Nine Years

Hello all,

My thoughts on the anniversary of the crash are not clear this year. My usual feelings on the matter have been sublimated by time and more immediate concerns. I didn’t even think about the anniversary approaching until a few days ago, and it didn’t come with the usual preternatural heaviness, but rather a sort of “oh, right. There’s a thing that usually happens at this time.” It’s not surprising that my annual meditations have been supplanted. Very few things that usually happen are happening this year. The surreal truth of my experiences during and after the crash somewhat pale in comparison to the global surreality in which we all find ourselves right now. The future seems a daily question and our anchors of reliability have been winnowed to the most personal. It is difficult to focus on the past when the present lacks all normality. 

My trauma surrounding the crash is a function of my flight or fight response being stoppered. My lizard brain was not given the opportunity to choose, because escape was not an option. When my human brain eased back into control, that startled instinct to flee was still lodged at the tip of my reflexes. In the first few years, it remained close to the surface, easily triggered by sudden shifts in movement or reminders of Alex. Over time, with a lot of help and effort, it was pushed further and further back, surfacing infrequently and more easily subsumed. Incidents that might have led to a week of sleepless nights eventually led to a single restless sleep, or even just a few hours of buzzing anxiety. Earlier this year we got in a minor fender bender on the highway. It was I80 on a Saturday afternoon, so we were only going about 15-20mph and only minor damage was done, but the sound of metal on metal was the same as I remembered and the impact to my body was similar, if significantly reduced. All three of us were in the car at the time. I looked immediately back to Jack. His eyes were pained and filled with tears of fear and confusion. I was not prepared for him to know that impact so early in his life. I went through the motions of collecting information and calling the insurance company from the shoulder. The whole time I was coursing with anger and adrenaline. I knew it was just an accident. The other guy simply didn’t look while merging. It wasn’t the affront of the inconvenience, it was being forced to feel this again, of putting my son in that position. I barely spoke to the man. I focused on the call, on keeping myself in control. My body was tense on the drive back home. Each time the car went over a bump, Jack would ask with a tinge of fear, “did the car get hit again?” The need to comfort and assure him somewhat diffused my own swirling response, but I was certainly less present for him than I could have been at that moment. I was able to be there for him the rest of the day, putting aside what I might like to do in favor of returning to normalcy for him. That night was rougher. Flashbacks to the crash and trouble closing my eyes. But it was just that night. Whereas in the past I may have spiraled for several days or even a week. 

I know that story because I’ve been telling it every month since at the monthly MADD speech I give. I planned to tell it here, knowing I would likely write something, as I do every year, but I don’t feel it now. It seems almost silly to bring up. There are bigger things happening to us and to my son. Almost every day we field questions about whether he can play with his friends, whether he can return to school, why he can’t. We are thinking about employment and rent and eggs and toilet paper and the uncertainty of invisible dangers and the unpredictability of weird, petty leadership and the loss of school and of a certain kind of time and the gain of a different kind of time all together. We’re focusing on providing stimulation and education and food and health. We’re thinking about masks and soap and how far away everyone is and whether people will think we’re too close and how we’d rather be so close we’re just touching everyone all the time. (And we’re certainly nowhere near as bad off as many) I’m not saying it is suddenly less important to deal with trauma or check in with myself, just that there is less time and energy to do so. Just as there was time to grieve Alex after I got through the immediate daily struggles of the hospital and rehabilitation, there will be time to think about April whenever the world re-opens to something closer to normal. Probably.

I wonder what Alex would think of all this. He was a largely rational man, but also often a skeptic. I can’t see him walking around with a mask on, but I can see him worrying about the health of his friends and family. The truth is I don’t know what he would do, because it’s been nine years since I last saw him. I knew him for a year and a half and I’ve loved him for ten. I have the luxury of loving him as he was, because he’s not here to tell me otherwise. He is a reliable anchor, because he has not had the opportunity to move.

I could say more about worsening acrophobia and driving and anti-depressants and death and connection and survival, but I’m not going to right now. This is what it is today. Tomorrow might be something else. 

