by Aimee Ross
Sure, I understood the point, and yes, I believed in it. Early in my teaching career, I had even advised the LHS chapter of SADD—Students against Destructive Decisions (Students against Drunk Driving back then)—and had students sign the Prom Promise for an alcohol-free evening.
But the trauma of our own crash, very real and not even ten months old, was all too fresh. So I opened my classroom as a place of refuge for the girls who were with me that night. We didn’t need to re-experience it.
The noise of the helicopter moved closer and grew louder while we questioned and vented—Whose idea was this mock crash? How could they do it so soon?—but eventually our discussion turned to normal “girl talk” and gossip.
I wondered what kind of impact this mock crash was having on the rest of its audience. Yes, it was probably a short-term deterrent—I mean, how could it not be?—but at the same time, as I had just witnessed with these girls, teenagers were teenagers. Indestructible and immortal. Unbreakable. And kids forget.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among teenagers aged sixteen to nineteen, and the likelihood doubles when teens drive while under the influence. After alcohol, marijuana is the drug most often found in the blood of drivers involved in crashes, and in fact, drivers with THC in their blood are roughly twice as likely to be responsible for a deadly crash or killed than drivers who hadn’t used. Recent statistics showed that in the past two weeks, one in eight high school seniors drove after marijuana use, and sixty-five percent of them were more likely to get into a car crash than those who didn’t smoke.
But educational efforts like this mock crash usually focused only on drinking and driving. I just didn’t understand.
We had become a part of the statistics. And so had Zach Ryder.
The truth was sobering.
One Year after the Accident
We think you should see a psychologist, Aimee.
The attorney’s-office suggestion came at just the right time, and I realized my brother had connected me with caring people who could play more than one role in my life following the accident. I knew I should see a psychologist, too.
Just when my life was starting to get back on track again, five months after heartbreak, I had moved back to Loudonville, the relationships with my children were repairing, and…wham!
Yes, I survived the accident, but I was angry. I lost my smile. I lost my spleen. I lost myself. Other people made decisions for me, nursed me, paid my bills, killed my houseplants. The start of an independent, healthy life was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Returning to my classroom seemed to be helping, but I had a strange new body and no self-confidence. I also couldn’t forgive someone who had lost his own life.
Thankfully, my brother had connected me with an attorney friend of his to take care of financial details while I was still in the hospital. He specialized in personal injury awards, and his office was working toward a settlement with the other driver’s insurance agency on my behalf. My medical bills from the night of the accident and the following month’s stay were nothing short of astronomical.
It will help your settlement case if you’re taking the steps necessary to get better, and we know what you’ve been through has been difficult.
I was still taking the Prozac my gynecologist had prescribed all those years ago for Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, and it did take the edge off my assortment of emotions, but still.
Guilt. Anger. Extreme sadness. Self-pity. Poor self-image. And the never-ending anxiety.
The list was adding up, and when I took a hard look at my overall state, I knew I wasn’t well. I knew these feelings were dangerous. Nervous-breakdown dangerous.
“Sometimes I just want to crawl into a hole, curl up into a ball, and die. But why?” I had written in my journal.
Like Alice, in a strange place she didn’t understand, I shrank by the day, my only refuge Jerr, Nat, and Connor. And with them came more feelings of guilt. Not that they intended that, of course, but the feelings were there nonetheless.
It had been more than a year since I left my home (thus them, as well, or at least it felt like it), and I had still not gotten over this change, even though I saw them every day. I still had yet to grieve the end of my marriage. A heart attack followed by a car accident had decided for me that there simply wasn’t time or energy for dealing with the fallout from my divorce. Instead, the circumstances dictated that I’d had to focus on survival.
A year after the accident, layer after layer of trauma had left me with wreckage I couldn’t sift through. So many questions plagued my mind.
I wondered if I’d had a mid-life crisis. I wondered if I had been punished for ending my marriage. And still I could not find it in me to forgive the young man who’d done this to me. If I couldn’t forgive him, how would my children ever be able to forgive me? How would I ever be able to forgive myself?
It was a vicious circle cycling toward infinity, this vortex carrying everything that hurt me. Painful memories, uprooted from their chronological sequence, flew around the storm’s eye, flashing and howling at me ferociously, always sucking me toward the center. And when the storm wasn’t raging, I felt hollow.
My spirit, crushed between major life-changing moments, had shattered into countless irretrievable pieces, spread across too much landscape to map.
I didn’t know how to put myself back together without help.
Yes, I needed to see a psychologist.
• • •
Psychologist Number One: Interviews and inventories.
Why do you think you are here, Aimee?
Tell me about your father. What were you like as a child? How was it growing up with your mother? Did you ever experience any abuse—physical or sexual?
