystified as to how someone could take a person’s life and not realize its impact, not feel shame or sorrow or regret.

  The drunk driver had mown down people before. Several years earlier he had run a red light and hit a woman on a bicycle in a pedestrian crosswalk. Her injuries were serious, and she, like Neil, required multiple operations to heal. At one of his parole hearings, the drunk driver seemed to forget about this incident. (He also seemed to forget that the parole board had access to his complete record.) When they reminded him of this earlier infraction, the drunk driver responded, “Oh yeah. But thank God she’s okay.” One of the members of the board was not impressed.

  “So by ‘okay’ you mean not dead.”

  At trial he was asked over and over by the lawyer what he remembered of that night. Apparently the answer was nothing.

  “Do you remember getting into a car with thirty empty beer cans in it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you remember striking Mr. Bornstein and Ms. Zinck?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you remember rolling your SUV?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you remember running away from the police then being caught?”

  “Nope. Nope. Nope.”

  Each time he answered in the negative, he gave his head a definitive shake, as if trying to leave no doubt in the jury’s mind that he should be found not guilty by reason of amnesia.

  The drunk driver faced a variety of charges, each with its own potential sentence. The manslaughter he was charged with carried a maximum twenty-year sentence. Vehicular homicide, ten. Leaving the scene of an accident, operating under the influence, and possession of a class D substance together brought his potential sentence to forty years in state prison. He received a three-and-a-half-year sentence in the Essex County House of Correction. He was out in thirty-three months.

  I believe in redemption. I really do. I have to. I’ve parented two teenaged boys. I am a pediatrician with a large adolescent practice. I know kids make mistakes. I believe in second chances. But this drunk driver had his second chance; he blew it. That doesn’t mean I hate him. When I argued before the judges for a lengthy sentence, I wasn’t seeking revenge. I was looking for justice.

  There are only two ways I can travel to and from work. On one route I pass the cemetery where Trista is buried. Her grave marker is a large granite heart with a photograph of her and her family at Disney World embedded in it. Soggy teddy bears, deflated balloons, and dead bouquets clutter the space around it. Trista’s famous quote is engraved along the bottom of the tombstone: Life’s too short to be sad. The other route I can choose takes me past the scene of the accident itself. A makeshift shrine with photographs of Trista, ribbons, and candles marks the spot. They are daily reminders of our loss and what Neil has overcome. I don’t dwell on the past. It dwells on me. Driving by these two scenes evokes many emotions in me; but hatred isn’t one of them. I do feel the injustice of the drunk driver breathing air that Trista cannot. But I don’t feel it as hatred. I feel it as pity and hopelessness and amazement that there is a human being on this earth who so completely doesn’t get it.

  41

  The Three White Envelopes

  Because we were victims in a criminal case, the district attorney’s office assigned us a victim/witness advocate. We have had seven or eight different ones over the years, changing as they retire or move on to other jobs. We were also assigned a new advocate each time the drunk driver changed correction facilities.

  I have always appreciated the advocates. They accompanied us to every hearing, trial, and sentencing. The court can be a very intimidating place. While waiting for our case to be called, we have been witnesses to all manner of tragedy. We unwittingly were at the trial of an elderly man accused of poisoning a toddler at a barbecue at his home. We witnessed part of the trial of a doctor who allegedly walked into his wife’s hospital room and shot her dead along with her lover. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits, their wrists manacled, shuffled within inches of us, their shackles clanging with each step. Although our advocates couldn’t really do anything about who was in court wi
th us, I was grateful for their experienced presence.

  They weren’t just hand-holders though. They explained the system to us as we went along: the role of the grand jury in the indictment of the drunk driver; the array of possible charges that could be brought against him and the advantages and limitations of each; the range of sentences possible. The learning curve was very steep, and the district attorney did not always have the time to explain all the details to us himself. There was also an endless number of Latin terms to puzzle through. The voir dire: a fancy phrase for jury selection. The colloquy: the process by which the judge ensures that the person charged understands the rights he is giving up if he changes his plea to guilty. Ex parte: the sidebars in which the lawyers conferred with the judge, hands over microphone to mask their words. It was a bewildering new world to be mastered quickly. The advocates helped us cram.