I hope you are all as well as can be expected in these weird, uncertain times. I hope you have some measure of stability and are finding unexpected pockets of joy in the confines of your homes. Much can be done with cardboard and tape.

Thank you for being someone who has helped me in some way or another. If you see this posted on Facebook as well it is not because your importance is diluted, but because I have a weird thing about things being seen.

Take care, have fun, drive safe,

Love,

David

Eight Years

This is the first year since I’ve started doing this I seriously contemplated not writing at all. Possibly because my fragile facility with numbers lead me to remember the anniversary as April 11th and not the 14th. On April 8th, thinking I was only days away, I noticed how the usual heaviness had not yet creeped in. I wondered optimistically if I’d reached a new point in my evolution in which my feelings about the crash had eased away from a subconscious emotional realm and into a more purely intellectual one. Of course, that line of thinking was the crash and its anniversary and all that surrounds it seeping back in once more. Each day since then, the slowly building weight has become more and more noticeable, until today (April 12) it is almost inescapable.

What’s strange is how vague the weight appears to me even now, after eight years of experience. It does not carry with it concrete signs of why it’s there or even what it is. It’s not the memory-laden, almost wistful grief that sometime comes on the birthday of a dead relative. It’s not a nihilistic cloud of bitter anger. It’s not depression. It’s not even sadness, really. It’s not specifically about Alex or my injuries or injustice or irresponsibility. It has no form or color. It’s just heavy. It starts in the brain and flows slowly downward. My eyes droop, my skull draws in, my shoulders hunch, my chest begins to cave, my legs feel tired, my feet slap the ground gracelessly when I walk. I am not being held or dragged. I am steadily encased in a transparent but viscous something and it takes effort to move my newly-added membrane. By the time the 14th arrives I am usually pretty drained.

It’s interesting to question where the weight comes from. It’s more than the loss of a friend or the commemoration of a fucked up evening followed by many fucked up months. I know the short answer is, “trauma,” but I lack the clinical knowledge to synthesize the physiological facts into something that squares with my raw and relatively innocent immediate experience. The closest I can come to understanding it has something to do with energy and the enormity of what my and my family’s experience tapped into.

