[Serious] Those who have been in a serious car accident, what was it like?

TL; DR: father causes accident, friend dies, PSA: Kids are different, yo

Time slows down. I can remember the nanoseconds leading up to the actual impact.

My father was driving my friend and I home. My father was convinced that he was an excellent driver. In fact, he did have good instincts about defensive driving, but he was ultra-aggressive and had a bad temper.

We were in a line of cars on a 2 lane road. Passing was possible (dotted yellow line) but not very likely because it was typical Saturday afternoon traffic. Still, he wanted to get around, and passed several cars. I was pretty scared because it was dangerous as fuck.

Eventually, he poked the car out to try to pass and realized there was a car coming and that he wasn't going to make it. He was already partially passing the car that was immediately in front of us, so he had to slow and get back into the right lane at the same time. There was very little time to do it.

Keep in mind he's not driving a sports car, but a shitty little Dodge Colt, basically an econobox subcompact. It wasn't exactly nimble at low speeds, let alone 60 MPH.

Did manage to whip it back, while braking, into the lane but came in to fast and was running off the road. I could hear and feel the gravel shoulder, and thought we were going to go into the ditch. Just then he whipped it back to the left to get out of the ditch, and the car started to skid. The rear end slid so that we were then headed back towards the left lane.

We ended up crossing the center at like a 45 degree angle and out of control. We were going to fly off the road into a field, and I was just hoping we wouldn't hit a tree (like I had done on my bike once) when we got blasted by, presumably, the car he intended to avoid in the first place.

Came to in the field. I remember the windshield being just inches from my face, and my arm was caught in the wreckage of the door, the dash had been bent in, too so I was stuck. The car was all fucked up. Witnesses said it rolled over a few times after the impact.

For a minute there (what seemed like an hour) my father thought that my friend had been tossed out of the car and I was looking around the car, while still in it, for him. Then I looked in the back seat and realized that he was still there, just all kinds of fucked up.

It's been 31 years and I still see it, this isn't an exaggeration whatsoever and not meant to gain sympathy or anything.

My father got out and was trying to get me out when I was finally able to get myself free and crawled out through the driver's side.

Some people came running down and it was a madhouse. My father crawled back into the car to try to render some aid to my friend, and I got taken up to the road by some people. The ambulances started arriving.

The other driver was hurt pretty bad, too, and my father and I and her passenger were the only ambulatory ones from the wreck. I had some cuts on my face and, when they got me in the ambulance, my shirt and shorts full of glass.

My father eventually came up covered in blood and they put him into another ambulance. I learned later they helicoptered my friend out.

At the hospital I asked everyone I could about my friend, so I think they just didn't want to talk to me about it and checked on me every once in awhile. My mother eventually showed up and they let me out of the bed to walk around with her. It had been a few hours and I was pretty much calmed down by then. Then she told me that my friend had died and shit just sucked.

I got to go home that night but they kept my father for observation for two days.

I went home and watched Short Circuit approximately 18 times over the next couple of days. It was the only movie we had.

Over the next couple of years things got progressively more fucked up. I started out blaming myself for wanting to be on that car ride at that time, and I ended up blaming my father. My father got sued by the family of my friend. My brother and sister sided with my father, and were angry with me that I blamed him. I ended up telling my father to fuck off and that I didn't want to be around him anymore because, honestly, his driving scared the shit out of me. My parents were divorced, so this was somewhat practical, but my mother still maintained a relationship with him and he'd come over to the house for meals and holidays and I just ignored or hid from him.

I was one of the first kids through the programs at Fernside and ended up doing all sorts of volunteer work with and for them. I got to know the founders very well and did all sorts of talks, with other kids on the panel, at schools to teachers on grief issues for children. I continued, on and off, until about 5 years ago as I feel that the mission set out by the founders has sort of been left behind. Also, the field of grief counseling for children has become much more widespread; at the time of Fernside's founding, there was only one other such organization.

I still have a lot of emotions about it. When I was younger, the primary thing was anger and I got into a lot of trouble, and I can't say that I wouldn't have even if this didn't happen.

I will say that I'm a pretty good driver now and, aside from one stupid accident when I was 17 (no other cars involved, no one hurt), I've had nothing like it happen since. I take safe driving very seriously, and think about ways to be safer even when I'm not behind the wheel. I used to actually enjoy driving, but not anymore.

I guess I write this all just to say: kids take this sort of thing, both serious car accidents and just death in general, very differently than adults do. For me, I was the only kid I knew that had had something like this happen until a year or so later when I got involved with Fernside. When shit gets nuts for kids, it's so important to realize that they're not looking at it with adult eyes and emotional control. Getting them talking about it is one thing, but it's important to keep the conversation going and to not provide the type of advice you would to an adult, to let them work through it and to hold on to some part of their childhood. The grieving process for adults can take years, for kids it can take a lot longer because they don't really have an established worldview but will have to build their worldview on top of this pile of shit the world served them up.

TL; DR: father causes accident, friend dies, PSA: Kids are different, yo

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