by Aimee Ross
I love her, just like your parents loved you. Our worst fear as parents happened to them: you didn’t come home. They must miss you desperately. I imagine they didn’t know about your regular drug use. I wonder if they were shocked, horrified maybe, to find out. Perhaps they have forgiven you by now. You were their only son.
But I am finding it difficult to do.
We all make mistakes and poor choices. I know this.
And if you had lived through the accident, maybe you would have apologized. You probably would have been sorry, too. If you had lived through the accident, maybe you even would have changed. You probably would have stopped being reckless, too.
But maybe your life ended because of how you chose to live it. Maybe change would not have been possible for you even if you had lived. I don’t know.
I changed, but not by choice.
I am a different person today. Body, heart, and spirit.
I wonder what I would be like if it never happened.
But that’s silly to consider, because it did.
You crashed into me.
I don’t want to hate you. And I don’t want to be so angry, still.
I even want to try to forgive you.
But I just can’t yet.
Sincerely,
Aimee, the woman whose life you changed
During the fall of 2013, as I continued to write about the effects of the accident for my master’s thesis, I realized I still had questions—mostly about that night.
In my quest for any answers the Internet could give me, I Googled the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s website and found out that I could order the report from that night for a nominal fee. Of course, I had to.
It came in two parts: one, a PDF file I downloaded straight to my computer, the other, a CD burned with photographs that I’d received by mail.
The report shared nothing unusual: the date and times and names and vehicles of all involved, the weather and road conditions, the place of impact in the road, and the angles of the cars’ trajectories.
And of course, I had seen pictures of the vehicles already—Dad took those in the days after the accident.
But I knew, pushing the CD into my laptop’s drive, that these photographs would be much different. I steeled myself in preparation for what I already feared I might witness.
Altogether, seventy-five photographs made up two sets of pictures: one collection from that night, the other from the crash’s investigation in the days after, where a summer shower had just passed through, leaving the roads covered with rain and wet enough to look unmarked, undisturbed…
But the ones from the night of the accident shared utter confusion.
One, two, three ambulances. A fire truck, a highway patrol car. Spotlights and gurneys and people in glow-in-the-dark vests—I counted more than thirty in just one photo—police, witnesses, firefighters, volunteer EMTs. A line of stopped cars and trucks only visible in the summer darkness by their headlights.
A Queen Ann’s Lace blossom leaned against his wrecked Mini Cooper. The driver’s-side window was partially rolled down but completely fogged up, the sunroof open, the rest of the windows cracked or missing. Now-deflated front airbags hung from the dash, and in the floorboard beneath, athletic shoes waited for the feet that had once worn them. Impact had scattered money, both bills and change, across the driver’s seat and launched my front hubcap through shattered windows onto his backseat.
So much spilled blood, neon red under the cover of night, and other debris, indistinguishable, on the blackened road. A balled-up medical glove marked the location of another burst of blood, this smear staining the berm.
Smashed wildflowers encircled my demolished Saturn Aura, while more flowers pointed out the newly removed, cleanly peeled-back, tragic scars of the turf. The keys were in my ignition, which gave me pause, but not as much as seeing my earring, the one Jerr had handed to me in my hospital bed, lying on the blood-stained cushion of the twisted, mangled driver’s seat. I wondered how much force was necessary to cause earrings to come out on their own. And in the backseat, against more bloody, blurred splotches, force had flopped Jorden’s animal-print purse upside down.
Every image made my head ache, knotted up my stomach, made me cry. These were remembrances from a night I wished I could forget.
But one photo stood out. A camera had stopped time in the same moment that five firemen carried a stretcher away from my car. Two bare feet were visible at the end of that stretcher, one bloody from injury. Another group worked at the rear driver’s-side window, which meant I had already been removed.
That stretcher was carrying me.
2014
“We go through bad stuff to learn things about ourselves,” Jerrica once said to me. “I truly believe that.”
Wise words from my first-born daughter, then in nursing school. They reminded me of the definition of existentialism I had written on my chalkboard for students after we had read Camus’ The Stranger:
To exist means to suffer. And to live through that suffering, we find meaning in our lives.
Now I could see the book’s lessons a different way; I could relate. I had lived through the suffering, and I was looking for meaning.
“I’m still trying to figure it all out,” I told Jerr.
“Mom, your doctors didn’t even know how you lived through the accident.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
“Really? Did they tell you that?”
I was aware that Jerrica had to sign all of my surgical consent paperwork, but she had never said much about it.
“Well, not in those words, but it was obvious,” Jerr went on. “I think it was the second day after the accident, and one of the doctors was explaining the surgeries you needed. I asked him if you were going to be okay, and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”
Trauma doctors, who saw life-threatening injuries on a daily basis, were surprised I had lived through the accident. I thought of the voice in the car that night. I thought about the fact that I had been resuscitated.