I don’t really believe in ghosts or spend much time pondering psychic phenomena, but I do believe in the idea that people leave energy behind when they die. Whether this energy can be physically measured or is just a residual feeling we carry in our minds and hearts is largely irrelevant. I think we carry with us the impact a person had in life. I also think that energy can be tied to certain locations and dates (or songs, books, movies, etc) because they were shared with that person or played a large part in your relationship.  The collective amount of psychic energy expended during the crash and the months and years that followed was like a bomb dropped on all our lives. It was a violent explosion of pain and fear and sadness and empathy and connection and vulnerability and humor and anger and tedium and perspective and heart. It encompassed family and friends across the country, complete strangers on the highway, police officers, EMTs, nurses, surgeons, interns, therapists, new acquaintances, old acquaintances, lawyers, morgues, bands, benefactors and countless others. It opened pathways both terrible and transcendent. It taught me more than I could have remotely fathomed and left me with knowledge I wish I could unlearn. The explosion left behind it a deep, wide crater. The day after the crash I was at the bottom. It probably took a few years just to scale the sides and, once out, there was still a gigantic hole in the ground. And not just a hole, but a cloud above, casting a shadow over what was to come, carrying debris and possible radiation for miles and years. Even if you walk away from the crater, even as you begin to refill the crater, the initial shape and scope is always there. The potential of that cloud is there. I think the heaviness is the physical/mental/spiritual manifestation of the burden of having been in the crater, of knowing what it took to get out and what it still looks like from the outside under the intermittent shadow of the cloud. It’s the burden of knowing what it feels like for the vehicle you’re in to lose control. It’s the burden of having heard my friend’s last breath. It’s the burden of the careening claustrophobia of the ambulance, of the chaos and tedium of the hospital, of the out of body fever dream of intravenous painkillers. It’s the burden of watching my wife and my mom watch me and wishing they could do more. It’s the burden of my roommates in the hospital and rehab facility, each dealing with their own horrible path back. It’s overdue bills and government programs. It’s the burden of coming home scarred and broken, of re-learning how to do things I’d done for decades, of being a burden to my wife and family, of trying to fall asleep and not see all that I had seen. It’s the burden of physical therapy and legal documents and courtrooms. It’s Alex’s memorial and Alex’s parents, Jeannine and Sean. It’s becoming family with Jeannie and Sean knowing the reason why we’re now so close. It’s the burden of knowing that I had not known Alex all that long before we became inextricably linked through this nonsense tragedy. It’s eight years of wondering if I could have done more that night. Eight years of wishing I had said more when Alex was alive. Eight years of wishing we could jam in that disgusting rehearsal space one more time. It’s the burden of boxes and boxes of Jeannie’s and my book, of the poems and art inside, of all the people that made it happen, of what we went through to make it. It’s the burden of being tied to people, all of which I love dearly, I never would have known as closely without Alex’s stupid death. It’s the burden of knowing Jeannie and Sean will never be without their pain. It’s the burden of being tied to the man who killed Alex. It’s understanding what Jeannine and Sean lost after Jack was born. It’s the how close Alex and I became even in a short time. It’s wanting to share things with thim. It’s knowing there is little if anything I can do to prevent something like this from happening to Jack or Nissa or anyone. It’s the burden of everything after being colored by the crash. Driving, drinking, drumming, running, walking, stretching. It’s not being able sleep if there’s a particularly realistic collision on tv, or a particularly nuanced depiction of trauma. It’s not being able to sleep if something during the day triggers thoughts of the crash, driving by an accident on the highway, hearing about a drunk driving crash, hearing a collision on the highway by our house. Sometimes I’ll be reminded of Alex’s memorial or find some relic of our friendship. Sometimes I look at Jack and see all that might happen and it’s enough to make my heart burst. Sometimes I’ll be fine. Sometimes I won’t. It’s much, much better than it’s ever been, but it’s still there right beneath the surface. I walked into a recent therapy appointment riddled with anxiety about non-crash related things. My therapist suggested we try EMDR (https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/). When she asked me to visualize the anxiety, I immediately flashed to Alex’s truck skidding and rolling down the highway, which lead into waking up in the cab, which lead to watching and hearing him buck against the seat and be still. Of course, the rest of the session was taken up by re-living the crash and that night was a hard one to find sleep. That it only lasted one night is a sign of great improvement. I did not come in wanting to talk about that and I hadn’t even been thinking about it, but it was right there at the top, waiting to spiral out. It’s the burden of knowing it will always be there in some form or another. It’s the burden of knowing every April 14th will bring with it a need to check in with myself and, likely, fight through a bit of heaviness.

I think there’s a tendency to wonder if maybe spending so much time thinking about the crash and its aftermath makes it more difficult to get past it, but I really don’t think that’s true. It’s not about getting past it. There is no other side. There is living through it, of adapting and evolving inside it. I cannot undo anything that happened and I cannot remove its residue from my mind and heart. I can learn how to live with it as a part of me, along with Alex and Jeannine and Sean and every dumbass hot shot on the highway and Joshua Blackburn who killed my friend and everyone who opened themselves up to me and how open I became in response and the terror of Jack’s stupid fragile body and the stupid fragile bodies of all my family and friends and all of it all the time forever. I can and have reduced the impact. I have moved from a place of near incapacitation to a place where maybe two or three times a year I have trouble sleeping on top of the raw, vulnerable nerve endings of the second week of April.

The crash opened me up to extreme pain, extreme confusion, and extreme empathy. That deep, wide crater appears in the distance and I walk toward it every April. The cloud that is always there turns a deeper shade of gray and my open self remembers it all. Where I’ve been, who I have been with, how far I have gone, how long we have all been connected and how many more will join as we move forward. April 14th I lie open, just as I was on the operating table, open to what must be done, to what may enter. Love and darkness and asphalt and bass strings and babies and whiskey and cavernous, shrieking metal and reaching out and holding on and letting go and knowing even though his hands were so quiet that night, he sometimes still pushes me into what comes next. We live and we continue and we do what we can to help others understand that there is no one way to feel. We must learn how to honor it all, the pain, the love, the fear, the hate, the silly, the wonder, the horror, the beauty. We must allow it all in so that we may learn how to live inside what happens and not be buried by the weight. The crater is wide and deep, but I am outside it looking down. And I am free to look up and walk away.

