I once had some friends come to visit me from 100 miles away. This was supposed to be fun.
Instead, one of them, the one who drove, showed up and proceeded to drink 2 bottles of wine on her own, pick a fight with my other friend, and insist that she was going to drive the hundred miles home right then. Which was the start of me spending the next few hours in an escalating battle of insisting that she was not allowed to drive home and that if she got in her car I would call the police and have her arrested because I was not about to let someone leave my home drunk in the middle of the night.
The thing is, she was not welcome in my home anymore at that point. She wasn’t. Her behavior, the fact that she chose her trip to visit me as the moment she was going to pick a fight with her best friend, did not make her welcome in my home. I drink a glass or two of wine on occasion, but I have never liked drinking until I am out of control. I don’t even like to “buzzed.” And, I have never in my life had to take care of someone who was so drunk they were vomiting in their sleep. Most importantly, I have never had to physically stop someone from driving when they are drunk. That’s not the kind of life I lead and those are not the kinds of people I want in my life, because of that I never had to face the reasons that I did not let her leave my house.
Why, if she was no longer welcome in my home did I keep her from leaving and take care of her throughout the night? I guess it is the same reason that in college I always volunteered to be the designated driver. Why after just two glasses of wine when a boy I really liked invited me to spend time with him I told home no, I wasn’t in any condition to drive.
In January of 2005, just a few months before I turned 16 and a few months after I completed drivers ed, a car accident rocked the small school where I was a freshman. Coming home from a youth group event a car carrying three teenage girls was run off the road in a terrible accident. A woman in my church (I attended a different church than those girls, but we’ll get into how I knew them in a few minutes) was a bar tender on her way home from work saw the accident happen. She called her work the next day and resigned her position.
I knew all three of the girls. I played volleyball with them at Grapeview Middle School, I was part of the same girl scout troop as them, I sat by one in math class for two years, one, the driver, was the daughter of one of my teachers. Whether we were close or not doesn’t matter, I knew them, the way people in small communities always seem to know each other. Of the three girls, the driver died that night, another broke her leg in multiple places and spent the rest of the year on crutches, I don’t know if she ever played Volleyball again, the third spent months in a coma and when she woke up she did not remember anything after the summer before. Their lives were lost. For some, pieces could be recovered, but the lives they had lead to that point were gone forever.
Until my friend was trying to drive 100 miles dead drunk it never occurred to me how much I believed it was my responsibility to not let anything like that happen again. I screamed and yelled, I threw a fit and took her bag away, and refused to let someone who was no longer welcome in my home leave because I was carrying that baggage with me. I owed it to those three girls, to their families who I knew so well, to not be responsible for anything like that… ever. How could I ever stand before God knowing that I was responsible for such a thing? I believe that is why the woman from my church saw that accident and no longer wanted any part in that culture, no longer wanted the weight of that responsibility.
As much as we try to move on, to ignore pieces of our past, they are part of us. Even the parts that we never think about. I haven’t thought about the accident itself since high school, at least 12 years. It never occurred to me that was what I was doing until I was holding a friend’s purse away from her telling her that I was not going to let her get in her car and kill herself or someone else. That moment is a part of me, and I suppose it always will be.
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