by Shey Stahl
He had a point. “Very true.”
Give up – Gradual or drastic deterioration of a tires performance during use.
After Christmas, again, our lives seemed to take a fast lane and early September we were on the west coast. Sway had made a complete recovery from the cancer and remained in remission. I was so fucking thankful for her to be alive and okay I’d laid back quite a bit even and thankfully she stopped showing everyone her tits. It only happened like once a month now.
We started the season strong only to have a string of engine failures. Rager was doing great though and bringing in the wins one by one. Maybe from the temptation of having my daughter around him so much, but either way, it was nice one of our cars was winning this year.
Arie was traveling with us and working part time for the World Racing Group. I had to admit, it was nice having her around that much. Casten was now racing full time with the Outlaws but still hadn’t pulled off that first win yet. It was coming any day now though.
Since we were on the west coast, most of our family was around for the last stretch of the tour away from home. Even Jack was here tonight and eating up every moment in the pits he could.
It was on lap fourteen of the feature event when life as we knew it came to a complete stop. The car in front of me had been squirrely in the opening laps but something went wrong on lap fourteen.
Everything seemed to move so slowly, yet too fast. I was moving, doing things, demanding people to react, but I had no control over my own body after I saw it happen. My mind wouldn’t comprehend any of it.
I saw the car wiggle in two and then shoot up the high line. I’d had that happen before on my own car and immediately knew his throttle was stuck.
The car did a half-wheel stand midway through the backstretch and then shot up over the barrier and flipped into the pits. I knew who was in the pits right there.
The boys.
When the lights on the track blinked yellow and then red, my chest constricted. I had barely stopped the car on the backstretch before I was out and running toward the pits.
I saw Tommy first, face down in the dirt with Casten hovering over him, and then Jack about ten feet from him under the four-wheeler.
Oh, God. No. Please no. Not him.
My first thought was a few broken bones. When I made it to Jack and flipped the four-wheeler off him, it wasn’t broken bones any longer. He was bleeding heavily from his neck.
I couldn’t fucking breathe. My breath came out in short quick gasps to keep from fainting on the pure adrenaline racing through me. My heart thudded loudly, my adrenaline spiking, coursing through my veins like ice. My heart pounded, moving through my chest, to my arms, shaking my hands then jolting through my legs.
Amongst the wreckage of the sprint car, Jack had been hit in the neck by something, leaving a three-inch-long gash along the left side of his neck. By the lifeless way he lay there, he was gone already, but I had to try. When I reached him, I fell to my knees beside him. His eyes opened, and then closed, his breathing short and uneven.
I started ripping my gear away, my helmet first, then gloves and the upper part of my racing suit, wanting to use the T-shirt I had under it to press against his neck. His body was completely limp, as though all muscle tone was gone. He almost felt soft, as if all his strength had suddenly disappeared.
“Jameson,” Willie gasped when he came over to us, pure white and covered in blood from Tommy.
Two paramedics ran over, their arms full of supplies but stopped, the same blank faces as everyone else when Jack drew in a labored gurgled breath. When he did that, blood pooled in his mouth.
“Do something! Help me! Call 911!” I looked down when warmth hit my hands. The blood had soaked through my shirt in less than a minute, pooling in the dirt beneath my knees. Jack wasn’t moving at all, his eyes closed, face pale, lips blue. “Do something!”
“Jameson… he’s….” The paramedic shook his head and pressed more towels to the side of Jack’s neck.
“No! Don’t you fucking give up!” I shook my head refusing to believe my grandson was dying in my arms. “He’s not! Just apply pressure. He’s going to be fine.”
His blood covered me within two minutes. All I saw was red. It was everywhere I looked. It wasn’t just coming from his neck either. It seeped out of his mouth. He had to have hit his head, or he was bleeding internally. Everything was happening so fast, and I couldn’t stop the blood. He was slipping away right before my eyes.
We used towel after towel, anything we could find to put pressure on his neck, but it soaked through just as fast.
This isn’t real. It can’t be. He’s just sleeping.
“Breathe, buddy!” I touched his face, careful not to move the pressure on his neck. “Fucking breathe!” I sobbed, my face soaked with tears. “Please fucking breathe!”
Watching someone’s life slip away before you hurt more than any pain I’d ever endured. I saw the life seeping out of him, the hopelessness taking over.
Make it stop. Make time stop. Make the pain stop right now. Give him life. Take mine. Give it to him. I’ll sacrifice the very breath in my lungs if you just please give it to him.
“Jameson,” the paramedic said again, grabbing my arm.
I pushed him away, keeping one hand on Jack. “Stop saying my fucking name and do your goddamn job!”
I looked back down at Jack and he was turning blue, his skin a light gray but with a purple tint around his eyes. They were bruising already.
When Sway was attacked, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t save her. Nothing I could have done would have done or made a difference that day. But now… maybe….
When my dad died, I was dying myself. I couldn’t save him either.
But I was here, the first one to Jack and I could save him. I needed to save my grandson. I had to….
I just had to. For me. For Axel.
