Recently driving down a long, rural road, the sameness of the route jogged my memory to those young people who crashed and died on that Thanksgiving holiday so long ago. The accident had made it impossible for a while to commemorate that holiday, be thankful for anything.
For a few years after the crash I religiously remembered every Thanksgiving with terror. I refused to drive anywhere to celebrate. Part of it was sorrow, part of it fearful superstition. This made my first wife’s family unhappy and maybe contributed to the demise of our marriage.
Then that scene faded—death can fade, does fade, must fade and I remembered that holiday event less and less until finally Thanksgiving no longer conjured the understanding that I should not be on this earth, should not be happily retired, should not be able to drive anywhere any Thanksgiving, should not have grandchildren, should not be discussing burial plans with my second wife, should not myself be able to be thankful for anyone or anything.
I attended a small Midwestern college when a group from a large city in a nearby state decided to carpool to join our families for the holiday as we had done the year before and as most—not I—would do the next year.
Two cars were going and as we walked across that tiny campus to the parking lot to leave, I knew in advance which car I was riding in and who the driver was because I had talked to him in advance and arranged it. It didn’t much matter I thought because we were all going to the same suburban area south of the big city.
Maybe one hundred yards from the cars, my roommate saved my life and ended his. I will call him Rob.
“Vince, you’re riding in Karl’s car?” Rob asked even though he knew that already. “Can I switch with you? Sherry is in that car and I’m kind of sweet on her.”
I quickly joked that I didn’t have any foreseeable love life. A shrug—“sure”—and I am still walking on this earth, driving on this earth, and Rob is not. Or Sherry, or Glenn, or Kaci, the Homecoming Queen, or Karl, the driver, who was committed for a while after the accident and died early.
My roommate Rob has a backstory; he had stolen money from me. We didn’t get along; we didn’t like each other. Although unspoken, we already knew we would not be roommates at semester. School was easy for me. It was hard for Rob. He almost flunked out his second semester. Spanish almost killed him. I played around much more and got decent grades. Some jealousy, even bitterness arose.
Some people are also judged better looking. Rob was a dreamboat to the girls. I was a skinny guy afraid to ask out a shadow. I managed to ask a girl to the Spring Dance our freshman year. She said yes, then lied a bit later and told me she had forgotten that Rob had already asked her out. It was a weak lie. Rob knew I had asked her out and “snaked” her from me which was the term back then for cutting in on someone. That hurt.
I could have been spiteful. I knew he was still dating that same girl from that dance. But here he was,”sweet” on another girl, the classic lady’s man. I could have said no to Rob’s request to switch cars, get back at him for being a jerk. But it never entered my mind. That would make this more dramatic, as if it needed to be. I just said yes and didn’t think about it then. But I would think about that yes for years. Just desserts? I don’t think it works that way. Lived too long to believe that. Life just happens.
The two cars took off merrily down Highway 80, headed for home with our families and a joyous Thanksgiving. But first, for Karl’s car, the one I wasn’t in, was Gunther, a German exchange student with suitcases too large to fit into that car when they stopped to pick him up. Gunther could fit but not his luggage so they left him waving sadly by the road. Gunther and I had a few beers after the accident discussing why that wave was as sad and as glad for him as I was about granting Rob’s request. Gunther, head down in the bar, shaking his head to dispel the idea that the stopping for him caused the accident, knew that it did and it didn’t. Probably Gunther is still alive somewhere out there. Maybe not. But I’m fairly sure he lived many more years than those who would have gladly transported him. It made a difference that the car stopped. It would have made a difference if his suitcases were not so large.
Our two cars did not stay together. We did not see them stop for Gunther. Karl’s Ford Fairlane had whizzed ahead. We only caught up when their car had been crushed by a gigantic car van. Later we learned they had suddenly come over a hill and almost ran into the back of a flag-less tractor plodding down the road in that farm country. Karl swerved to miss it, then pulled the car back, but the power steering (he later told us in his pain) carried him into the path of the van. He was thrown clear and lived to drown in his guilt. (We all knew what he could not accept. That any of us would have done the same thing. It was the tractor that caused the wreck. As far as we know, that farmer just kept going toward his field. No one noticed him at the scene. But he might have been there. We only saw the abundant signs of death like the desiccated autumn gleanings in the nearby fields.)
Everyone else in Karl’s vehicle was crushed.
