Your Distracted Driving Killed Me

Published in

Beach Sand Kicker

10 min readJan 15, 2014

One second I was listening to U2, the next I noticed you looking down. Were you texting. Changing your radio station. Getting your coffee mug. Grabbing a beer?

I’ll never know.

I’m dead.

You killed me while driving distracted.

I don’t know if you were injured and I don’t really care. I care about everything you just took from me. I care about everything you just took from my wife, my mother, my in-laws, my extended family, my friends and co-workers.

Let me clue you in on some of the things your irresponsible actions resulted in.

Meet my wife.

Take a good look at her picture. Study her face. Now remember that her face will never look like that again. The pain you’ve inflicted will be etched there permanently. She will smile again, but not for a long time. The pain in her heart will never go away. Every September 2nd, our anniversary, and January 4th, my birthday, will be days of sorrow rivalling the date you killed me.

Each night she will now have to go to bed alone. The animals that slept with us will try and fill my bed space but it won’t be the same.

Financially, you’ve just devastated my wife. Yes, there is some life insurance. But that’s not close to what I would have earned over the rest of my working life. The health insurance that I had as a state employee will no longer be available to her. We already worked part time jobs to help pay for the cost of our animals and to get by. You just ensured my wife having to work well into her seventies. She will now lay awake at night having to figure out how she is going to pay for her medical expenses. Nights wondering why she was forced into making a Sophie’s Choice over which one of the elder cats medical treatments will be done.

How can she stall the oil company for just one more month?

My wife and I loved taking driving vacations where we would solve the problems of the world. A week or two driving around America and Canada visiting national parks and remote lands. Some places, such as Newfoundland, we actively considered uprooting our brood to relocate in the not too distant future. We spent hundreds of hours talking about the house we would buy there and what we would do for work.

It will be hard for my widow in the near future to take any kind of a vacation as she will have to pick up even more jobs to get by.

Meet my mom.

I was her only child.

Mom was a young seventy when you killed me. She’s now grieving with a sorrow for which no amount of time will soothe. I was incredibly proud of my mother and I would have liked to think I’d done some things with my life to make her proud of me. Now all my mom will take with her is memories. And grief. Unspeakable grief.

Meet Juno and Gracie…..

……. our rescue dogs.

On September 1st, 2011, Gracie found her forever home and a special place in our hearts. Juno found a special place in everyones hearts. She knows no strangers, only friends she hasn’t met yet. As much as I loved my kitty kids to an insane amount, these two gals taught me an even deeper love for the four-leggers of the world.

Coming home to the swishing tail of Juno and the kisses of Gracie washed away even the worst of days of work.

There will be no more Juno tail swishing as her daddy walks in the front door. There will be no more twenty-minute licks of daddy’s hand for Gracie when she goes to bed. They’ve lost one of two people that would move heaven and earth for them.

That’s on you.

I had family spread across the country that I rarely got to see the past decade. There was always tomorrow or next year to travel half way across the country to visit, but we kept in touch as best we could. Facebook became a means to fill the location void.

It took my death to bring the family together again in one place. I wish you could have sat next to my mother on the plane as she flew home from Houston to bury her son. I wish you could have observed my mom’s dazed stare through the plane window… interrupted by sudden hysterical sobbing…. followed by the flight attendant reaching past you to console my mom yet again.

Unsuccessfully consoling, though. How does one console a mother broken by the death of her only child.

That’s on you, too.

I married into an amazing family. Calling them in-laws demeans what they meant to me. My wife’s parents were all anyone could ask for and then some. Supportive, loving, kind. Treating me as a son, not as someone married to their daughter. My wife’s brother and sister were my brother and sister. My niece and nephew growing into young adults so fast. I was looking forward to their high school graduations, weddings, and someday becoming parents themselves. I went with my niece to see Frozen for my birthday. Not her birthday, but mine. We had a ball. I looked forward to taking her to more movies before she was too old to want to go with Uncle Jim to a movie. That’s not happening now. There will be no more movies for us.

That’s also on you.

In the future you’ll be standing in a court for your sentencing to a jail term. Before the sentencing, however, you will watch my widow during the victim impact speech as she struggles to convey how much I meant to her. She will break down repeatedly as the echoes of her sobs fill the hushed room. No matter how hard you look into the table in front of you there will be no escaping the sounds. My widows gallant attempt to tell the Court about her husband will end with her mother coming to the podium, putting an arm around her daughter and slowly walk back to their seats. You’ll steal a glance and notice my mother as well, too grief stricken to speak, face red in agony as she cries into her sister’s shoulder.