And then, one winter snow day off from school, while writing at the kitchen table, I decided to look up “resuscitate” in the dictionary. Maybe I was exaggerating its meaning. Or worse, maybe I didn’t really even know what it meant, I thought.
I sipped from my shiny black mug, then typed the word into Merriam Webster’s website.
“Resuscitate.”
Definitions: “being revived from apparent death or from unconsciousness.” The word’s Latin origins meant to reawaken, to rouse, and to put in motion.
That’s what I thought.
I sipped from the mug again, wondering what synonyms the word resuscitate might have, so I typed it again, this time into thesaurus.com.
Raise again. Restore. Resurrect. Bring back to life. Breathe new life into.
Resurrect.
Breathe new life into.
Holy shit.
I knew I had been resuscitated that night after losing so much blood. I knew that trauma doctors were only “hopeful” I would recover. I knew that family members were not given the reassurances they needed. But now the idea that I had been resurrected gave me pause. I had never thought of it like that.
I’d been brought back to life. A new life breathed into me. A chance to start over. A chance to finally find the happiness and peace that had been missing even before the divorce, the heart attack, the accident. A handwritten scrap of paper confirmed it.
I’d just needed to figure it out for myself.
• • •
I left our delightful two-story house in the country at the typical time—a half hour before school—on a chilly, gray weekday morning typical of early April in Ohio. It wasn’t dark, but the sun wasn’t shining, either. Rain showers,
typical of spring, had been predicted for the afternoon.
But today wasn’t quite so typical.
I backed out of the garage and turned down the driveway, noticing the faintest specks of water, pinpoint-tiny droplets on my windshield, but only three or four. Not even enough to turn on the wipers. Not even enough to say it was raining. And certainly not enough to deflate the giddiness of my about-to-burst, happy heart.
Jackson wanted to marry me!
I reached the end of the drive, where I always waited to pull out. The slight hills hiding the oncoming traffic of the busy state route presented quite a challenge. In fact, if you were going to go, you had to commit.
Ah, the irony. Was I ready to commit myself to someone again? And did I believe in marriage enough to try?
I checked my hair in the rearview mirror and then glanced across the road to the field straight ahead of me, an open area before a tree line. I could not believe my eyes.
A single vertical rainbow stood straight up and down all by itself in that field.
I looked quickly to my left and right again to see if there were other witnesses, but no one else was around—no cars drove by, no neighbors stood in their yards, no joggers passed on their morning run. A rainbow for my eyes only.
A sign from the Universe that I couldn’t deny. Approval. A blessing. A symbol of hope and a promise of the future.
Very strange, this out-of-nowhere rainbow, especially on a morning with little rain and hardly any sunshine, the two ingredients normally needed to create such a phenomenon of light.
But not a coincidence. I understood this. I felt it in my heart and body and soul—all that had once been broken.
Its message was shining through.
• • •
Teenagers: the people with whom I have chosen to surround myself for seven hours a day, five days a week, thirty-six weeks a year, for most of the past two decades. You can do the math on that (I am an English teacher, after all), but I’d say that’s a lot of time invested in the “future of tomorrow.”
I’d also say it makes me somewhat of an expert on this age group.
Teenagers historically have been one of the most underestimated groups out there, but I’ve found that they really do care, and about lots and lots of things. They are also the most curious, honest, and open-minded group of people I know, and sometimes to a fault.
There’s never a dull moment with teenagers around. They make everything interesting. They’ve made me laugh, they’ve hardly ever made me cry (except that first year—class of ’95, you know who you are), and they’ve accepted me for me, on a daily basis.
Even with all my quirks.
“Don’t rattle that wrapper; she’ll flip out.”
“That Ricky Martin poster of hers creeps me out for real.”
“Dude, do not tell her you don’t have a research topic today.”
“What’s with the word ‘thusly’? Is that an English teacher thing?”
“Don’t ever knock on her door and interrupt her while she’s teaching, either. She will come unglued.”
“And whatever you do, forget sniffling if you have a cold, tapping your pencil to help you concentrate, or crunching chips. Just not worth it, man.”
They have me figured out, and they have for years—probably ever since I stepped into the classroom that first day. I have always tried to allow my students to see that I am only human, just like them, and they seem to appreciate it. Maybe even embrace it. I’m sure that watching me live with The Trifecta of Shit has helped students to realize it even more. And if I ever need my own personal cheerleaders, particularly with my sideline hobby of writing, I certainly know where to turn. Teenagers are my go-to…everything.
It just took losing my grip on the meaning of my life to figure that out. I had been so steeped in professional arrogance, thinking I deserved more, that I must have forgotten my ultimate teacher goal.
And that’s where teenagers—my students—came in.
In the months, even years, after the accident and my return to teaching, students were the ones who helped me remember. As I continued teaching what I knew—literature and writing—I let my traumatized guard down, slowly, and resumed sharing myself as I had before.
