We are not quite up to the double yellow line yet, and cars are zooming past us, making that westbound turn off Central Park West. The weather sucks; everybody's in a hurry. I can see the rest of the kindergarten class, the teachers, the other moms who are chaperoning the field trip, waiting for us on the sidewalk.
Then it happens. A furious gust of wind rips my two-dollar umbrella out of my hand, and I automatically drop my child's hand to make a grab as it flies ahead of us. All this happens in under a second. In that same second, I realize I have lost something far more important than my umbrella - I've lost hold of my six year old son.
I panic. I try to grab my child, but his hand isn't where it's supposed to be. In my terror, my left hand loosens its grasp on the other boy - the boy I am responsible for, the child of two other parents, the child I am supposed to get safely to the marionette show.
I am looking wildly left and right, trying to seize both children at once. The other parents and the teachers on the sidewalk are screaming. Is it the screaming that alerts the drivers, slows the cars down long enough for save us? I don't know. I will never know. All I know is that somehow, I've grabbed those two little hands, and somehow we are all on safely the sidewalk.
I do not remember anything about the puppet show. I only remember sitting in my seat, completely limp, thinking over and over again:
My life almost changed forever today.
I thought I had understood how lucky I was that no one was killed that day. I thought I'd grasped what it would have been like, trying to explain to that other child's family that a moment of bad judgment on my part had cost them the life of their son. Trying to explain to my own family that, in that instant, I chose saving a two dollar umbrella over protecting the life of my child. Trying not to blame myself, each and every day for the rest of my life, for the deaths of two children for whom I had assumed responsibility. I was wrong.
It is February 2013. My husband (my son's stepfather) and I are sitting numbly at a meeting of bereaved parents. It has been a little more than three months since his daughter, who was my stepdaughter, died at the age of 23. No - not a traffic fatality. But now I know in my gut what it means to lose a child.
A new family comes into the meeting. I hate it when a new family comes in. It means that now someone else is going through that specialized agony reserved only for parents of a child who has died. You can always tell in our support group when parent have just lost their child. They have that look you've felt on your own face, right after you heard the news. Completely shattered. Can't even speak. Scorched earth. Broken, beaten down beyond all possible hope of repair.
These people are brave. They manage to choke out what happened to their daughter. Ella was 23 years old, same age as our girl. Hit by a bus at the most notorious intersection in Bushwick - an intersection that has been the subject of traffic safety studies for literally decades, because so many pedestrians have been struck by cars there, most of them just injured - just! - others, killed. Their daughter? Beautiful. Gifted. Recently graduated from college. A dancer. Setting her sights on grad school. Bright, bright future. Not now. Not ever again.
We become friends. Bereaved parents share an unusual bond. The bond of suffering that is never going away. The bond of getting up every day wondering what it is we're getting up for. The bond of thinking it's nothing out of the ordinary to feel like your own death is looking pretty good - a consummation devoutly to be wished. But - there are those other people who love you in your life, and you don't want them to feel the way you feel every single day. You wouldn't wish this kind of hell on anybody. There's just nobody in the world you could hate enough, to wish this sort of thing on them, too.
Months roll past. We keep breathing. We go to work. We cook food and eat it, even when we have no appetite. They do the same.
In the fall, another family comes in. This time, the dead girl, Renee, is only 16. Only 16, but she was working to save up for college. Not yet out of her junior year of high school, she was a superstar scholar, already being recruited by Howard University and a slew of other colleges; all the signs were that she was on her way to becoming a writer of note. Bright, bright future. Not now. Not ever again. Her life was crushed out by a semi coming off the 59th Street Bridge exit up Third Avenue. It is common knowledge, we learn, that accidents happen here all the time, because traffic is heavy and the trucks are in a hurry. Her father tells my husband that the paramedics who tried to save his daughter told him that her last word was "Daddy."
Since then, it's gotten worse. Allison - a three year old girl in Queens, crossing the street holding her grandmother's hand. They had the light. Sammy - a twelve year old boy Brooklyn boy, hit by a speeding van on Prospect Park West. A hideous ten day period in my own Upper West Side neighborhood in which Alexander Shear, a 73 year old man, killed by a bus on 96th Street and Broadway - and, less than two hours later Cooper, a 9 year old boy crossing West End Avenue at 97th Street, killed by a taxi that failed to yield while making a left turn. Cooper was hand-in-hand with his father, and they had the light. A few days later, it's Samantha, a first-year anesthesiology resident at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, who tried to cross West 96th Street in front of her own building. The ambulance that hit her with its rearview mirror stayed at the scene, as did the Dodge Charger that also struck her. Neither driver was charged.
February 23, 2014. Today. I buy an extra-thick marker and some posterboard, make up my sign - a list of names - and take the subway to City Hall. A new group has been formed in support of the mayor's Vision Zero campaign to eliminate traffic fatalities in New York City. The group is called Families for Safe Streets. Ella's parents are speaking. So are Sammy's mother and father. Allison's parents are there to speak on her behalf. Renee is being represented by her big brother. Her mother and father have spoken at other press conferences to urge for legislation that would reduce speed limits, install speed bumps, provide better visibility at intersections, and, above all, enforce greater accountability on the part of the drivers. But today they are exhausted. They didn't sleep last night. This is nothing new; I understand that completely. When your child is dead, you lie awake at night. You lie there wondering what would have happened if only your child had gotten that nanosecond's grace, luck, whatever it would have been, that would have left them shaken, but alive. You're wondering why that didn't happen. You're wondering why there are no second chances. And it leaves you unable to get up and act like all the other people, the normal people, the people who don't have a dead child to think about at night. And so it's up to Renee's brother to ask that unanswerable question - Why did my sister and all these others have to give up the rest of their lives, so that some driver could get wherever he was going a little faster?
I stand on the steps of City Hall, holding up my sign, surrounded by hundreds of others holding up signs calling for reduced speed limits that read TWENTY IS PLENTY. There was a time I would have said, "Twenty miles per hour is plenty? Are you kidding me? This is New York - we've got to get there!"
I would not say that now.
Do you think, because no one in your immediate circle has died in a traffic-related accident, that this is not your issue?
Ella. Renee. Allison. Sammy. Alexander. Cooper. Samantha. And this is not even a complete list of all the people who died because they were struck by a vehicle in New York City in just the last 12 months. Not one of those who died, not one of their families, had any reason to think, on the day of their death, that New York City pedestrian safety was ever going to be their issue. Any more than I was thinking about it, the day I was rushing through a downpour to get to the puppet show.
Now, I ask again. Do you still think that this is not your issue?
Do you, or the people you love, ever cross the street?
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