Moving down that road, in our car, we were singing another folk song—a French WW I song—Hello Amiens—one of a succession of folk songs we happily warbled when our driver, a music major, taught them to us. The car was joy and hilarity on one side of the hill. On the other side were the flashing lights of several ambulances and cars lining both sides of the road. Many other cars traveling on that lone highway taking us across the state had come over that hill and been shocked into stopping. It was instantly clear that something terrible had happened although at first we did not know what. We just pulled the car beside the road and leapt out. Within seconds, over by a smashed corn field fence was Karl’s car, as you would recognize someone you really knew well even though his face had been beaten to a pulp. Our hope was skeletal at best, quickly shattering into horror.
Within a few minutes we knew—everyone except Karl, who was surrounded by others and in a complete state of shock—had been mangled.
My own grief was ratcheted up almost as soon as I crossed the road to the side the wrecks were on. The dinosaur-like car van was still heaving to my left, having shattered a huge section of fence. To my right were the ambulances, in the center the bludgeoned car. Immediately, a stretcher went right by me, carrying my roommate who looked like he was sleeping. There were no marks on Rob at all. I looked into the eyes of the man who held the front of the stretcher. The sun had gone behind a cloud and yet his eyes shown as blue as I have ever seen, an uncanny blue as if a light shone behind them.
“How is he?,” was all I managed to get out.
“Oh, him?’” he slowed a tad and looked back at Rob,”He’s dead. Snapped his neck,” he reported as if he was telling me about the weather and he moved past us to the open doors of an ambulance.
I do not remember another detail from that scene. Later I found out that all the others had been smashed badly including Sherry and that one boy had to be cut out of the car with a blow torch. Also, the Homecoming Queen was raced to the rural hospital where she died the next day, never coming out of her coma. Over and over people said without actually knowing: They died instantly. None of them knew what hit them.
There were no more songs in the black roadster on the way to the city, still a long way from the accident. Some intermittent and halting words expressed our amazement that this even happened. The most common sentiment was that we could not believe it. It is easy to sound hollow when there is no way of comprehending something you never conceived. Particularly when you are young. Death does a good job of hiding, except on rare occasions, and is more of a horrendous surprise when the victims are young.
We drove a long way. Then finally bathroom needs overcame the worst emotions and we stopped at a roadside oasis. I made a mistake, something I would have talked and laughed about later, but there was no laughter now. I went into the wrong bathroom. A woman at the sink screamed. I merely mumbled an apology and stumbled to the men’s room.
At home, my Father gave me a big slug of whiskey which I hated as it burned a throat that had barely touched the stuff. But I do remember, it did make me feel like a man and I wanted to feel like someone responsible, someone who could step into this tragedy. But the reality for me and all the others, a reality that lasted for days, months, years, only becoming an echo which could be heard for a long time, the internal voice in our collective heads: Why him?Why her? Why not me? What did they do to deserve this? Should young people ever die? And, particularly for me, the most haunting: Why did I switch cars? Is there any meaning in this for me? Is it fate? Was it God, a God I was having a youthful, philosophical dialog with at the time, as so many college students do, their childhood faith faltering under the onslaught of academic reason? Is it fair? Is there any justice in the universe?
Before I tell you the conclusions I came to back then, the denouement of my faith and worldly philosophy, hammered out over “green” beer in a small town bar with my fellow philosophers of suds and opinions, I want us to go to the funeral, one of the worst experiences I have ever had.
The funeral was ghastly. The tragedy of young death, which is always unacceptable and about which you can never say—He had a good life— was multiplied by the fact that Rob’s father had had a severe stroke in his early forties and was wheelchair-bound and mentally reduced. When I came into the church, suffused with guilt—it was almost impossible to dismiss the thoughts of feeling incredibly glad you were alive, pinching myself fortunate that I had switched cars, and incredibly guilty because of the same. I was an emotional mess and dreaded seeing Rob’s parents. They may have known that we did not get along and certainly would have equivocal feelings about a surviving roommate although I will never know if they knew about the car switch.
The mom, reduced to a female version of Job, was pushing the dad in a wheel chair and I was in their direct line as I entered. Rob’s dad spied me immediately and wheeled away from the startled mom and rolled across the floor right up to me and embraced and hugged me as hard as anyone ever had. He refused to let go even when his wife caught up and tried to pry him loose. And throughout the entire incident he was keening: “Oh, Vince, you knew Robbie, you knew Robbie, oh, oh. He was such a good boy. You knew Robbie. Why did this have to happen!” over and over and over.