  They tried not to let anything surprise us. They didn’t want us reading about developments in the case with the rest of the region in the Boston Globe. They called us on the phone whenever the drunk driver’s lawyer made any motions. Whether he asked for a parole hearing or requested to be moved to a different corrective facility, the advocates made sure we knew first.

  They are always happy to answer any questions we have about the drunk driver. From their answers we learned what classes he took in jail, what infractions he committed while there, and who came to visit him. Sometimes it felt voyeuristic. But I guess he surrendered certain rights when he took a life, left the scene, violated his probation.

  Now, eight years after the crash, our contacts with the victim/witness advocates are few and far between. Often it seems that just when our lives are getting back on track and back to normal, the envelopes appear. Always three: one for Saul, one for me, one for Neil (even though he hasn’t lived at this address for years). All with the same telltale blue coat of arms of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the upper left-hand corner. All with Victim Service Unit typed in the return address. My heart always drops when I see them. Those three white envelopes, all the same. I worry that he’s been let out of jail—proclaimed free and innocent. Or out on some technicality.

  The most recent letter informed us that inmate W92140 had been approved for transfer from minimum security to a prerelease program in Boston. My heart skipped a beat. Were they letting him go? I called and spoke with my latest advocate. I have never met him. We had never spoken before. But he knew all the facts of the case and assured me that the earliest the drunk driver would be released was more than a year away; that he could still serve his entire sentence until 2014.

  We will know when his parole hearing comes. The advocates will make sure of that. We’ve done this before many times. We’ll argue for continued incarceration in front of the parole board. We’ll write our victim impact statements and read them to the board. I have a drawer full of them now, including the one I wrote from Neil’s hospital room at Anna Jaques.

  After all these years I am quite used to this roller coaster of a judicial ride. But the predictable is still painful. The prosaic still smarts. Try as I might not to allow the drunk driver to rule my emotions, the sight of those three white envelopes showing up in my mailbox, all the same, brings me to my knees every time.

  42

  Of Grief and Gratitude

  “The road to recovery after a traumatic brain injury is not linear.” Those words were spoken by Marilyn Lash, a publisher of books on brain injury, at a conference put on by the Brain Injury Association of Massachusetts a few years ago. Truer words were never spoken.

  When I first learned of the accident …

  “Where are the kids?”

  “They should have gotten to your house by now.”

  “Two kids were hit on Ferry Road,”

  … I was stunned into disbelief. I ran all the way to the crash scene, praying that Mary was wrong. That it wasn’t our kids. That Neil was all right.

  And he was all right. Or so I thought. In the span of one breath I went from gratitude to grief. Breathe in. He’s alive. Breathe out. He’s confused. Breathe in. Thank God. Breathe out. Oh no. Breathe in. “He’s gonna be just fine.” Breathe out. But will he still be Neil?

  As glad as I was that Neil had survived the crash, I was still, even that very first night, worried about his future. His personality. His IQ. As grateful as I was, I still grieved for his losses. And with good reason. Those are the very aspects of his life that are affected to this day.

  But with that grief came guilt. For even as I stood over my shivering son in the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wishing I could warm him with my coat, my body, I thought of Mary—of how she would love to feel Trista cold and shivering instead of just plain cold.

  And later, when Neil was screaming at me, I thought of Mary. Of how she’d give anything to hear Trista’s voice again. Even if she were yelling; even if she were angry or confused.

  The road is not linear, indeed.

  It can take a very long time to realize all the effects of a traumatic brain injury. It can be a very long time before you realize that your son, who looks so perfectly fine on the outside, isn’t really so perfectly fine.

