But what happens when the last memory you have is of blood and smashed windows? –
I got the news of my cousin’s death early on a Friday morning on my way to work. At first, I refused to believe the words that were coming out of my mother’s mouth.
Accident, he was drunk, he did not see her, she died on the scene, they had to use jaws of life to get her out of the wreckage.
All these words rushed through my head like hot lava, but still I felt numb.
By the time I got to work I was a mess. Messages and calls started flowing in to confirm the worst.
How could this happen to us?
My grief was evident in a river of tears that had everyone in the office worried. My editor advised me to go home but I was too scared to face the reality.
How could I go back and be okay?How would I look at my aunt who had just lost her husband a few years back, and now had to bury her daughter?
Until that Friday the prospect of drinking and driving was always an issue I brushed aside, I always thought of it as a distant thing and a crime that is not as bad as they make it out to be.
Until it was my cousin who had died because a drunk person did not see her, I always thought it could never happen to me.
Think of how many times you have gone out for a jol with friends and had one too many.
It’s always a debate at first between you and friends about whether or not you are fit to drive, but ultimately you win the argument with the famous ‘guys, relax, I’ll be fine’.
Very often we miss those small details in our actions, fun seems like it will last forever and nothing can possibly go wrong in our lives.
We live for the moment and are so consumed with what is happening in our lives at that moment in time, that we fail to think about what could happen two hours later.
Our actions lead us to the situations we find ourselves in, things don’t just happen – it’s actions that propel the turn of events.
I am just as guilty for allowing friends to drive me home when they had been drinking, or having that one cocktail at an event when I know I will be driving back home.
The truth is, no one who is driving should be having a drink.
The man who plunged his car into my cousin did not wake up that morning and plan to hit her. He did not have that drink with the intention of colliding into a young mother in an accident that would kill her on the spot.
I don’t know what was going through his head that day, or what could have pushed him to drink so much that he could not see her as she indicated to turn.
But I do know this, when you make a choice to drink and drive you make the choice to open yourself up to the worst kinds of scenarios.
He may not have know what would happen that day, but his choice to drink and drive opened him up to a world of possibilities.
The man who my family has come to resent and blame could be someone’s father, he could be a loving husband who had a bad day at work.
He could have talked himself into slowing down but only realised once he had hit her that it was too late.
We will never know what she was thinking when the car hit her, if she saw him or if there was a sign from God that she was about to die.
We will never know the shock that must have drowned both of them as both their lives changed forever in the blink of an eye.
Two families lost a loved one that day, we lost a sister, mother and daughter and they lost a father, brother and son who may have to spend many years in prison.
In our grief, we may have said hurtful things and wished it was him rather than her, but in the end no matter how much we cry, she will not come back to us.
Although we wish justice can be served, deep down inside we wish he had never had that drink to start with.
