148: What if you killed someone?
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We have so much less control than we think we do. So much less control. Many things, many more than we acknowledge are a mystery. Death is really close at hand. And we do not do ourselves often any favors by forgetting that. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 148, What If You Killed Someone?

This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I grew up in, I'd say, an ordinary family in an ordinary middle-class suburb outside Washington, D.C.,

I was a really lively, energetic kid, and I stayed that way. It was significant that my family lived outside Washington, D.C. Both my parents were really fascinated by politics.

They talked about it all the time. And I was born in 1956, so when I was little in Washington, D.C., is when John F. Kennedy became president. And my parents, they were just excited and optimistic and felt like, you know, our generation is coming to power. And my mother especially, I was just captivated by her being captivated by, the world is going to be better now, you'll see.

So from a really early age, like four and a half or five, I remember being a little save the world type. I just read all the rescue, save the day, do gooder, life-saving stories I could. I mean, I thought that is, that's the way to be.

This was a really, really big thing in my life, and it continued as I got into school. I, you know, created and joined little clubs around the Civil Rights Movement, and then the farm workers, a great boycott, and then, you know, early, early, early women's movement. I was known in my school as quite the activist, and quite the debater, and quite the little, you know, politica.

and I don't make any claim to being good or virtuous, it was just because this was my parents' and especially my mother's orientation, I was someone who really thought, "Oh, I want to be a rescuer. I want to make a difference."

Also, when I was 11 was when Dr. King was shot, the funeral of Dr. King, and then the funeral of Bobby Kennedy. It was as if, you know, members of my own family had died. And these tragedies made me that much more determined. I felt like, oh, this is going to be really hard. You know, we really all need to get involved here. I was a little troubled because there were almost no women in politics back then.

I was discouraged, but then discouragement also tended to kind of fire me up. There were questions about being a woman. Certainly could a woman become a crusading lawyer because all the crusading lawyers then were men and could a woman be elected to office? Not many women in office. But the other thing was that I began to sense during junior high school and high school that I might be a lesbian and that really complicated things.

At that time, there was the women's movement, but just a feeling that that was a terrible thing to be and an obstacle to success and not something that could coexist with a lot of what I was thinking of, certainly electoral politics, and possibly having any kind of professional job.

That was a constraint. That was the one dark cloud that began to emerge over all my imaginings of being a rescuer and a do-gooder and a crusading attorney for rights. Of course, that was a time when, for someone like me, you know, a 17-year-old kid in a suburb,

Invisible. Invisible. Inaudible. And I actually watched all my classmates go off to college. And even though I'd gotten into college, I was very uncertain about how would this work? Dorm life. Huh.

And I actually put off college. I decided to defer college for a year. And in that year, I had thought, "Oh, maybe I'll discover I'm not a lesbian. Maybe this won't be a problem." And actually what happened in that year, I discovered the women's movement, which then was very focused on causes that touched me a lot. As a new baby lesbian,

I got involved in the women's movement, sort of the early years of the women's movement. And I particularly felt drawn to, I got involved in the really early anti-rape work, anti-sexual assault, and anti-domestic violence. As I did that work, I really saw what that women's movement slogan, the personal and political, meant. I saw what it meant in real life.

And one meaning for me was, and still is really strongly, that telling the story of the pain that you've experienced or witnessed, just telling your personal story can really generate change. I had a feminist awakening, and I moved from feeling really ashamed of the possibility of being a lesbian and very hidden about it to feeling, oh, maybe, maybe.

This is something I could live with. Maybe I could even speak of this. I also made the decision to come out to my parents about a year after I graduated from high school. And that really solidified my sense of, I'm not going to be able to follow the path I thought I'd be able to follow. I am going to have to be on a different track now.

I left the family home. I actually lived in my car for a while, and I had to generate as much money as I could, as fast as I could, and so I actually ended up laying asphalt, working in construction.

I was a feminist and I felt, well, construction jobs pay more than being a secretary and I need money, so I'm going to try to be a woman in the trades. And at that time, well, I mean, even now, there are very, very few women in the trades, but became the first woman asphalt layer, I think it would be safe to say, in Washington, D.C. or Maryland. And I spent quite a while laying asphalt. And for me, the job was a revelation. I'd grown up in a middle-class suburb

And now he was working alongside men who were Vietnam vets, African-American men from Washington, white men from the mountains of Maryland.

The previous year, I'd been coming out, I'd been learning about feminism and the women's movement and focusing on rape and abuse and harassment and domestic violence. And now I was working alongside men who themselves openly talked about being batterers, having at various times harassed and even assaulted women. In fact, I could see on the construction job that they harassed women. Initially, they certainly harassed me very, very, very intensively.