I don’t mean to sound self-pitying or over dramatic. Today is the day I allow myself to vent without filter, and this is how it came out this year. As always, I can’t say enough to thank you all for being who you are and being with me while I do this. I know it’s not fun to be there sometimes. Please take care, drive safe, and have fun.

Sincerely,

David

Here are two poems I wrote about openness and empathy:

HAKOMI WALK

He is at fault, of course,

but he does not become fault -

a skinless, rootless mass.

He walks and warms the bones

of other, luckier souls.

The heart hardens, constricts,

and stumbles to insist he is nothing

but a mistake.

Lost.

I remember the face of the one he doomed.

The patient eyes and the wet, horrible noise.

The piercing fire in my gut and knees.

The dawning I was not the one who died.

Alone.

In bed I tried to rid him of his life,

remove his weight and clear him

from our soil,

but his steps are burdened

and his bones are cold.

Open.

He is mine and I am his and we share roots

in drought and flood.

we know eyes and long to rid

ourselves of noises in our skin.

We walk and warm the bones

of those without.

Unclosed.

(https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/hakomi)

THE BARGAIN

I met a woman who lost her son.

Her son had been my friend.

We bonded our grief together,

knowing it was not the same.

Separate, but parallel,

we push, not knowing where.

Simply forward, hard and through

as forceful as we dare.

My son was born and now I know

something of what she lost,

swaying in the back seat

singing that he knows the names of cars.

She loves my son in near the same

way that she loves her own.

She knows what we accepted

on the day we brought him home.

“I can’t imagine.” They all say.

She says, “I think you can.”

The floor beneath your feet

is not as sturdy as it seems.

She knows what a phone call can do.

She knows how thin the tether.

She knows what color the box turns

as it rolls slowly into the fire.

And she knows how fragile fingers are,

how warm tired shoulders.

She knows the wrenching pull through black

of love’s undying smolder.

And I know too the risk involved,

the dam built just to breach.

What one allows inside

when one allows one’s soul to reach.

The darkness guaranteed is all a part

of our grand bargain.

The day you feel those fingers curl,

your heart is broken

open.st year since I’ve started doing this I seriously contemplated not writing at all. Possibly b

Seven Years

Hello all,

(NOTE: This first paragraph is a paraphrasing of last year’s intro. I thought it would be useful for those new to the list of recipients.)

It’s been seven years since the crash. Every year, starting maybe two weeks out, but really ramping up in the final week, my brain becomes weighed down with thoughts and images and reflections of and on my experience since that night. I have discovered that writing out my more complex or frenzied thoughts, be it in prose or poetry, tends to help release them. It allows me to reflect on and, in a way, distance myself from them. I am able to hold them and look at them analytically, as opposed to just being overwhelmed by largely illegible noise. That is the reason I write this letter every year. I send it to a community of people whose energy has been helpful in large and small ways over the last six years. If I simply wrote it out and saved it, it would not have the same effect. The thoughts must be seen to be released. It may seem self-important to assume anyone wants to read this stuff, but it is helpful to me. And I don’t think it is unhelpful to understand the wide-reaching and constantly changing consequences of one’s actions and one’s responses to the actions of others. Grief and trauma are foundationally human experiences and I think by living through and better understanding those experiences we better accept humanity in all its pros and cons. If you would like to not receive these letters in the future, please let me know and I will be happy to take off your name. But, thank you for reading.

