Living-Deliberately.com

Grocery day: I expected a harried pace, traffic, the rain, the baby to be sick from all the prunes he ate….we had an oil change, drama practice, and a puppet show thrown in.

I didn’t expect to nearly die. I’m still more than a little shocked at how close I came.

We’d finished the day, all but the co-op, and we were on Alcoa Highway on the way into Knoxville. It’s a busy, busy road; it has some kind of nickname like “murder mile” or something like that but the actual thing isn’t coming to mind. A white sedan and I were side by side, past the air port, past the exit for Pellissippi Parkway; I was listening to Dave Ramsey and pondering what a hard time it is to do ordinary household errands when it’s christmas-shopping season and one wants very much to give and buy the things their children would like to have but there are no resources to do so. A pity party of sorts…

It was a blue 4 door car; I’m bad with make and models, but it was new. She was a college student and talking on her phone. She wanted to pull across our lane of traffic to the center section to ultimately turn left. But she didn’t even look.

And she went so slow! I keep replaying it in my mind to see if it was just one of those “slow motion” reactions during a stressful situation but she really was not gunning it across those two lanes. It was almost laid-back and sleepy. Anyone with spatial skills at all could see there was no way she could make it across us before we hit that same point of the pavement.

Both the white car and I saw it at the same time. We were both going close to 60. The white car driver couldn’t swerve or she’d hit me and she didn’t seem to think the median was a choice. Maybe she just didn’t realize impact was inevitable fast enough. I pumped my brakes and got on the shoulder before the car before me rear ended my van and narrowly missed hitting the blue car’s tail end by doing so. The white car took the full, head on impact.

I saw the girl in the blue car realize she was about to get hit and I saw her face right after impact. Then my car was passed and I was shaking and realizing that the white car driver was probably dead.

That close. It would have been me or Andrew, who was in the front seat next to me. Our airbags would have gone off but then what? There were three other kids in the back on an extremely busy highway, with traffic behind slamming on their brakes.

I called 911 and then David and that’s when I started to cry. The police took my witness report and I saw that the white car driver was not dead on the scene but was seriously injured. The blue car driver was unharmed enough to be sitting up and I think I saw her talking.

One hair of a second’s difference. That’s all it would have taken and our lives would have changed forever, on the spot. I’m still kind of reeling, writing about it because I think maybe getting it out in print will help me process it.

My life didn’t flash before my eyes but my children did. Which is kind of the same thing maybe. I made them french toast when we got home and unloaded the groceries and they are in jammies ready for bed. Tonight’s a big cold front and there’s lots of wood stacked. I think that’s pretty much all I need.

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