Only… he was gone before I had the chance.
There was yelling all around us, and guys tried to shield everyone from what was happening not more than thirty feet from the track in clear view of the pit stands. My eyes drifted to Axel as he approached, his helmet in hand. My first-born son took in the sight before him. His first born laying in a pool of blood.
I was afraid to look at Axel. Afraid to see his eyes, but when I did, the pain hit me like a bullet to the chest.
Rager grabbed more towels from somewhere and threw them in my direction. We applied more to his neck but didn’t remove the ones that had been soaked through.
Axel didn’t move. He just stared at Jack’s body. Guys swarmed around him, waiting to see what he’d do as Lane stayed right beside him, waiting.
“Jameson, we need to transport him.”
My hands shook. I couldn’t let go of him until I realized that he wasn’t breathing any longer.
Closing my eyes, I released a sharp intake of breath.
“Jameson….” My name was said by the paramedic. “Let go of him.”
Let go of him? How could I? How did this even happen?
The paramedics took over and tried to control the bleeding while another did CPR. I knew there was no chance, but they weren’t going to give up on a child in front of his dad. They kept looking to Axel then back at Jack, and then me.
I fell apart when he was loaded into the ambulance. I fell apart because that was when Axel did, his knees hitting the dirt with desperation.
It couldn’t end like that. It didn’t happen like that for kids.
But it does.
It did.
As I stood there, staring at the ambulance that Axel was getting into behind Jack, I couldn’t breathe.
There are no words to describe this pain. There never would be. The pain was not instant. You bled it. It poured out of you, dripping from your broken soul.
And when you finally did feel it, it took the breath right out of your lungs.
Nothing I’d ever been through in my life had resembled this. My grandson had died in my arms.
An indescribable guilt knotted in my chest when I thought about Lily, and then Sway, and Justin, Ami… all our families. This was something that tore families apart completely.
What would this mean for ours?
Handing my keys to Willie, I couldn’t even look at him. “Go get my truck for me.”
I had no idea what to do next as the ambulance left. I was crying, covered from head to toe in blood and left with a sense of shock throughout my body trying to decipher if I had just watched my grandson die in my arms.
Standing beside the hauler, my knees gave out, my head in my hands as I prayed. “Don’t let this be real. Please don’t do this.”
Each breath seemed harder than the last, a reminder his had been taken.
Casten approached me, his hand on my back in an attempt to comfort me.
Our eyes met for the briefest of moments before I stared at the dirt and climbed to my knees.
“Someone call Lily and Sway,” I told him, scrubbing my hands over my face as I climbed to my feet. “Have them go to the hospital.”
Willie drove up with my truck. Glancing at Casten, I knew he’d take care of everything here for us. “Can you…?” I couldn’t even finish my sentence. It seemed my voice and ability to form words was gone.
“I’ll take care of it.”
Breathing heavily, my head was light. Words and voices spun around me but I was too numb to decipher who or what anything meant. I knew one thing, we were all heading home now. “Tell the boys to pack up and head home. We won’t be at the final two races in California.”
I saw the track officials approaching and Arie running toward the pits, but I left with Willie to go to the hospital. Neither of us said a word on the way there, which was a first for Willie because he usually couldn’t stop talking.
When tragedy of any kind unfolded around you, there was almost a sense of despondency that took over. It was probably meant to be that way.
Your bodies way of humbling you I supposed.
I STOOD IN the waiting room of the emergency room when they told Axel Jack had passed away. That sensation, the pain coursing through my veins had to be nothing compared to what Axel went through in those seconds the graveness hit him.
I knew what I went through, but to his father, it was completely different. He helped bring him into this world and had to watch him leave it in such a brutal way. This wasn’t something where he died in his sleep; he bled to death in my arms. I was covered in that reality.
As Axel’s body trembled and he leaned into the wall for support, Sway and Lily came around the corner. I wasn’t sure what was said. I was in too much shock to decipher anything at that point. It seemed I wasn’t even in my body, let alone watching the devastation unfold around me, my family fall apart.
I’d had so much experience with death, but never directly. When Charlie died, I wasn’t there. I was racing, and Sway had to deal with it on her own until I was able to fly home.
When the plane crash happened, it was the aftermath I dealt with.
When Ryder died, I wasn’t there. I heard about it a day later.
And when my dad died, I was unconscious, and it saved me from the pain I would have endured then.
But this… I was right in the middle of, watching my son tell his wife their first-born died at the track, bled to death in my fucking arms.
Breathing in deeply, shaking and inconsistent, Sway wrapped her arms around me, crying into my chest. I had no idea how to comfort her like a husband should have because all I kept seeing was Jack’s face and the blood on my hands.
This, above all else, would change our perspective on life.
My dad once told me, and this advice became legendary over the years, “It’s hard to see past the speed when you’re going two-hundred miles per hour.”
Those words were never truer as our world had come to a complete halt. We were forced to see what was right in front of us: grief, loss, devastation. It was one long inescapable moment.
