This is a true story. The names are changed to keep the descendants from coming after me.
I've debated for years about the best way to write about what happened, and this is my first run at it. It probably won't be the last, or the best, iteration. But I'll try. Because this was important, and I carry a load of guilt over it even though I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was being kind, but I ended up being the purveyor of an intolerable cruelty. And the event itself ripped away the last shards of religion from my life, and left me who I am today.
I guess the best way to do this is with the unvarnished version. Names have been changed, but everything else is exactly the way it happened.
I grew up in a superficially Christian household. My dad believed that he was a Viking, and immortality was achieved through having kids, but for years he kept his mouth shut around us. My mom, up to the day when she saw a UFO, went to church and sang in the choir because it kept my grandmother off her back. Sunday school was a babysitting service while the adults were at services, but my sisters and I endured it as well as the obligatory Confirmation and all other Things Lutheran.
My parents fell away from the church as we grew up, which was fine with us. We experimented with spirituality in school (one of the few organizations that the school system sponsored was Young Life and its evangelical affiliates--heavy on fun and light on liturgy) but it was a casual relationship at best.
In college I tried on religion, flirted with Catholicism but never made the jump, and thoroughly enjoyed the intellectualism of theology. God never spoke to me. God never spoke to anyone I knew. I started early on my lifelong study of medieval literature and culture, and reasoned that the project that occupied the greatest minds of the West for 1500 years had to have something going for it.
Years of study has led me to think that all religion is at base a hope, a hope that what makes us individuals, that spark that religious people call the soul--that which makes us who we are--will survive beyond this world. It is the great paradox of being human: a temporal creature that dreams of eternity, and religion helps the mind to endure in the face of The Great Perhaps. A profound hope, and one reason I've never written about this before is the question Who am I to rip up someone else's belief if I don't have something better to replace it? I don't have anything better, which has made me wrestle with this, but since we're all adults here, here goes.
*
You hear a lot of things in a hospital chemo room, especially if you've been at it for a while. And when you're one of the regulars, you get to know a lot of people. I get treatment once a week--you can't get much more regular than that. I've be doing this for years. Early on, at the hospital where I was receiving treatment, the chemo room had a strong "we're in it together" vibe, where strangers held hands and commiserated over bad news, and you were likely to walk into a party when someone's chemo regimen had ended. We regulars knew each other well. One by one, they've fallen away, a few success stories, but most lost to the disease that stalks us. These days I'm cautious about making friends in the chemo room, because so far I'm the one who's been left to face the relatives and friends, and it's very hard to shake the feeling that I don't deserve to be here when that loved one is gone.
Anyway, I'd been at it for about five years when I got to meet Edna. I didn't much like her. She was old and big and imposing and demanding; complained frequently and from the moment she stumped her way into treatment to the day they carried her out, made sure everyone knew she didn't want to be there. Edna had a big voice to go with her bulk, and knew how to use it. I stayed away from her.
That was the summer that Emma was in the local gossip. She was pushing 70 and raising two grandchildren when she got her diagnosis.
I never heard what kind of cancer it was, but it was advanced when they found it. And Emma was one of the very many poor people who live in the shadows of every small town and major city. She had likely known for a long time that she was sick before the disease got too bad for her to hide it anymore. A local property owner gave her an apartment on the second floor of a closed business in town, so that she and the kids at least had a roof over their heads, and some of the local stores started a fund so Emma could cover her outstanding bills and fulfill her dream of taking her grandchildren to Disney World while she still could. It was said that the children, ages around 8 and 10, had been placed with Emma because their parents couldn't care for them and each wouldn't let the other have custody. There were whispers of crack addiction and other unseemly behavior, but those kinds of comments seem always to attend bitter custody battles.
Somebody kept the kids while Emma had surgery for her cancer, surgery that left her mute. She took the grandkids to Florida for a few days just before school started. The local news did a story, a sort of "make a wish made good" about how Emma and the children were coping. The granddaughter interpreted for Emma. I remember watching the broadcast; the kids were somber and poised beyond their years, but they seemed safe and comfortable in their borrowed apartment filled with donated furniture and under the care of an obviously loving grandmother who was extremely ill. The broadcast ended with an assurance that the children would be looked after, but they were fuzzy on details, and it was one of those "it's a shame" things, paused over and soon forgotten.
*
The school year started, and my son was entering middle school. Because of the way the bus route was laid out, he was picked up first in the morning and dropped off last in the evening, and getting him out on the road by 7:20 in the morning was a challenge that we met most of the time, but not always. On the mornings that the bus came early or he got out the door late, I would have to drive him to school.
