Crash (17 page)

39

Fate

“Things happen for a reason.”

It’s a line a lot of people use to try to comfort someone who is going through a tough period. It’s a line I’ve heard many times as people try to help me to deal with Neil’s losses. Folks mean well. They take comfort in believing that events are part of a larger, more complex or holier plan. God’s plan.

But I am not a fatalist. I do not believe things happen for a reason. I just can’t. Because what possible reason could exist for a kid to be driving so drunk on a Tuesday night that he kills one person and maims another and just keeps on going? I believe in the beautiful randomness of this world. I believe in finding our own meanings along the way. I am not the kind of person who takes things for granted. I did not need this accident to show me how precious my child is. I did not need to have him almost taken from me to appreciate his sweetness and intelligence and wit.

But people who believe in this concept of fate, of unalterable predestiny, believe in it strongly. The whole concept became a tense discussion point one night in my writing group. After reading this very chapter, Lisa, a member of the group, told me a story about a friend of hers who had lost her job as a nurse at Anna Jaques Hospital.

“Things happen for a reason,” Lisa told her. Cold comfort in the unemployment line, I thought.

But a year later her friend found another nursing job at a distant hospital with a lengthy commute. One day at work she didn’t feel so well. If she were at Anna Jaques, in the town where she lived, she would have simply gone home sick. But working so far from home, she did the next best thing; she ran an EKG on herself. When she handed it to one of the staff physicians to read, he packed her into an ambulance immediately and sent her to Boston. She was having a heart attack.

“If I was at my old job, I would have just gone home and lain down. I would’ve died,” she told Lisa.

To Lisa this was proof positive of her fatalistic view of the world.

“See, Carolyn? It may be hard for you to hear right now, but things really do happen for a reason. You may not even know what the reason is, but someday you’ll see it, just like my friend.”

I shook my head. To me the events in Lisa’s story were just random occurrences. Lisa was attaching her own significance to them.

“I just can’t believe that, Lisa. I just can’t.”

Lisa sat up a little straighter and gave her shoulders a little “believe what you want” shrug. We went back to our work. Lisa and I have been writing together for fourteen years. This was the tensest exchange we’ve ever had.

I give a talk as part of the ambassador program of the Brain Injury Association of Massachusetts. The program is designed to increase awareness of the devastating effects of brain injury as well as the BIA’s many prevention programs. Having speakers who are personally familiar with brain injury puts a human face on a very large statistic. Toward the end of my speech, I speak about this concept of fate and of my not believing things happen for a reason. I talk about taking the hand we are dealt and creating our own meaning.

“That’s what I’m trying to do here today,” I told one recent audience. “Taking the nasty hand my family was dealt and doing something positive with it.”

The speech is always well received. But on this particular day, as I left the building, an older gentleman chased me out into the parking lot. He put one hand on my shoulder and leaned the other hand against the door of my car, blocking my entrance.

“Look, I know you don’t think things happen for a reason,” he told me, a weighty look in his eye. “But I gotta tell ya. They do.”

With that he gave a little nod and strode off.

Maybe I should give it a try. Look for reasons this whole thing happened. Why Trista died. Why Neil didn’t. To the accident reconstruction team, the answer was simple. Trista was short. She went under the car. Neil is tall. He was thrown over it. There might not be any more to it than that. I don’t know.

But maybe we’re saying the same thing, the fatalists and I. Lisa says things are presented to us when they need to be. Events change us, or we change to adapt to them. I have learned things about myself and my family because of it. We may be stronger and closer as a result. But I am fundamentally the same person I was before the crash, just one with a different life experience. All that makes me a humanist, not a believer in fate.

40

The Offender

For all my family has been through, I still cannot say that I hate the drunk driver.

I don’t wish him harm. I don’t spend my every waking moment fantasizing about his demise. I feel sorry for him. Not in the same way you feel sorry for an orphan, say, or a lost puppy, but sorry in a pathetic kind of way. Sorry that no one cared. No one in the juvenile justice system cared enough about this kid to permanently take away his license after the first time he ran somebody down. No one in his family cared enough to get him the help he needed for his drinking problem. Maybe no one even noticed that he had one. I feel sorry in a regretful kind of way; that maybe if someone had cared enough to intervene, he wouldn’t have been drinking that night—or at the very least not on the road.

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.