Do you drink alcohol? How much and how often? Has anyone ever expressed concern for your drinking?
Do you feel as if there’s no point to your life? Do you ever relive the accident? Are you angry about the accident?
How do you feel about that? Have you ever thought about suicide? What’s going through your mind right now?
The psychologist called me a few weeks later to finish our interview, and when I said I was having a horrible time with my memory, he suggested neuropsychological testing.
“It’s possible that you sustained a head injury in the accident that wasn’t caught, and testing can find that out,” he explained. “I’ll include a recommendation in your report.”
Diagnosis Number One, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder:
“Aimee is experiencing feelings of inferiority and difficulty with memory…possible head injury sustained…depression…great emotional sensitivity…angry, irritable, and edgy…afraid of driving…Aimee’s greatest concern is that of her disfiguring scar…she will have to cope with anger about the accident and how it changed her life, the disfigurement of her body, and the impact of this on her body image and effects on issues of intimacy.”
Recommendation: psychotherapy and neuropsychological testing.
I wasn’t surprised by the report, just relieved with validation. A doctor had recognized that I needed further testing. Maybe I wasn’t really losing it. Maybe I just needed some help.
Eighteen Months after the Accident
(Neuro) Psychologist Number Two: More interviews and tests—PTSD and depression inventories; IQ, Rorschach, and other memory tests; and tests for cognitive and physical reactions—ten hours’ worth that spanned two days to determine if I had sustained brain trauma in the car accident.
Every time I heard myself say “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember,” I felt more and more stupid. Throughout the testing, I never blamed the accident or young man who caused it, I just got angry with myself. He might have been responsible for
messing up my body, but not my mind. I was in control of it. Or at least I wanted to be.
The results were less than surprising this time, too.
Diagnosis Number Two, pretty much the same as before:
“Aimee demonstrates a pattern of recovery that is consistent with recovery patterns of traumatic brain injury. She is also suffering from depression, as well as underlying anger and grief. She is guarded, anxious, and depressed, and she also suffers from social avoidance, left foot pain, memory problems, and suicidal ideation. She has feelings of powerlessness, and projective stories or drawings reveal an individual who is frustrated and overwhelmed. When faced with difficulty she wants to retreat. She also has some anger and guilt toward the driver who died.”
Recommendation: psychotherapy and drug intervention for “neuroemotional” responses.
Traumatic brain injury. Well, I had suspected. My memory had turned to jelly, it seemed, especially my recent, short-term memory.
A second opinion, same diagnosis: I was broken. But this doctor’s analysis also pointed out that recovery—I had sustained a closed-head brain injury—was happening and would continue with time. Slowly.
An extensive (and overwhelming, aligning with Diagnosis Number Two) list of psychotherapists in my area was provided, but none of the names was familiar, and I had no idea where to start. How do you choose a name from a lengthy list of unknown professionals knowing you will be sharing your innermost thoughts, talking about something you really don’t want to, while exposing your soul? And all after a year and a half of way too many other medical appointments?
I didn’t want to hop from doctor to doctor trying to find a fit.
So, I just didn’t choose. I had every intention of getting to it at some point. I would seek out therapy eventually.
• • •
When the other driver’s insurance company still hadn’t offered a settlement amount, my attorney filed a lawsuit. A jury would figure it out.
I panicked. And then I cried. Maybe I did both at the same time.
Under no circumstances did I want to go to court. I begged him to work hard to settle before the trial date. I was anxious thinking about showing my scars. Maybe even more so about facing Zach’s parents—they had lost their son, after all—until my lawyer promised he would do all he could to resolve it before then.
He reminded me that the county in which I lived was small and that I was a highly respected teacher who had taught in the area for almost twenty years. When I told him the presiding judge had been my divorce lawyer and the father of two former students of mine, he told me to breathe easy. Though this information wouldn’t affect the case, he was sure it would make the opposing side cooperate more quickly, and he was right.
By spring 2012, the lawsuit hearing was postponed and a date for mediation was set. There would be no courtroom hearing at all. What a relief.
Meanwhile, I started writing again using the daily prompts given to my seniors in English class. I didn’t write much, and I wasn’t that great at it, but it was helping.
In fact, for the English teacher who also aspired to be a writer one day, it was turning into more than just a healthy hobby. When I found out that an area college offered a master’s in creative writing, I was so excited, I signed up for the summer residency right away. I had always wanted to earn my master’s, just not in education. This would be a perfect fit.
“What will you write about for your thesis?” Mom asked when I told her I was going back to grad school.
“The accident and what happened to me.”
She looked puzzled and sounded almost angry when she asked, “Why in the world would you want to write about that when you lived it? You tell me all the time you don’t want to talk about, so why relive it?”
Yes, I was sick of telling the story of what had happened to me.