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As one ages, birthdays and anniversaries become useful, largely, as markers of time. You reflect upon the past year. You add distance between the person you were and are now. You take stock of how far you’ve come, of how much you’ve endured, of what has or hasn’t happened, of how much closer you are to wherever you may be headed. Of how much you have or haven’t changed. Of how long you’ve lived. Our anniversary of the crash is no different. It has become a marker. A point to and from which we measure.

We think about how far, physically and mentally, we’ve come since that night. We remember how much, internally and externally, we’ve endured. We dwell sometimes on what did or did not happen. We take stock of what has and hasn’t changed. We realize how long we have lived without Alex.

This year, up until this week, when things traditionally get heavier, and darker regardless, my crash-ripple response has evolved into a more matter of fact, if no less deep, state of mind. Seven years on, I am still triggered relatively frequently, but it has become somewhat expected and is only rarely debilitating. Even those moments that cut more deeply tend to fade within an hour or two, as opposed to the days-long doldrums of the early days, or even the 12-24 hour funks of more recent years. Physically and mentally, injuries flare, but rarely sideline. Last month at my monthly MADD talk was the first time I thought to mention that things were getting better. “It’s taken seven years,” I said. “But things have gotten better.” Seven years.

In early March I was told by Facebook I had been using the site for seven years. The sole reason I created a Facebook account was to create a page for mine and Alex’s band, Thea, since I had been told MySpace was no longer relevant. I had intended to avoid social media entirely, but chose to fall on my promotional sword for the betterment of the group. When I explained how painfully annoying it was, Alex gave me a (only mostly) mock heartfelt, “I know that was hard for you. I appreciate it.” Then followed with the trademark honesty of, “Brian and I were not going to do it.”   

We recorded six songs with our friend Josh in late February. On March 28 I posted most of them on Facebook. The last went up on April 1st, thirteen days before the crash. Both of Thea’s two shows happened in March, after I set up the account. It’s crazy to me how condensed that all seems. The band existed for a little over a year, but most of the most significant events in its history happened over about two months.  Things were really ramping up for us.

Now I measure those events in terms of the crash. We recorded our last songs two months before the crash. Our last show was two weeks before the crash. It took about a week in the hospital, after Brian, the guitarist, came to visit, that I realized I had lost the band as well. A week after the crash.

I have all this data at my fingertips because Facebook sees fit to remind me of it in its “On This Day” feature. Every year as April nears, I start noticing more the years of my various archived posts. Anything from March - April 13 of 2011 strikes me as relatively optimistic and maybe even a bit oblivious. April 14th - early May 2011 is sparsely populated, save a few updates from Nissa sent in my name. And, everything past then, regardless of content, is viewed through a post-crash lens...

...And here is evidence of the evolution. I find myself not knowing if I need or want to keep writing this. I’m stuck feeling obligated to honor this day, but not totally feeling like my long-winded thoughts are adding to my own conversation anymore. What I can think to say hews very closely to what I wrote last year, the only real difference being one year added. How many different ways can I say I think about the crash at least once a day and that’s just life? It’s not terrible all the time. It’s not great. It just is. This is life now. We all have a few stones in our pockets and these are a few of mine.

We live right by the highway. I’ve spoken before about how loud it is and how much it bugs me since the crash, but I’ve noticed recently what bothers me most is the cars that zip past the house on the road that separates us from the highway. The speed limit is 30. I’d say in most cases 35 is fine, but it’s also a street onto which a pedestrian bridge exits with no marked crosswalk at the top of an essentially blind hill, so caution is necessary. Not to mention, our son and our neighbors’ children play on the sidewalk that lines that road. Some people go the speed limit. Some that were speeding see the kids and slow down a bit. Some barrel through at 50 mph like they’re getting one over on all those suckers that decided to stay on the highway when there’s a perfectly good shortcut along this residential street. Sometimes these people are on cell phones. Nissa and/or I are out there with the kids, usually posting guard along the curb, sometimes stepping in to the street in an effort to get the drivers to notice us. I know it would take a wildly freak accident for even the most irresponsible speeder to suddenly jump the curb and hit the kids, but every car that zips obliviously by makes my eye twitch and my fists clench and unclench rapidly. Sometimes I give them a sarcastic “take it easy” hand motion. Sometimes I just glare at them not seeing me. Sometimes I flip them off. I remain outwardly calm, but inside it is an exhausting sort of tension. The vulnerability of human being vs. speeding steel box. The racing thoughts about generally selfish behavior on roads and highways. The indignation of some people’s choices. The thought that we’re out there on the road with these people everyday. The thought that my son will be out there someday too.

