As alluded to in earlier entries to this blog, I recently moved across country, from Georgia to New Mexico (with a pesky side-trip to New York to pick up the vast majority of my possessions that had been in storage for two years). I had the help of my parents (which meant more mom and dad time than I'd had in the last 28 years of my life... and I will be eternally grateful, but ugh), their truck, and their church's 6x10 trailer. The last saved a ton of money as we didn't have to rent from U-haul, but we were "Sharing God's Love" through north Georgia, South and North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia... through Brooklyn's less savory neighborhoods (Brownsville, yo!) and then throughout the Midwest. As a card-carrying atheist and someone who prides herself as independent, it was quite the identity crisis.
Upon arriving in New Mexico, mom and dad went to Seattle to tie up other loose ends for my move, and my sister came down from Seattle for a quick visit. When mom and dad came back into town, they had sad and horrible news: the 17-year-old daughter of family friends had died in a car wreck the previous weekend.
My sister and I did not know the young woman in question well, although we had just seen her at our home for a holiday party. I knew her parents much better, and still cannot imagine the hole in the lives of her mother and father, her sister, and all of the people who love her. Such sudden, non-sensical loss. Devastating, and my thoughts still go out to that grieving community.
Mom and dad left two days later to attend the young woman's funeral, and my sister and I were left with our shared grief for the family. Some of the grief was expressed through learning more about the wreck. In addition to notices for the funeral and facebook mourning pages, I found an article in the local paper with a description of what had happened during the accident. At the time, I consumed every scrap of information I could find regarding the wreck. Now I wish I had not read the article detailing what happened.
I didn't even know the article had left a mark until a few days later when, after my sister left and still not having a start date for my new job, I decided to embark on the five-hour trip to Denver to visit friends. I left much later than I had intended; a little after 4:00 instead of my anticipated 1:00 p.m. goal. At first the drive was beautiful... Northern New Mexico is beautiful, and I really enjoyed watching the landscape roll past with my cat in tow.
Then the sun began to set. The stars came out. The landscape became more and more difficult to see as the sky became darker and darker. Finally, the sun completely set and the night was pitch black. At this point in the drive, there were no exterior lights other than the stars. No moon. No gas stations. No street lights. No signs. Just the stars, my headlights, and the head and tail lights of the few other cars on the interstate at that time. I could not tell where the earth started and the sky began. I felt like we were on a road through outer space.
Normally in surreal circumstances, I do a pretty good job making the best out of the situation with which I have to contend. I think usually I would have put in some David Bowie and pretended I was an astronaut.
Instead, I had anxious ruminations about our family friends' daughter's wreck, which is a horrible thing to think about obsessively when you're barreling down the interstate at 75 mph with a limited view of the surroundings. But there was no talking myself out of not thinking about the young woman and her last moments on the planet, and the more I thought about her, the more my symptoms of panic (increased heart rate and blood pressure, higher body temperature, raced and catastrophic thinking, etc) elevated.
This is not how I want to remember the young woman. She was very easy to talk to (surprising given our huge age difference, at least to me), outgoing, hardworking, and led with kindness. Again, I do not want to have my memory of her be as the stimulus to a driving phobia. That would be unworthy of her.
Fortunately, the best therapy for panic is exposure... to expose the person (in this case, me) to the feared action or thing they typically avoid. As the trigger for me was driving and I could not very well just pull over to the side of the road (I'd just have to get back and complete the drive to Denver), I had to face the fear and literally drive through it.
Things did get better (although there were two triggering wrecks in Denver that reverted me to a hot mess) and I arrived safely at my destination (three hours late). I never would have expected to experience that prolonged moment of panic, though. I have never been an anxious driver. I rather (not always, though) like to drive. I found it very difficult to feel so incapacitated in such an unanticipated way.
The experience can serve as a reminder that we get through things. The family and friends of that lost young woman will always grieve her loss, but will go through the process of it. The challenges ahead of us... if we face them, we will get through them. The scary-ass adventures (that we didn't even know would be scary) will be navigated if we commit to them. That is how I would rather use these experiences, rather than being debilitated by them. And I choose to use the loss of our young friend as a reminder of people's strengths, instead of our weaknesses. That seems like a far more worthy association.
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