I had repeated it to every doctor, every dentist, every psychologist, and every attorney I saw over a span of two years, and trust me, there were a lot.
It always got the same embarrassing reaction, too.
I was almost killed in a car accident. I was recovering from a heart attack that had happened five months earlier.
Disbelief: “Wow.”
Yes, a heart attack. Yes, age forty-one. I know, crazy. It was stress. I had just told my husband of eighteen years that I wanted a divorce.
Pity: “That’s horrible,” or “I’m so sorry.”
And then a shrug or pat on the hand with: “Well, you look great anyway.”
I’d had two brushes with death, made it through the trifecta of shit, and I “looked great anyway.”
So they said.
I never knew how to respond to that—Thank you?—so I just didn’t say anything.
No one would understand anyway. My life had become a gloomy, tired documentary about trauma rehabilitation that most moviegoers would have walked out of, I was sure, and talking about it wasn’t helping. I was just sharing the same clips over and over, and getting the same, unhelpful responses.
I knew I needed to make some sense of it all, though, because questions still haunted me: What happened to me? Why am I still alive? And, who am I now?
I resolved to do what I’ve always done when I wanted to organize my thoughts or solve a problem in my head. I would write about it. I could create a meaningful, enduring record of what happened to me and earn my master’s at the same time. And maybe I’d find some peace in the process.
It couldn’t hurt to try.
IV
“And then her heart changed, or at least she understood it; and the winter passed, and the sun shone upon her.”
~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
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July 2012 | Two Years after the Accident
We crossed paths one summer afternoon on a busy state route, just miles from my apartment, almost two years to the day of a different kind of crossing.
It was only a quick glance, a brief moment of recognition, but it was enough.
Jackson Ross.
We had been Facebook friends for eight months, acquaintances for almost twenty years. He had been a new student at LHS when I was a new teacher, and now we were both middle-aged and divorced.
“I think I passed you,” he had messaged me the night after our cars had passed in opposite directions, sunshine providing a glimpse of each other behind windshields. “That smile!”
“It was me—I saw you!” I answered, intrigued.
Within the week, we had exchanged phone numbers, began a texting conversation, and agreed to meet for a drink sometime. The friendly banter—sweet, easy, and sometimes flirtatious—continued, and soon I realized he had potential, the timing was right, and this was not an opportunity I wanted to miss.
One night a couple of weeks later, during my master’s residency, I asked him to join my new friends and me for a drink at a local pub. I was a summertime, sloppy T-shirt, sweat-stretched navy shorts, hair-wilted and make-up-melted mess, so I figured it was a good time to put our texting interest to test. If I could look like that and he showed up and stayed, then hey, maybe there was something between us!
“What’s up?” Jackson greeted me, strangely raising his hand in a high-five, like we were old pals.
Uh-oh, I thought. Who high-fives someone at the start of a possible date?
And then I noticed his pale color-of-the-sky eyes and the way he looked at me when I talked. Our attraction was instant, the chemistry immediate, and the high-five became adorable.
When Jackson offered to drive me back to my parked car, I followed him and my heart, ditching my grad school friends for the rest of the ev
ening. Once alone, it was only a matter of seconds until I felt his fingers on my cheek and his lips against mine.
Sigh.
We made out like teenagers, pausing only to move closer to each other, even giggling when I climbed the center console to sit on his lap.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
• • •
“Mom,” I said into my BlackBerry, “I think I’m in love.”
I was on a quick break from class, headed out in my nearly two-year-old Honda CRV to do some summer shopping.
“Aimee, you know it’s never gonna happen with Ricky Martin, right?”
“Ha, ha, ha, very funny, Mom. I’m serious.”
“Oh, really?” she replied, her words curling into an unseen but unmistakable grin.
“Yes! I’ve only known him for a few days—well, sorta, I’ll explain—but he’s wonderful!”
“Wow,” she said. “What’s his name?”
“Jackson. Isn’t it perfect?” I sighed loudly in exaggeration. “I mean, Mom, could I have dreamed up a better one?”
She laughed, and I began to share our brief background.
I had known Jackson for years, and in fact, I could vaguely remember him as a student. This made my mom chuckle.
“How ironic,” she said, referring to her own story of meeting Dad.
“But we’re only eight and a half years apart.”
And anyway, it didn’t matter. Jackson had assured me that age was just a number, and that since it wasn’t a ten-year age difference, I “technically” couldn’t even be considered a cougar (confirmed by my own frantic research on the Internet). And I figured that since women live an average of ten years longer than men, I could be securing a partnership ’til death.
“Mom, he is soooooooo gorgeous. Wait until you meet him—blue eyes, tall, handsome, and he smells good all the time!”
She laughed again.
“So, you’ll see him again soon?” Mom asked.
