FBW: Twenty Years Later by Charlotte

Please welcome back each of our calendar bloggers as they join us for another week as the featured blogger of the week (FBW). This time they are sharing stories of survival and photos of the strong women in their lives. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

Twenty years later

It’s a story I don’t often tell. While it’s perhaps strange to put it on the world wide web for all to read, with an anniversary just around the corner, it just seemed appropriate to write it out once and for all. To share a secret many of my closest friends don’t even know; to purge and let go of a day that forever changed the way I approached life.

It was August 13, 1991, and I was in Germany visiting relatives and friends that summer. At 12, I was awkward, uncomfortable, shy, and bookish. From my unmanageable curls to my oversized glasses, I had clearly not yet settled into my own pale skin. But none of that mattered here, which was why I loved spending my summers in Europe.

It was a warm day not unlike any other that season. After a beautiful afternoon spent walking through Carlstadt, my mother’s longtime friend Gisella unlocked the doors to her car and we all jumped in: my mother kept Gisella company in the passenger’s seat and my brother, Gisella’s son, and I piled in to the back. Gisella had just tried on shoes at a local shoe store. If they had only fit, things may have ended differently.

The details of that day in August are foggy. There was laughter. The sound of two women reuniting after too many years and too much distance apart. The silly antics of three hyperactive children in the backseat. And then a swerve. A startling jolt. The deafening noise of glass breaking. Frantic screaming and the bright lights of an ambulance.

I was later told that a car wanted to pass another on the very narrow and windy road we were driving on but failed to see us ahead. Not left with much of a choice, Gisella headed straight into an embankment instead of driving over a cliff, sparing all of our lives that day. She was killed instantly.

I lost my glasses in the accident, which I think was a blessing in disguise all these years later. I couldn’t see Gisella pinned to the steering wheel or the passenger from the other car who had landed not far from us. Many hours later after I came to in a clinical white hospital room my mother sobbed and told me how she had tried everything to save her best friend’s life. She said there had been another life lost that day: a young man who wasn’t wearing his seat belt.

I pulled shards of glass from my hair and listened to the soft crunch they made under my weight on the hospital bed. I asked for my brother and Ralph, afraid of what she hadn’t yet told me. They would be okay she said, looking wistfully out the window, tears springing from her vacant eyes. My brother suffered from internal injuries and Ralph, who had been sitting in the middle, had broken several of his fingers when he braced for the impact. I left relatively unscathed, save for a grapefruit sized rainbow patch on my forearm.

Four years later, I found myself fearful of the license to freedom my friends couldn’t wait to hold. When I passed the driving test, I drove with caution. I was never a fan of taking the wheel and now that I’ve sold my dusty clunker, I have to admit I’m a bit relieved. I prefer to walk and take public transportation wherever I go. I guess some scars do transcend the test of time.

But the most valuable lesson is one I’ll cherish forever; the only good to come from a day that forever haunts my memory. I’ve learned never to take anything in life for granted.

Because all it takes is one swerve to change everything.

Charlotte blogs at My Pixie Blog, can be found on Facebook and chatting on Twitter @MyPixieBlog