“Did you see it happen?” Sway whispered, gasping at my bloody clothes as we stood alone in the hallway.
“Not really.” I couldn’t look at her. Instead, I stared at her hands on my waist. “I saw the car do a wheel stand on the backstretch. He… died in my arms.”
THE HEADLINES A few days after the accident were enough to make me physically sick.
They wanted to say how dangerous our sport was and that it should be illegal to have kids in the pits. The fact of the matter was, he was out of the way of the track, and it was a freak accident. No one could have predicted that would have happened.
Who was to say he couldn’t have been hit by a car walking down the street? That happened all the time, but because it was a race car, people went crazy and placed the blame on the sport.
So if I were to die in a car accident, people would still drive cars. They wouldn’t outlaw them.
But if I died inside of a race car, they wanted to ban them and put restrictions on everything.
People were so fucking ignorant. They also wanted someone or something to place the blame on.
Sometimes you couldn’t. Shit just happened.
They blamed us for what happened.
Why?
Because they weren’t there. That was why.
Because a child died and they found it necessary to blame someone. The fact of the matter was it was a horrible fucking accident.
Within a day, we were getting reports that tracks all over the states had immediately implemented new rules to the pits. No kids under sixteen allowed while cars were on the track. If they were racing a premier show, like the Outlaws, anyone under sixteen had to be in the stands before cars could be on the track. It would certainly make it hard on the families traveling with young kids.
There was a pain in the world that would never touch another pain. It didn’t even come close.
A child’s death.
Our family would never be the same again. This changed us all. Sure, we’d experienced heartache, but never like this.
This could destroy us forever. No one wanted to lose a child. It was unimaginable and avoided in conversation.
The friction it put on everyone was the hardest. Much like Sway’s cancer, it created an anger impossible to control, bled a hatred difficult to stop. Only worse.
The thing was, if we collapsed as a family, we wouldn’t be honoring Jack’s memory. Collapsing seemed selfish and I didn’t want that at all.
Everyone wanted to tell us that things happened for a reason. Well, fuck them! This shit should never have fucking happened. Kids weren’t supposed to die.
I had no idea what to say to Axel and one look at him that morning, I knew he didn’t want to hear anything I had to say to him. He didn’t want to hear from anyone.
IN THE MIDST of planning the funeral, Axel decided that having helmets line the top of his casket was what Jack would have wanted. He would have said, “That’s so cool!”
We wanted to have all of them up there, but sadly, he was small, so only four helmets would fit. So we chose his favorites: one of Jimi’s with the American flag on it, mine, Axel’s, and the helmet his parents gave him for his seventh birthday.
Four generations of drivers.
I thought of him right then, in my father’s arms, watching us and smiling. The thought provided comfort in a time when I really just wanted to mourn the loss of my grandson.
The morning of the funeral, I was down at the lake sitting on the dock when Sway approached me, wearing the same despondent countenance everyone was.
She said nothing but sat on my lap. Her arms wrapped around my neck tightly. We sat in silence until her lips pressed tenderly to my temple, her tears flowing again.
It brought a surge of emotion over me as the dock rocked with a subtle wind. For twenty-five years we’d experienced more than most could ever conceive of enduring, but this woman in my arms had been through it with me. Cancer, death, plane crashes… retaliation… all of it.
Losing our Jack was by far the hardest.
My arms tightened around her, deep sobs racking the two of us. Words weren’t necessary. We both knew the impact this was going to have on everyone.
It was right then that I was reminded of my thoughts when my team plane crashed nine years earlier. I compared my thoughts to a reciprocating engine. It was similar to now. In an engine, there were moving pieces inside that engine, systems that keep it running, belts moving, oil flowing and spark. You could take one out of the equation, and the engine failed. You depended on those systems to keep everything moving.
“Jameson….” Sway’s voice brought me from my thoughts. “Are we gonna be okay?”
“I love you,” I told her over and over again because the truth was, I didn’t know if we would be okay. It seemed almost redundant to keep telling her, but after everything, it was the only thing I could say.
I told her because it’s what we needed to remember today. We needed to remember despite the pain and anguish, we could make it through this.
Tears streamed down our faces with an unstoppable force along with choking, bone-rattling sobs.
“I love you, too. You can be sure of that,” she assured me with steady palms cradling my face. “This sucks, it’s awful, but we have our family here to support us in this red flag.”
She was offering me anything she could to provide like she always did. But it wasn’t me she needed to comfort. It was our family I cried for the loss, the pain, and I tried like hell to detach myself from the memories, the flashbacks of the night but I just couldn’t.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered to me.
“Sway,” my voice cracked, remorseful tears falling from my eyes. “I don’t know what to do....” My eyes shut, trying to stop the few tears that slipped by. “How are we ever going to come back from this?” I continued, unable to hold her stare.
“I don’t know,” she finally replied, her voice carrying with the wind.
The truth was, neither one of us were sure anymore.
Nosing Over – When a race car's performance “flattens out” or doesn’t pull down the straights anymore. Poor tuning or exceeding the engine's power range causes this.