January 22, 2009

If you know me, you know that the people around me (and myself...guilty) joke about how I have a traumatic/weird life.  Worse case scenarios happen to me.  Or things that "never happened before," they happen to me.  Most of the time when I think about the traumatic things that have happened in the most recent years, I start with January 22, 2009.

On January 22, 2009 I was in a car accident.  A lady pulled out in front of me and I t-boned her driver's side without braking.  My seatbelt came undone and I went into oncoming traffic, but I wasn't badly injured.  But she died.  

I have this blessing (that can also be a curse) of empathy.  My friends sometimes think I'm crazy, because even if I find myself in a scenario where someone has done something that hurts me, I still find myself feeling empathetic for them in one way or another.  I'd probably suffer from Stockholm syndrome if I were kidnapped (bad joke...).  

So the accident wasn't my fault, but for a long time I carried this guilt.  It was heavy.  It took me over 3 weeks to drive again, because every time I got behind the wheel I would freeze and think, "The last time I drove, I killed someone."   Maybe anybody with a conscience would feel the way I felt and feel guilty like I did, or maybe I'm just a really sensitive person.  I don't know.  

People would tell me, "You didn't kill her, she basically killed herself by pulling out in front of you."  Or "It wasn't your fault so you really didn't kill her."  But I would just think "But I hit her, so yeah I killed her."  

I remember going back to school a few days later and someone said across the classroom, "Hey, I saw you on the side of the road after your accident."  And I just kind of nodded, like....yeah.  And they asked if the other person was ok....and I froze.  I somehow managed to get it out that she had died.  I'll never forget the way they looked at me, like I was forever going to be that girl that got in that car accident that killed someone.  I mean, what do you say to that?  They just said "Oh."  I left the room crying and sat in the bathroom for awhile.  

I would replay the accident in my mind and think that there had to be some way I could have seen it coming and could have hit my brakes and maybe she wouldn't have died.  I used to think about the events of that day that led me to make the choices I did that landed me at 104th and Penn around 4:20, and I would wish over and over that I hadn't made one of those stops and would have gone straight home. 

I would google her name because I felt like I should know more about the woman I killed.  Like, how could I have killed her and not know anything about her?  I felt responsible to learn about her.  Her name was Mary.  She wasn't married and didn't have any kids of her own, but she had god children and cats that she loved a lot. 

I knew there was nothing I could have done differently; I had two hands on the wheel, the radio wasn't even on, I wasn't texting or talking on my phone, I had my seatbelt on.  I was doing everything you're supposed to do to be a safe driver.  And at the end of the day I still got in an accident and a woman lost her life.   

Depressing, right?

Let's not focus on that, though!  Let me tell you what that day taught me and how I choose to live differently because of it.  Because the things I learned from the accident apply to a lot of areas of life, not just car accidents.  

I learned that there really isn't a way you can have full control over your life, so you can try really hard to take precautions but shit still happens, even if you're playing by the rules and doing everything right.  Sometimes they just happen.  I learned that you can't wish you would have done things differently and you can't get do-overs.  You just have to move forward.  I learned that the things you do affect the people around you; if the accident had been my fault, I can't imagine what that guilt would have felt like.  The way you drive, the choices you make-they affect the people around you.  These things probably sound really elementary, but sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to understand.  

I still think about the accident sometimes-when my neck hurts the way it's hurt since that day and hasn't stopped hurting, when someone almost pulls out in front of me, when a patient comes into the ER I work at that's been involved in a fatal accident, etc. Whenever I think about the accident now though, I don't carry the same heavy guilt that I used to.  I still choose to remember Mary and what that day taught me, but I don't get sad and dwell anymore.  I choose to remember the lessons I learned and apply them to other areas of my life.  Because like a wise person recently reminded me, "We cannot and do not always choose what happens to us; however, we can and do choose how we respond to what happens to us."