Ground Work

Let's take care of some of the basics.

I was born in 1974, my sister was young and my parents were teachers.

In 1980 we were all in a violent car accident that killed my sister, did horrible things to my father, and basically made my mother crazy.

My sister was 9 at the time, and died shortly after the accident. The gory details are just that, gory - you don't need to know about them. My father broke his neck and impaled his frontal lobe on the rear view mirror. My mother got her ear cut off, and I suffered some facial lacerations. The crazy part about the accident is that the car was full of machinery at the time of the accident. My mother was opening a branch of the family business and had just returned from picking up some of the equipment. The most dangerous item they had in the car with us that night was a 55 gallon drum of highly flammable chemical.

After the accident that barrel was leaking. My father, with his broken neck and brain injury was trapped inside the car for hours while the rescue team tried not to blow everything up.

While the rescue team was working to "rescue" my father my mother, sister , and I were all piled into an ambulance.

* Yes, I do remember some of this, it may seem unlikely to you but, there are some things in this life that you can't forget. A few of the details have been filled in over time, but as I am sure you can imagine, the events of this day were never popular conversation topics.

I have such a vivid memory of the ambulance ride, they put my mother and sister in the bank on stretchers, I was bundled in a blanket and held on the lap of one of the paramedics in the front. I remember wanting to see my mother, desperately. Screaming, crying, needing. I bit that man that was holding me, I bit him for all I was worth. I drew blood. After that I don't really remember a lot. I have never been able to forget the taste of his blood in my mouth.

The next portion of my life is basically a blur, I have bits and pieces of memories, flashes here and there, but no solid pieces of time, nothing coherent. I remember seeing my father in a halo ( the device they use to stabilize a broken neck), and saying good bye to my sister. Some friends of the family wanted me to come and stay with them for a while, but my mother refused feeling that it was important we stay together.

Years later I happened to be in the same emergency room waiting for a friend with a absolutely stupid head wound (another tale!). It was a hot summer night and while waiting a hospital employee sat down next to me on the bench in the hall. He was wearing a tank top and had a funny scar on his shoulder. As happens when you are sitting with a stranger we struck up a conversation and I eventually said something about his scar. He told me a heart wrenching story about coming to rescue a family who had been in a car accident and being bitten by a terrified little girl that wanted nothing more than her mother.

He cried and hugged me. He had never know if that little girl had made it.

It took them a couple of hours to extract my father from the car, after he finally got to the hospital he was still drunk. Its not a pleasant truth, but it is the truth.

My father was in the military, and was eligible for coverage by military insurance, but not until all of our family resources had been exhausted. Basically they would step in to take care of him, but not until we had nothing left to contribute. My family wasn't wealthy, we lived a simple life. My parents had some land and were working on building a house on it for us all to live in. My mother, who had just lost a child and had a 5 year old left to care for was faced with losing what little she had left. Sell the land and the business and go on welfare in order to care for her husband who had a broken neck and a traumatic brain injury, was in a coma, and was not expected to recover, ever.

As you can imagine she had a lawyer - we were in a bind - having a lawyer was a necessity. What I know of all of this has obviously been passed on to me. Basically her lawyer told her that if she divorced him she would be able to keep her business and land and the military would step in immediately. The only way for her to get a divorce would be to sue him. Feel the horror - lost your child, your husband is a shell, and your job is to sue and divorce him, while in a coma, so you can care for your living child. Its not a situation I would want to be in.

She sued him for being drunk (he was - so was she at the time), and was granted a divorce and a small settlement. His family was furious. All they could see was that she sued and divorced him, not the why behind it.

The relationship between her and them has always been "he said she said"... I didn't meet them until I was an adult, their version of the story is more angry than hers but as far as I can tell it all boils down to the same thing.

My father was in a coma for a really long time - years and years - after he woke he was not the same person. His body no longer worked, his brain was irreparably damaged. He lived with his mother for a time and then in a neurological rehab and eventually in a nursing home where he died when I was in my late 20s. I saw him a few times in the 26 years between the accident and his death. My mother used to take me to see him when I was young, but the doctors told her she needed to stop because it was too emotionally damaging. I saw him when I was 15, that is a story in and of itself. I saw him a couple more times in the next 10 years, it was never really a positive experience for me.

Not all of the tales I have to tell are so dramatic, many are ridiculous, some are hilarious. This however is a big part of my childhood, this is part of what made me who I am today. This blog probably won't be linear, the stories come to me often as a result of a conversation or something I see. I've had a full life - multiple parents, off shore sailing, climbing the Eiffel Tower, and much college insanity. It will be an adventure, I hope you tag along.