We Remember, Inc.

"It’s"

On November 1, 1996, my brother’s wife and two daughters were involved in a head on collision with a drunk driver. The collision started a chain reaction that ultimately involved three other vehicles.
Now, I’d watched television commercials that flashed photos of children lost to this type of senseless violence, and they had an effect. I rarely would drink and drive. Whenever I did drink it was never to excess. I always volunteered to be the designated driver. I sat smug in the knowledge that I understood. I had become part of the solution.
I was wrong.
I didn’t know a thing.
It’s so much more.
It’s late night phone calls that rob you of sleep. First the accident. Hours later you learn a seventeen year old, who had graduated high school a year early to attend collage, who called you her favorite uncle, died on impact. Later still you here a ten year old, who the night before was trick or treating, has died in her father’s arms.
It’s crying so hard that you wake your neighbors.
It’s having to wake your wife and daughter at five a.m. because you have a hundred and twenty miles to drive and no time to waste.
It’s standing in a kitchen, you’ve always associated with warmth and good times, as a father tells his sons (fourteen and fifteen) both their sisters are dead, Mom’s in critical condition at Shock Trauma, and we just don’t know yet.
It’s struggling to answer questions there are no answers for.
It’s a father with no time to console, because there are arrangements to make.
It’s watching in amazement, hours later, as those same young men console grieving adults.
It’s a phone that never stops ringing.
It’s having to hear that horrible story repeated again, and again, and again.
It’s not being able to look at family portraits or go into the girl’s bedrooms.

It’s Halloween candy that will never be eaten.
It’s people to feed.
It’s deciding who stays with the kids, who answers the phone, and who goes with Dad.
It’s finding out there’s no such thing as being all cried out.
It’s putting your life on hold.
It’s a Mother in a comma, who doesn’t know yet.
It’s reporters.
It’s going to an elementary school for personal effects and finding the halls filled with tearful students.
It’s being grateful for Crisis Intervention Teams.
It’s the thousand yard stare.
It’s wondering why the rest of the world hasn’t stopped.
It’s choosing a gravesite, and picking out coffins.
a Church that comes to the aid of one of their own.
It’s the Shock Trauma Unit. Where heroic people, go to extraordinary lengths, in an effort to mend mangled bodies and shattered lives. Where others locked in similar battles, lose their fight, and you feel guilty.
It’s the kindness of strangers, and the strength of friends.
It’s a year’s worth of hugs in a single day, all for the wrong reason.
It’s a funeral procession three and a half miles long.
It’s realizing that this will never end.
Only change.

Corbin E. Waldron

Drunk Drivers Steal Our Future.

For more information:
We Remember, Inc.
P.O. Box 10126
Brooksville, FL 34603-0126 US
1-888-588-4525