On a Friday night a few months ago, I took Oscar out to the backyard to pee. Out of nowhere I hear from the highway a high whine like a motorcycle and then three enormous booms, like a canon. The sound actually moved the air around us. Oscar and I both whipped our heads towards the noise. It sounded like it was right outside the door. I raced inside to see. Nissa had heard it too, but we couldn’t see anything that made it clear it was right next to us. We heard no sirens and traffic was still moving. I was a bit rattled, but settled back into the evening relatively quickly. The next morning in bed, Nissa was reading the news and told me what had made those sounds. A mile up the road a drunk driver caused a multiple car collision that left four people dead. The driver of one car, a local college student, lost his younger brother, his father, and two in-laws, all in the car with him. The moment I heard what had happened, I realized I knew exactly what those sounds were the night before. They were the sounds I have kept in my head since the night of the crash. I had always described them as cavernous. I thought this was because that’s just how I experienced them in my head. I had never realized that’s how loud and powerful they were to the outside world. I knew at that moment that I knew exactly how that young man had felt, what he heard, what he saw, what his body now knows, the only difference being the fact that he was driving. He knows how it feels to lose control of what he had been controlling, to have controI taken from him. I knew what he went through in the moments immediately after he realized what had happened. I also knew, for the first time, what those in the immediate vicinity of my crash may have experienced. It was overwhelming and I sunk into the bed, not getting up for an hour or more. Nissa was kind enough to get Jack up and get him ready while I laid there spinning. This is all the subject of the first poem below. The incident drove home once again the cruel unpredictability of the highway and my complete inability to protect myself or my family. We were supposed to go to Best Buy that day to pick up something we had ordered. I knew I couldn’t let them go by themselves and I knew I couldn’t ride in the passenger seat. I eventually got up and drove them all, white-knuckling it all the way. I feel connected to that man’s family and to him. We are now a part of the same community. Those who know.

I come from a long line of worriers. The kind of people who think you might be dead if you’re 15 minutes late and haven’t called. I have often had the thought that I arrived uniquely conditioned into this weird and stupid situation, because I had so much practice imagining terrible things happening. It is never far from my thoughts what I might do or think should the unimaginable occur. What would I say to my employer? Would I have to book travel? What kind of lee-way does one get with bills? What in the hell would I do the next day or even the next hour? Beyond all those (what I call) normal thoughts, this week has brought some disturbingly concrete fears about my son and what could happen to him. At this moment I can’t see myself being anywhere near as put together as Jeannine was and has been. Granted, I was not with her in those first few months and I know she went through and still goes through absolute hell. I can’t even picture myself speaking, let alone moving through the horrifically mundane bureaucracy of it all. This all a terrible way of saying Nissa and I are painfully aware now of what Jeannine and Sean lost and how ungodly hard it must be. I know standing still is not an option. I know they have and are moving and building and creating new and wonderful things for those who happen upon them. I know I would get up the next day and call who needed to be called. I would fill out the paperwork and make the plans. The fact is, I don’t want to think I could, because at the moment I have the luxury of not needing to. The last few days, when I have found myself losing patience with my son’s behavior and contemplating potential responses, I have occasionally asked myself, “how would I feel about that decision at his funeral?” Had I given him all I could? Had I offered my best self as often as possible? Death comes when it comes. We are not always ready.

