Driving to the store one day all of a sudden what felt like a punch in the gut came from the backseat in the form of a question from my 5 yr old daughter. She asked where in the sky is heaven and how old was her brother when he was killed. With the window cracked open a little bit she stretched up from her booster seat to yell threw the crack “I miss you Matthew!” and “please come back to us!”
These are the things that no one sees, the aftermath of a drunk driving crash. What makes things even harder is knowing what took them from you was a totally preventable crime. As the days after the crash pass one by one and it seems as though the distance between us and them gets greater every day. It feels like a bell that is rung that continues to reverberate until the sound can no longer be heard, but in this case the reverberations never go silent. I know that one day in the future that my daughter’s children will ask her about us, her parents and her aunt and uncle. She will tell them about us and then she’ll mention that she had two brothers but one died when she was one yrs old. Then the questions will come about what was his name, how old was he and what happened to him.
And I pray that the rest of the conversation goes something like this;
He was killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver.
What’s a drunk driver mom?
Back then people would go out and drink a drug called alcohol to make themselves feel good.
Then get in their cars and drive.
Why would they do that and what is drive?
A lot of different reasons, some to get away from their problems for a little while or to make themselves feel happier or relaxed, but that only lasted for a little while then the feeling went away and they were back where they started. But now very few people drink alcohol especially since people started see how bad it was for them and that it made a lot of people sick, and back then you would have to control the car to make it go where you wanted. If people were drunk people could hardly control themselves let alone a car but now cars do all the driving so the roads are a lot safer.
This I hope is what the future hold, but today we still have people drinking and driving, and with that comes the tragic and devastating aftermath of this crime.
Until the day we bring drunk driving to its end there will be little sister missing her brother. Mother and Father who wish that as they open the door to their home their children would be there to greet them, a wife who saw her husband off to work one early morning but never saw him again. And Best friends separated in death only to be reunited a year later due to the lasting effect of the crash the both suffered. But none of that matters to the guy walking out of the bar saying to those he’s leaving behind “I’m ok, anyway I’m not going far.” /\/\/\/\/\/\/\~_________