All of that agony is on you.

I can’t feel sadness for your prison sentence as your family will one day have you home. That’s more than my wife, mother, and family can say. You deserve no sympathy for taking my life. If there had been a mechanical malfunction, a deer in the road, sun blinding you… that would be different. But you veered into my lane because of your own actions. Your attorney used the term “accident” at your trial, but we both know the truth.

I could go on and on about the result of your actions. The shattered lives, the stolen moments, the future that will never be as it could have been for many people. This didn’t just affect my wife and mother, it impacted many people. But I won’t go further. People’s eyes glaze over after a certain amount of time and everything becomes white noise.

So a glimpse of what you caused is all I will show.

Was it worth that moment?

I’m certain my wife doesn’t think so. Nor my mom. I’m certain your family doesn’t think so as they see you led away in handcuffs to begin your prison sentence.

Did you imagine that cold January morning as you hustled your kids into the car to drop off at school that you’d be missing from their lives for the next five or ten years. Your first grader might be a high school student by the time you are released. If you don’t want to think about what you took from my family, you might want to consider what you took from your’s.

Was it worth it?

Now you get to live with the knowledge that you took a life for no reason. There won’t be a day you wake that it won’t be on your mind. I say that not with glee, but with sorrow.

It didn’t have to be this way!

POST SCRIPT:

The above could have been true, if but for one reason….. the car sliding into my side of the yellow line on the morning of January 14th, 2014 in Middlefield, CT missed me by inches. Not because the woman in the SUV loaded with children looked up and swerved back into her lane. She never saw the head-on collision coming as she was bent over towards the middle console. Luckily for all of us, I noticed her looking down and saw her vehicle starting to drift into my lane. I didn’t have much room (it was a small two lane country road) but I was able to move just enough out of the way to avoid the accident.

Texting, eating, drinking, drunk driving, drug driving, reckless street racing…. etc.

We see TV shows and movies filled with car crashes where no one gets more than a few bumps and bruises. We don’t get to see the real aftermath. I thought about my own potential aftermath and wanted to share what could have been a graphic scene playing out not two miles from my home.

If just one person reading this reconsiders their driving behavior then thinking about the resulting consequences and the emotional pain of writing this will have been worth it.

Stop driving distracted.

Update: February 1, 2014.

Since posting this story, I’ve received hundreds of thoughtful comments via email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. People telling me they are changing the way they drive, as well as people recounting their own near misses.

One email in particular reduced me to tears. Derek Woltman, who served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me of his harrowing head-on collision in September 2013. His injuries as a result are staggering and it’s a miracle that he survived. In one of his emails, Derek told me those few seconds before the accident were the most terrifying of his life. That speaks volumes when you consider he served 33 months with the Infantry in Iraq/Afghanistan.

Derek gave me permission to share his story here in the hopes that readers will think twice before driving while distracted.

I’m grateful beyond words to Derek for sharing and I wish him a full recovery so that he, his fiancee, and infant son, can resume the life they were leading before his accident.

This is the email Derek sent me.

Hi, my name is Derek Woltman. Reading this brought a giant flood of memories from a fateful morning in September of last year. September 9, 2013 at around 0730 in the morning my life nearly ended due to a similar situation. Heading eastbound on HWY 141 towards Des Moines, Iowa, I was struck nearly head on by a ford ranger who crossed the center line. I had multiple choices to make in a blink of an eye and making the only choice I could without involving the other Ford truck in front of him or the lady in front of me that dove off the road to avoid him I got clear off the road onto the shoulder/ditch where I was struck. Being severely shaken up and in and out of consciousness I never knew the extent of my injuries until 5 days, and 3 emergency surgeries later waking in Mercy Hospital in ICU. While I was unknowingly fighting for my life, the other guy for what ever reason he crossed and hit me broke his arm. While I had an aortic distortion…..an injury that was told by my doctor pretty much 99% of all people with that injury never make it out of the vehicle alive, fractured rib, bruised lung, 3 fractured vertebrae, and an open book pelvic fracture. I laid in a hospital bed for 16 days before released only to be confined to a wheel chair for 6 weeks. I am walking now and in physical therapy and things are going well for the most part but that really put my life into perspective and what could have been. That was a really powerful story and I enjoyed it immensely. I just wanted to share my story with you and let you know that distracted drivers are more dangerous than they are conceived to be a 4,000 pound sledge hammer traveling at 60 mph is nothing to scoff at. Enclosed are some pictures of what was left of my truck. The other is of my fiance and our son. Feel free to use them to get a point across and my story. Good luck and stay safe out there.