Happy anniversary

to the boys I met on a mountain road

Dear Bob and Sam (names changed so I don’t get sued),

It’s been six years, but I think about you both every day. I can’t help it. The effects of our first and only meeting live inside me.

If I had to give a first impression, I would say you are probably both perfectly nice young men. You were very kind to me that day we met, standing over me in the grass and asking if I was okay. Bob, you looked so scared, and Sam, you were holding your head where it had hit the dashboard (or was it the windshield?), looking confused. You probably had a concussion. I hope by now you’ve learned to wear a seatbelt.

I am 100% sure there was no maliciousness in our meeting. I’m sure you didn’t start out your day thinking, “Hey, let’s go up in the mountains and hit somebody head-on.” Yet there we were on that winding road with two undrivable cars being hauled away, you going to the hospital, the result of one decision to drive too fast.

All my life I have heard it said that you can choose your actions but you can’t choose your consequences, and for sure by now we all know that is true. I have wondered since that day we met what your consequences were. Was your car totaled? Mine was. Did you have a concussion? I did. Did you have to rent a car to get home? I did that too. Did your insurance rate go up? Mine didn’t, but that’s because a 57-year-old woman is not considered a high risk. Twenty-year-old males are, though, and you proved them right.

But what I’ve wondered most about is whether either of you have suffered from trauma. I hope you haven’t, but I’ve wondered. Did our meeting cause you to have roller-coaster emotions? Did you suffer from short-term memory loss? Did you struggle with unreasonable anger? Did you have your first-ever panic attack two weeks after our meeting, and then many more in the years to come? Were you suddenly afraid of things that were previously part of your everyday life? Did you develop any phobias? Did you have anxiety and depression when you never had before? Did you have trouble sleeping? I’ve had all those, and I’ve wondered if you did too.

Did you spend years trying different therapies and paying out-of-pocket for them, doing anything you could find that might offer a little relief? Did you feel like you were losing your mind, like you were going crazy? Did you ask yourself 50 times a day, “What is wrong with me?” Did you wonder how such a stable person could become such a mental-health train wreck? Did you move away from your beautiful farm in the mountains because you couldn’t handle driving the winding roads anymore? Did you stop going in the pasture with your cows because you were suddenly afraid of them?

I hope you haven’t experienced any of these things, but I’ve wondered. Was our meeting as traumatic for you as it was for me? Do you even know what trauma is and what it does to a body?

Have you ever had a 30-minute-long panic attack while strapped in the seat of an airplane with 300 people watching, while your spouse tries desperately from across the aisle to comfort you? Do you know the effects of trauma last forever and do not get better with time, and in some cases even get worse?

Have you made the decision that you cannot ever fly again? You cannot take part in the ministry you love because it’s across the country? You cannot visit your missionary friends on the other side of the world because it’s too far away and you can’t drive there? Have you ever had your freedom taken from you and oh by the way here’s a check for thirty-eight thousand dollars to “compensate” you for it? Do you think it would be worth thirty-eight thousand to lose your freedom? I’ve wondered.

This was never a club I wanted to be part of, yet here I am and it’s because of one small decision. Am I angry? Yes, but not really at you. You were young and you made a decision like young people do with a not-yet-fully-formed prefrontal cortex. This is why young men pay high insurance rates. Rationally I know you did not intend to cause anyone harm. But it doesn’t change the circumstances of my life, now, after our meeting, circumstances that can only be managed, never erased. Sometimes it’s hard to accept what God allows in our life, even though we know he loves us. I will probably always ask why.

My life is completely different because trauma happens when the body feels unsafe and cannot escape the situation. And that’s exactly what happened. When I saw your little black car skidding toward me around the corner, I knew you were not going to make that turn. I knew it was coming. I watched it get closer and closer. I braked as hard as I could and steered toward the side of the road as far as I was able without driving into the ditch.

Remember that ditch? It’s the one we had to stumble through to get to the lawn we wound up sitting on. I realized during one of my EMDR sessions (that’s a therapy for PTSD, which is my official diagnosis) that if I hadn’t been there that day, your car would have skidded nose-first into that ditch and would have flipped right into the little house and who knows what would have happened to you, especially Sam, who was not wearing a seat belt. But I was there, and my car stopped your car and surely kept you from a much worse outcome. I’ve asked myself, was it worth it? Would I go through all I’ve lived with—and continue to live with—to save your lives? It’s such a heavy question.