It was one of those mornings, and I was not the only parent to be carting an overslept kid to school. We were lined up for the great drop-off at the door, and the morning was halfway cool, one of the first breaths of autumn and I was railing at the kid for being a slug, when everything changed.
Rending metal makes a sound that is primal, a screech that cut through a million of years of evolution, a shot to the limbic system that short circuits every thought except Oh Shit! I stopped in mid-syllable in mid-scold and checked the rear view mirror in time to catch an unforgettable half-second that my brain took a bit longer than that to tease out--a boxy white SUV coming past, sideways and fast, on the front of a speeding 18-wheeler.
By the time I realized what I was looking at, I turned around to see the 18-wheeler on its side in the median, skidding to a stop. No idea where the SUV had gone.
I hurried my son out of the car. Teachers were already coming out and shepherding the kids into the building. I pulled around to survey the accident. The trucker was already climbing out of his cab, people were running across the highway, into the median, and the SUV was at the bottom of the small ditch in the median, on its roof.
For an instant I debated. After all, I passed the Red Cross' Basic First Aid twenty years before, but at least I'd had a thimbleful of training, which was more than most people. So I pulled into a space, threw the car into park and joined the general tide of scared adults halfway across the highway.
The truck driver was walking around his rig, and saying "Oh God, oh God, oh God," until someone got an arm around him and walked him around, talking him out of his shock. Most of the onlookers were clustered in two groups around a pair of small still forms on the grass. Two kids. No one was near the SUV.
As I reached the median, a woman passed me. She had wrapped her arms around herself and, as she walked, she was shaking her head. "Don't go near that car," she told me. "That woman had her head driven into the ground."
My little resolve fled, and I stopped. Everyone had clustered around the kids, so whatever could be done for them was already being done. And the woman in the smashed car that sat on its roof was alone.
I almost turned around. The image of someone with a smashed head was something I most certainly did not want to carry around with me. But a little voice in my head insisted that, if her head had been driven into the ground she was surely dying. And no one should die alone. I made myself move toward the SUV.
The windshield was still intact, broken into cobwebs. As I circled the vehicle, to my great relief I saw that, although upside down, the driver was belted in and her head intact. I knelt down beside the driver's broken-out window, and she opened her eyes, and looked straight into mine.
Her eyes were black and bright, like a bird's. She was old, strangely serene and still. Silent.
"Be still," I told her. "Don't move. The paramedics are on their way." My voice did not sound like my own; it sounded calm and reassuring. "I know it's uncomfortable, but try not to move around."
She blinked at me, with her little bird eyes. She didn't make a sound, which was odd. "Everything's okay," I told her. "The kids are fine. Don't worry about them, they're just fine."
I had no idea how the kids were, but I suspected they weren't good. The lie came so naturally to me I didn't stop to think about it. If this frail old woman was going to die, and I felt pretty sure that was what was going to happen, I thought at least she would have the comfort of thinking that the children she had been driving--obviously to school, obviously her grandchildren--were going to be okay.
I didn't recognize her from the news, but, yes, it was Emma. At the time, I didn't put it together, her silence, her frailty, her bright black eyes blinking at me as, over and over, with my hand on her shoulder, I lied to her that her grandchildren were just fine.
It seemed like the fire department and rescue squad were taking forever to arrive. Emma started getting restless, and as she tried to shift around and I tried to keep her calm and still, other people gathered around, and the SUV itself started to move. To my left, gasoline was dripping from the underside and I eased over to avoid the gas, while I decided I would stay with her, because from the moment she opened her eyes, she had been staring at me, she seemed to trust me, and I couldn't look away.
A man, one of the school administrators I think, tapped my shoulder. "You have to get out of there. The car might roll."
"Then brace it," I snapped, and a couple of men threw their shoulders against the damaged frame, although if it went, there would be no way to stop it. "It's going to be okay, you're going to be okay," I told her.
It wasn't courage--make no mistake. I just couldn't turn away from her eyes. As the SUV started to creak and shudder, my nerve started to fail and, although I didn't want to, feeling like a coward I was ready to back out. Just then, though, a firefighter crawled into the upturned vehicle through the broken out passenger window to take over. As soon as he arrived, Emma closed her eyes and a look of resignation came over her face.
I crawled back and out of the way. Paramedics were there, and more arriving. Fire trucks and crash trucks from three towns were pulling in. The crowds around the kids had grown exponentially, and I was surprised to see the number of people around the SUV. Police had stopped traffic on the highway.