This is all pretty rambling and unfocused, but I think that’s a decent illustration of what it’s like now. Fragments of feeling and unexpected reminders. Piercingly real possibilities and glancing, everyday pokes. It’s the year of a Facebook post sending you momentarily sprialing. It’s hearing a friend say your son is the same age as Alex was when she first met him and unavoidably peering forward to a time we will unavoidably hand him the keys and hope he comes back while at the same time loving the fact that his hair stands on end with slide-generated static on the playground on a sunny day in March with pink-blossoming trees and the ludicrously scenic fog drifting just beyond the towering green hill. It’s casually walking up to that same friend’s art project and recognizing the silhouettes of your shared endurance like a swift punch to the part of your mind that waits for just these moments, where you’re torn between thinking about lunch and just laying in the middle of the floor to let the past seven years wash over you while you’re son clacks together the library’s Legos. It’s wanting to text Alex about a new band I’ve found and it’s remembering Jeannine and Sean are no longer in town and knowing at least one of the reasons rests on the head of one man who made a terribly stupid and selfish decision. It’s knowing that decision is not at all an uncommon one. It’s feeling the tightness in my hamstrings and remembering I didn’t do enough to dig myself out that atrophic hole. It’s looking at my wife and knowing she’s got to deal with all this shit too. It’s looking at my son and knowing he might have to someday. It’s living just like everybody else and maybe sitting down and watching Parks and Rec again if that’s what is needed. It’s the quiet, often unsatisfying zen of moving forward with a bruised, but open heart.

I don’t mean for this to make my life sound bleak. This is just a corner of my life I tend to emphasize around this time of year. I don’t know. It is what it is. It’s a heavy day, but it’s just a day. The sun shines and my son needs to scooter.

I know I’ve been at my current job for six years because I got the job just over a year after the crash. I know we’ve had our 2005 Ford Focus for 6 and a half years because we drove it back from Wisconsin in autumn after the crash. My son was born a little over four years after the crash. It will be roughly twelve more before he learns to drive. My wife and I will have been married for 24 years by then. About 19 of that will have been after the crash.

I appreciate you all reading this far if you have. I love you all and hope for you decent neighbors, manageable traffic, healthy families, and patience.

Take care, have fun, drive safe,

David

WHAT IT IS SOMETIMES

Three cannon blasts moved the air at my elbow,

pre and proceeded by climbfading look-at-me engine whine and goodbye.  

My dog’s nose jerked toward the noises

I did not recognize as mine until the next morning

news of their source.

Then began the customary sink and pull.

My spine to the bed, my mind to the brink.

Four more timelines ended. Countless more begun anew

or annotated. Now a before and an after.

Now a never more again.

I knew the sound only from the inside,

cavern metal crunch and slam, shoulders

driven back and dragging behind knees jut

quick past ankles. Unforgiving. I had long assumed

it deafening only because it lived in my head.

But the backyard we share with the upstairs neighbors

is miles from where it happened and the air around me moved.

I know now what the unsuspecting evening felt

as I spiraled, limp and nothing, down the highway.

I know what those four heard as they wondered when it would stop.

I lay, blanket-tombed, in bed, huffing back my own

carbon dioxide. My wife and son in the living room.

My wife and son without armor. Without assurances.

They we I must leave the house, must drive, must risk.

I we they are helpless outside.

I am no match for gravity. We are no match

for the unerring confidence of selfish whims.

I would have been no match for those four.

Some children. Some parents.

The highway carries us all the same.

We live by the highway. I bristle in the night at open windows.

Rain-slicked asphalt roars this morning

as I contemplate my complete inability to protect

my son from knowing tragedy.

I wonder about the son who survived and consider him a brother.

They are all my family now,

equally still in the hands of what happens,

tied together by knowledge.

We know the unique fullness of being there

and the intimate void of being told.

I have to drive to Target.

The wind will shove our fragile Kia at random,

will trip my hair-trigger memories of powerless tip,

of knowing I no longer decide.

We may very well die today on our way to pick up a new TV.

My son cannot live in fear.

I cannot protect him.

We will teach him how to drive.

I will tense on the wheel when young instincts flare.

They will drive to the funeral, and then to work.

TAKING A SHOWER

The twin-tone hum of the bathroom fan

sounds faintly of my son’s plaintive cry,

just as the highway’s constant roar

sounds of chaos

(Art below by Liebe Wetzel)