Seniors in high school on the brink of the rest of their lives and adulthood, on the edge of true independence and adventure, those whose existence hasn’t yet been marred by time or jaded by experiences—teenagers on the verge of living—listened to me, questioned me, thought for me and helped me process what had happened…to me.
They inspired me. My middle-aged self needed to hear what they had to say. I needed to see it through their youthful eyes.
• • •
I was in the middle of reading Darin Strauss’s memoir Half a Life aloud to the seniors in my English class when their bullshit meters started to go off—at least the outspoken ones.
“You know, this dude’s guilt is unbelievable,” K.J. said. “It’s, like, too much. Is he serious? Like, dude, quit wallowing already. It’s not your fault!”
When Strauss was eighteen and a month from graduation, a classmate on a bike swerved in front of the car he was driving, which struck and killed her. His memoir was an attempt to work through the guilt and responsibility he felt for her death.
“Yeah, enough already,” Corey said. “I kinda agree with K.J. on this one.”
It was early spring, a couple months before graduation, when seniors were predictably skeptical of everything. I had hoped that this late in the semester a literary non-fiction unit, rather than The Canterbury Tales (a mistake I’d made my first year teaching seniors), would keep them engaged. I had also hoped that reading it to them, rather than assigning it, would help.
So far, so good.
“Don’t you think you might feel guilty if you were in his situation?” I asked.
“Yeah, you guys,” Samantha added, “you know you would.”
“Well, yeah, of course,” K.J. said with a hint of sarcasm. “But come on. He keeps going on and on and on about how guilty he feels. He didn’t do anything wrong! Let it go, man!”
Quiet giggles erupted then, partially what K.J. had hoped to achieve. Students looked at me with wide eyes, trying to gauge my reaction.
Corey jumped back into the conversation then.
“You know, when you think about it, this book is pretty selfish,” he said.
Selfish? Where was he going with this?
“He’s taking what happened to her and writing about it, twisting it like it’s his story, and guess what? He sells books,” Corey said. “Selfish.”
“Yeah,” K.J. said. “Has he even written another book? Or is this the only one? Did he just write this one to profit off the accident?”
Uh-oh. This was not how I had hoped the discussion would go. Had I chosen the wrong piece of non-fiction writing for the unit? I had to get them back on track before they completely derailed the conversation. Luckily, I had done my teacher research.
“No, he has written other books,” I said. “In fact, he started by writing fiction and realized he had to get this story out. The guilt was too strong.”
I could identify with Strauss. I had only recently started processing in writing what had happened to me—The Trifecta of Shit—because I needed to understand it. I needed to figure out what it meant to me and the person I had become. And I also had gotten stuck in the guilt.
But I didn’t want to talk about me right now. My story wasn’t relevant.
“I know that if that happened to me, I would feel guilty,” Morgan said. “I would need to talk about it, too. It must be so awful to know that someone died in an accident you were involved in.”
“But it wasn’t. His. Fault,” K.J. insisted. “The girl rode her bike right in front of his car. He couldn’t h
elp it.”
“You know, Ms. Young, this is just like what happened to you,” Corey said.
I wasn’t sure what he meant. I wrinkled my nose and furrowed my brows.
“Well, your accident, y’know…You did nothing wrong, and someone else died,” he explained.
“Yes, but it was different,” I said. “He was under the influence.”
“But,” Corey went on, “didn’t you tell us once that you felt some guilt for what happened, even though you did nothing wrong? And you couldn’t have avoided the accident?”
Oh, man. The discussion had just turned personal. Yes, I probably had shared that with the students. They knew I was writing about what happened, and sometimes I even shared my work with them. Modeling is a worthy educational tool.
“Yes, that’s true, Corey,” I said. “There is not one thing I could have done differently that night. It happened so fast. I never saw him coming. And yes, I do feel guilt. I couldn’t protect the girls who were with me.”
I hoped that was enough of a response. I also hoped I could get through this discussion without an emotional breakdown. I was still having trouble processing the recent events of my life on my own, let alone in front of students.
“Aw, but how could you protect them?” Samantha asked. “You had no idea. You did nothing wrong.”
I no longer felt as if I were the teacher in this discussion, leading students to their own revelations and insights. The students were counseling me, and caught up in my own thoughts, I felt the words come tumbling out of my mouth.
“I also feel guilty because someone died. A mother’s son. Someone’s brother. So young. Sometimes I feel guilty because I didn’t die. I know the accident was his fault, but I don’t know how or why I stayed alive.”
Alyssa raised her hand, and I nodded to her.
“You stayed alive to be here with us and to be with your own children. To keep teaching, to share your story, to inspire,” she explained.
Wow. I smiled at her, blinking away tears.
“Thank you.”
I was not going to cry.