Scribblings

Dining at Burger King ...

is not something I like to do. If I am going to spend $40 on a meal I'd rather have something other than burgers and fries. Today, though, we went to Burger King because they were having a fundraiser for the family of a boy killed recently in an accident.

I didn't know the boy. The circumstances around the accident sounds like every parent's nightmare. Apparently the boy was driving too fast, lost control of the car and smashed into something. What an awful tragedy. The parents and the family are going through hell. No one ever thinks that a bad car accident will happen to them.

Accidents are terrifying. I was driving with Billy and we were in an accident. It was a sickening few seconds that seemed to stretch out into hours in slow motion. The car spun around and I realized I had to get control of the wheel. Meanwhile, I could see the oncoming cars trying to stop and I'd seen Billy's head go through the passenger side window. We were both all right but the car was totalled.

Not too long ago, David and the kids were in an accident that totalled their car. Thankfully, none of them were seriously injured. I imagine they all went through their own kind of sickening time warp where you just feel like everything is totally out of control and you have just enough time to wonder if you're going to be killed.

People I've known have been killed in accidents. It was 20 years ago this month that my to-be mother-in-law was killed in an accident. It was Saturday morning and she was running errands. She was on her way to a dry cleaner and was in her own neighborhood, maybe a couple of blocks from home. The other car was speeding and ran a stop sign, plowing into her car. She died enroute to the hospital.

Many more years before, the teenage foster son of a friend was killed when he hit a bridge abutment. He might have been drinking. It was raining and the roads were slick, and any combination of those things was just deadly.

Here's the thing ... you never anticipate getting news like that.

I remember Christmas Day in 1980. My parents came up to LI to visit for the holidays. We were all at my aunt's house when the phone rang. It was my uncle, and he sounded very shaken. My brother had been seriously injured the night before and had been taken to shock trauma. His best friends went to my parents' place with my brother's keys and let themselves in to find the phone book. They had no idea where we might be and so they began calling everyone who had a NY address. That's how they reached my uncle.

My brother was in shock trauma!

He survived, thank God, but it was very difficult for all of us. They don't call it shock trauma for nothing.

Three years later, there I am making dinner in my apartment. It was Saturday and I was having company ... my then boyfriend Rich, my cousin Anne, and Scott and Carolyn, friends of mine. The phone rang and Rich answered it. Puzzled, he turned the phone over to me. "It's Linda," he said, "but she wants to talk to you."

She couldn't tell her brother that his mother was dead. She asked me to do it.

I'd met the lady only one week before. Never in a million years would I ever expect to hear Rich's mother was in a car accident, never mind killed in one.

I'm sure that Rich never expected to get a call from other church members that Billy and I were in a car accident. I can't even begin to imagine what he must have felt as he drove to the shelter restaurant with our daughters.

You never expect anything like this to happen.

That's why I wanted to go to Burger King. If there was some small way to help that family, I'd want to do it. There's really nothing you can say to make it any less painful or shocking but you can try to help a little. I hope we did.