Did you take any pictures that day? What did it look like from your angle?

I saw your car coming and stood on my brakes but there was nowhere for me to go. I couldn’t get away and that’s what makes an event traumatic: it’s that your body knows it is not safe and it can’t escape the unsafeness. It’s literally too much for your brain to process in the moment and so the whole thing is stored in your body as if it is in the present. It’s not just in your mind, it’s in your actual flesh-and-bones body. For years after our meeting my right foot twitched when I was at therapy. It remembered pushing hard on the brake and the jolt that went all the way to my hip joint when our cars met. My body still thinks the wreck is happening now. Any time I have a feeling that something unsafe is happening, I panic. Have you ever had a panic attack?

Did you know I drive with my headlights on for “safety”? If you ever have to get hit head-on, do it in a Honda.

Right before your car hit mine I yelled. Did you hear it? I turned my head and squeezed my eyes shut, felt the impact and the back of my car raise up from the momentum, then fall back to the ground. You know all about that because you are both engineers so you understand physics, except you forgot it all that day when you took the curve too fast. I heard a loud bang that I thought was from the cars hitting but realized after I opened my eyes it was the airbag deploying. Did you know airbags are pink? That’s more than I ever wanted to know in life.

Did you know when an airbag deploys it’s actually an explosion of gunpowder? It leaves black residue all over the interior of the car and the people in it, and it also creates smoke. When I opened my eyes and saw the smoke I panicked, thinking the car was on fire. Somehow my brain took over and I found myself talking out loud, giving myself orders to shut the car off, unhook the seat belt, get out of the car.

Remember how my car was at an angle on the side of the ditch? That—plus the fact that the front quarter-panel was pushed back into the door—made it hard to get the door open. But there was so much adrenaline coursing through my body it was like I had superhuman strength. That’s part of the trauma response that’s built into our bodies. God really knew what he was doing, didn’t he?

And remember the guy from across the street who stuck his hand in the mangled front end of my car and broke the horn wire, giving us blessed silence? I’m so glad he was there. He’s the same guy who found my glasses that had been thrown off my face by the impact.

Did you know we met a half mile from my brother’s house, where I was heading that day? He was sitting on his back porch waiting for me to arrive and he heard the crash from there. He says there are wrecks at that spot all the time because people do exactly what you did: make a decision to drive faster than they should.

We all overestimate our abilities, don’t we? I’ve done it. I think it’s part of being human. We want to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. You overestimated your ability to drive safely on a winding road you were probably not very familiar with. I hope you’ve gotten better at estimating.

So what’s the point of this letter? I guess it’s just a bit of wondering on my part. Wondering what was going through your minds when you knew you weren’t going to make that curve. Wondering if you are still affected by our meeting or if you went on with your lives and forgot about it. Wondering if you ever think about it or even remember it. Hoping it hasn’t had such difficult consequences for you as it has for me.

I am not looking for a pound of flesh. I don’t want you to feel guilty. I surely don’t wish you to suffer like I have. I don’t want your money.

I want it to be acknowledged that July 21, 2018, was more than just a bad day for me. It was the end of my life as I knew it, but I didn’t know that at the time.

My husband and I were recent empty-nesters and had retired to the mountains of Western North Carolina. We’d bought our first little farm and had just started raising a few cattle. We were living our dream, equal distances from all five of our children and our growing herd of grandbabies so we could drive to see them whenever we wanted. We had great plans to visit our missionary friends in Eastern Europe and to see this beautiful country we’d spent 20+ years serving in the Navy.

We had so much to do and see. And while we’ve done some of it, now, six years later, it has become increasingly hard. I can no longer get on a plane without having a major panic attack. I can’t be a passenger in a car without excessive anxiety. I struggle daily with the long-term effects of the PTSD that became my new normal because of our sudden meeting. I will never be the same.

It hasn’t all been bad. After almost two years of therapy, I’ve grown in ways I didn’t know I needed. I’ve learned a lot about myself—both good and not so lovely—but mostly that at 62 I still have the ability to change for the better.

And I’ve learned that God does not forsake his children. He has walked with me every step of this path I never wanted to be on. He is as faithful as he says he is. I hope you can say the same.

I know you did not intend to cause damage that day. I did not intend to receive it. But here we are, living the consequences of one poor decision.

I hope you learned from it.