  It was easy to feel gratitude when Neil opened his eyes and said, “Hi, Mom.” It was harder to feel grateful five years later when he’s still seeing a therapist and taking Lexapro and smoking cigarettes.

  For years I felt like I was standing in the shadow of the other mother: the one whose child was killed in the same accident that injured mine. To even use the word grief when talking about Neil’s losses felt fraudulent, like I was hijacking the very word from someone who knew true loss. Whose loss was terminal.

  But as time has passed—as Neil has continued with his memory loss, learning disabilities, and personality changes—I have owned my grief. Spread out in it and made myself at home. Year after year I attend the Brain Injury Association’s conferences. I am comfortable there. I feel like people understand me there. We get one another in this disenfranchised grief. I always learn something new at the conference. Every year I feel like I understand Neil and his injury a little bit more.

  For years after the accident, Mary and I went to court, over and over. We stood side by side before judge after judge, telling our respective stories, chronicling our individual loss. Our parallel if uneven tragedies were held up for display over and over. I stated my disclaimer up front. I haven’t suffered like she has. The whole time I was writing my impact statement, I was making comparisons. Myself to Mary. Neil to Trista. Every time, my own losses came up short.

  Sometimes Mary and David spoke ahead of me. Occasionally I went first. Sometimes they read from prepared statements, but often they just spoke from the heart. They told of memories: shopping trips and Girl Scout camps, school plays and holding hands—all the things they would miss about their daughter.

  “What yardstick do we use to measure that?” they asked.

  But I need a yardstick too. It may be different from Mary’s. With tinier notches perhaps. Or at least spaced more widely apart. But I have things to measure, too. Neil’s pain from fractures and blood. From stitches and metal and scars. His slow progress through physical therapy. His struggles with memory loss, depression, anxiety, and learning difficulties. His pain from the loss of his girlfriend and having his whole world shattered in an instant. Neil wonders too what is a result of the accident and what is just his personality. But he’s coming to grips with the fact that it doesn’t really matter. It’s just who he is now.

  I believe now that grief has many faces. There is no one right way to behave in the face of it. No correct approach. There is no one set of circumstances that warrants it as a reaction and no
specific set of behaviors that qualifies as appropriate in response to it. It just is. Mary’s rawness. My reserve. Her guts and grit. My reticence and guilt. I have come to understand that the whole gamut of human emotion is legitimate when it comes to coping with loss. Even how we define our loss is personal and valid, different as it may be for each of us. I’m not sure where I stand in this hierarchy of grief. I may not be on the top rung, but I’m not on the bottom either. I just know that I belong on the ladder.

  For years I bounced around between grief and gratitude and guilt. But over time, all three of these “Gs” have given way to another “G” on this very nonlinear road, and that is grace. We’ve had our struggles as a family, but we’re here. We are survivors. Neil may not be the same person he was before the accident, but who really is the same person he or she was at seventeen? Neil has his limitations, but don’t we all? I don’t want to focus on what Neil might have accomplished without his brain injury. Instead I want to celebrate everything he has accomplished with it. Despite it. That is grace.

  I also choose not to make my life all about the drunk driver’s punishment. I had to show up. I had to voice my opinion to the judge about what I thought that punishment should be. But I can’t make my peace depend on justice. I can’t make my happiness be about that. Again, there is grace.

  I don’t believe in fate. I believe we deal with the hand we are given. We make our own meaning. We find our own grace. Grace as a kind of acceptance. Grace as thankfulness. Grace as new meaning for a changed life.

  Afterword

  The accident has become a defining part of our family’s narrative. Tragedies can break families. Ours is not broken. I am proud of the way we came together. I am proud that Dan’s immediate reaction to the news of the crash was “get me home.” There was no question that I would take time off from my job at the community health center. The vastness of staff led to many frustrations with my job there, but it also meant that there were many hands to take over caring for my patients while I cared for Neil. Saul’s role, after those precarious first days in the ICU, went back to being chief provider for us. Our rock.

 

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