I don’t remember that scene ending, but of course it did and left any ability I had to control my emotions in tatters. I stumbled into the sanctuary. They sat the family on the left side in the first row and us students on the right side front row. I cannot remember a word of the sermon. I guess the words were the standard comfort about the Resurrection and, in this case, a lament about the mystery of life that would take those so young with the assurance that Rob was with Jesus. But what I do remember is Rob’s father punctuating the sermon with loud sobs and cries of remorse and pleas for Rob’s return, something a man who had not experienced a stroke would never have done to that degree. It was so pronounced that the preacher had to pause several times. All of this undid me and I wept loudly, as many of the other young people did, and, in my case, my nose began to fill and I had no handkerchief so the snot poured out. It got so bad that I had to use the lapel of my sports coat to repeatedly staunch it, leaving an ugly, noticeable, embarrassing stain that I could not hide as I exited the service.
Thanksgiving was over as if it had never happened. The accident caused a pall at every table where the young people were still alive and I’ll never know if some of those families even celebrated that year. But it was over and we returned to the campus and the first thing I had to do was walk back into that room to see what Rob had left behind. I am not sure why, but it was left to the roommates to pack up the dead students’ things and get them back to the families. I don’t remember if I actually shipped it as I had no car, but I remember getting boxes and packing his stuff up as best I could and taking it out of the room at some time. I stayed alone in that room for the semester, then moved in with a friend for the second semester. I don’t remember if they gave me the option of leaving that room, but I know I finished that term still there.
The small campus, which was abuzz with the event, certainly the biggest happening in all of our time there, involved me in the strange phenomenon of being a kind of “hero,” answering scads of questions, giving details over and over, continuing to respond and all the time recalling that I did not have a good relationship with Rob. But repeatedly I said what a good guy he was, good roommate, good student, how tragic it was, how fortunate and guilty I was because that was what was expected and, a fairly articulate student, I played that role as well as one could, maybe partly because I wanted it to be that way.
But besides the choking up I felt when I first went back into our dorm room and saw his stuff, the only time it really got to me after my return to campus was when I went to the only class we had together—Geology—where our assigned seats had us just across the aisle from each other. Looking at that empty seat was truthfully a hard moment.
How do I assess it now, looking back? How did it influence me? The final denouement of this experience destroyed whatever faith I had back then and that was played out in a local bar with two of my college friends, the kind you drink beer with and pontificate on everything from your lack of success with the opposite sex, the current status of your education, the worlds of sports and literature and the inevitable examination of a God who would let this tragedy happen, with a bit of why me? or, in this case, why not me? mixed in.
The more we drank, the deeper the conversation and the more it drifted toward theology. At one of these encounters, I read a letter to my companions dismissing God from my life for the reasons that most people do. If you are good God, why did you let this happen and, especially, in Rob’s case, why did it happen to a family already crushed by the father’s terrible stroke as well as the death of an only child? I thought it was an articulate letter, but my guess is that it was as sophomoric as my actual year in school, but I had the huzzahs and back slapping and confirmation of my compatriots as we downed pitchers of “green” beer, which was all that that rural state was allowed to sell back then, until we got literally too drunk and finished the discourse, in my case, with the tavern toilet bowl. Any youthful faith I had was flushed away.
After retirement, I went to our 50th Reunion and had the fires of the accident stoked and, as older people sometimes do, reflected back on that scene and reviewed all the emotions—the fate of switching cars—through the alembic of my age and experience. I even ran into one of the bar buddies who had been with me when I read my letter to God, an epistle I didn’t keep. The other friend, with whom I had completely lost touch after college as often happens even sometimes to the best of friends, died of cancer a few years back.
Jeff, the still living bar friend and I, during one of the visiting times that wise Reunion planners always build in, intentionally went to that same bar in that same small town. It didn’t have the same name as before—The Library then, Fuzzy’s now. But it was still there sans the “green”beer. No pitchers this time; we just nursed a draft apiece. We caught up a bit about what had happened in our lives, and remembered together another scary incident when I was driving a car back in the early morning from an all-night diner in that same town. I fell asleep at the wheel and, Jeff recalled, Rob grabbed the steering wheel just in time to prevent us from becoming breakfast for a semi. We both shuddered and I remarked on how close I came to being hit by two separate behemoths, surviving both for no reason I could ever fathom. And I realized that this same Rob, who was mostly a negative person in my life, had actually saved my life twice. A strange kind of Thanksgiving—50 years later.