*
I found out later that the school had called all the students to the auditorium, where they pulled the shades and tried to distract them with a movie. Since they weren't supposed to know about what had happened outside, of course they all knew. I really wanted nothing more than to grab my son and hold on to him, but one look at my dirty, bloody self convinced me that, for his sake, it wasn't the best idea. I washed up and went home.
Once Emma closed her eyes, she never opened them again. In fact, she never regained consciousness and died on the way to the hospital. The grandson died at the scene. The granddaughter was airlifted to a trauma unit, where she was listed in critical condition. The last thing that Emma heard was me telling her that everything was going to be okay and her grandchildren were fine. So I gave her that peace, or so I thought.
A few days later I was due for chemo, Emma's tragic accident was a chief topic of conversation. It wasn't until then that I put it together--Emma, the cancer that left her mute, the grandmother with custody of her grandchildren and the kids' uncertain futures. "I shouldn't tell you this, but she was in hospice," one of the nurses whom I knew well confided to me. "She was on so much morphine, she had no business getting behind the wheel of a car."
That day, my heart sank when Edna, obnoxious Edna, came in and was assigned the seat next to me. As she accessed Edna's vein, my nurse-friend offered her condolences on the death of her daughter and great-grandson, and hopes that her great-granddaughter would recover, and suddenly the rest of the picture snapped into view.
For the first time, Edna was quiet and subdued. I struck up a conversation with her, and over the course of treatment I told her I had witnessed the accident and had been with Emma before she died. Edna kept looking at her hands, knotted with arthritis and age and a lifetime of hard work, and she began to talk.
"You know, my girl, she knew Jesus. But she done a terrible thing. I know she did. She loved those grandbabies--nobody in the world loved them babies like she did. Oh, her own girl went bad. Worthless and bad, you know. She didn't deserve them children, and she was ascared what would happen to those young lives if their mama got hold of them again. She tried to bring them up in the Lord. But she was scared. I know what she done. She wasn't supposed to be driving nohow. The neighbor was supposed to come and get them to school. But Emma--I know how she thought. And she knowed she didn't have much time. I know she did it on purpose. It was the onliest way to be sure them kids didn't get ruined."
She was silent for a few seconds, and then burst out in a keening wail, "Oh, my Emma, my Em, my Em! What you done! What you done!"
I ended up holding her as she rocked back and forth in my arms, and cried. Fortunately, the nurses were wise to it, and the rest of the room deserted. After a while, Edna calmed down and composed herself. "I know my poor girl ain't with Jesus," she whispered, "not after that. I'll never see her again."
All the while that Edna cried, I thought of Emma sitting at the intersection, waiting for the right circumstance, a loaded 18-wheeler come barrelling down the hill at 65 miles an hour at least, the resolve it must have taken to pull into its path. The twisted thinking that she was saving her grandchildren for God, saving them from hardship and from life itself, not trusting anyone else with what she loved best. She must have lain in the bottom of that gully upside-down, believing that at least she had succeeded and the children were already gone. And then I came bungling in and took that away by telling her the kids were fine.
It haunts me now. It still haunts me.
I confided my thoughts to a friend who is religious. Halfway through the story, she was nodding and telling me that my lie was a kindness and it gave the old lady the chance to die with a measure of relief. Then I finished, and watched a hard judgment cross my friend's face. "Serves her right," she said. "Now she'll be in torment forever."
There was no funeral for Emma, although there was one for her grandson. The granddaughter recovered in time. I heard her father took her away to Florida. When Edna died, there was no family at the funeral, but her church buried her. I heard it from one of my nurse friends. I don't go to funerals much anymore.
*
In the face of death, religion remains a hope, and at best, only a hope. We quail before the great looming awe and dismay of mortality, and certainly greater tragedies than mine have given us to ponder the ineffable and apparent injustice of a just creator. The mind and heart cling to that shred of hope that death is a gateway, or a temporary dirt nap before we all rise together and get sorted out.
I don't blame anyone for holding on to that hope. After Edna died and I failed--I still fail--to understand how and why I so easily and cruelly took the last illusion from a dying woman, no matter how twisted her mind had become, I decided that such things are best left alone. That hope is best left alone. What will happen will happen, and thinking one way or the other doesn't change anything.
So that's it. Some of us--the poor truck driver, the granddaughter, the paramedics, some of the onlookers, me--will not forget that day. As we go through life, accruing experiences, we tell ourselves we'll learn better, but that's not likely. I would make the same mistake again, given the same circumstances. If I'm going to commit a cruelty, I'd rather it be out of an excess of compassion than someone else's idea of what is or is not just.