For them, it was really hard to have a woman on the construction site, whether it was just my crew laying asphalt or, you know, all the men doing all the things that happen. And I think their automatic reaction was,

get out. And how do you show that? Well, you know, you harass physically. So, you know, you do some groping and you do some pushing up against the wall. But also, there are a lot of ways in construction, quote unquote, accidentally pouring kerosene on somebody, swinging a chain really close by. I really got the message that, to say the very least, I was not welcome. But I was desperate. I needed to hold on to the job. So I lasted. And the fact that I lasted is

earned me a little bit of respect. And so from being someone who dreamed of, you know, a job in electoral politics and changing the world, I was completely immersed in a world where all of us, me, all of the men on the crew were just trying to make enough money to get through the day and the week and the month. And I was learning a lot about men's lives.

The harassment began to diminish. They got kind of intrigued. Who are you? What are you doing here? Looks like you're staying. Okay, what is your story? We started sharing stories. I didn't have many stories to tell, but they had stories to tell, stories I had never heard. To sit with men and hear about their experiences in Vietnam in a way that I will never, ever forget.

Something they did was they looked out for me because there are a lot of men coming and going on construction sites. New men would see me and spot me and they would have to have, you know, they would have to do their harassing and my crew would look out for me. They also did something, they stopped catcalling the women who walked past on our breaks at our lunches.

Once in a great while, they'd say, hey, Shane, why don't you join us? You're a lesbian, right? Hey, why are you not catcalling too? And I'd say, well, here's why. And so I think they moved from, oh, Shane will be uncomfortable to, oh, Shane's telling us what this feels like. Maybe this just isn't a good thing to do. So there's a little bit of movement there.

That experience stayed with me when I did actually decide finally to go to college. College was challenging.

But it was especially challenging because I had been laying asphalt with these men and I felt, what am I doing in a classroom reading these books in sociology about working class consciousness? Why would I be in a classroom? Why am I not back somehow in the world today?

I then dropped out of college after a couple of years. I had said to myself, I will not forget these guys. I will not forget them. And I didn't know what I meant by that. And some of the work I did was to begin to create programs for batterers, feeling that

While of course domestic, there are many, many ways we as women can work against domestic violence. I also felt we have to work with the men who are violent. And I know these men. Just a few years after I left college, I took a job as the editor of a national women's newspaper. What I could do in this newspaper was I could collect the stories of women in pain and women suffering.

After I left the newspaper, the women's newspaper, I headed up various do-gooding nonprofits. Environmental work, domestic violence work, prisoner support work, women's cancer work, early breast cancer and advocacy.

Along with being a would-be rescuer, do-gooder, lifesaver kind of kid going right up through high school and beyond. Another big thing about me was that I loved being in cars. I used to say cars were my favorite place to be. When I could really talk with my mother was when we were driving the car together. When she was at home, she was caught up and overwhelmed.

But when we drove together, we could talk. I thought that cars were the place to be. There was more great conversation for me in cars with my parents than at home. I just felt blissed out a lot of the time driving. It was a real consolation.

One thing I'd always, always wanted to do, and especially as a young activist, was go see California. And Berkeley was the center of, of course, all kinds of student activism. I wasn't brave enough to go be a student that far away from home, but I'd always wanted to drive out there and see Berkeley.

Berkeley and see the rest of California and drive along the Pacific coastline on my wall. As a teenager, I had a Sierra Club poster of the coastline of California. I just promised myself, get out to California someday, Shane. And so as I left the newspaper, I felt, I think the time has come for me to make that move west.

So with a lot of dreams and hopes and East Coast fantasies and visions about California, especially the Bay Area and especially Berkeley, I moved west knowing almost no one in the early 90s. So I went for and to my surprise, I got a job at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I got a tiny, tiny little cabin very close to the Pacific Ocean above Highway 1, the coastal road that I'd had a poster of on my wall when I was a teenager. And I started working at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was the director of their women's center. I was fascinated by that work. That meant a lot to me. No sooner had I taken that job down in Santa Cruz and rented my little cabin above Highway 1

then I actually got involved with someone up in the Bay Area who I had known for a couple of years. Absolutely wonderful. I'm a little biased, but someone absolutely wonderful who had a young son. And so my life became very, as it turned out, very intense work down in Santa Cruz. And then every weekend I would drive the...

92 miles it was, up to see my partner. And I also adored driving. So driving the 90 or so miles each way up to see them every weekend along this beautiful Oceanside Highway that I dreamed of. And that was part of my vision of going to California and having a California kind of life.

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One weekend in mid-December, I went up and were determined to give my stepson a wonderful Christmas. So we went over to San Francisco the whole weekend and had a famous holiday tea, visited the huge Christmas tree in central San Francisco, and we went ice skating. I'd have to say one of the most blissful and happy weekends of my life.

I knew I had to get back down to my cabin and go to work the next day. So I sadly said goodbye. I drove down south from San Francisco along Highway 1. And I was on Highway 1, and I was about 15 minutes north of my cabin. Darkness had just fallen. Cruising along, thinking about what a great weekend we'd all had together. And as I came around a curve...

Very, very suddenly, very suddenly, I heard a terrible thud. My car shook thud. And for a second, I thought, oh, because it's a very rural roadway and this happens a fair amount. I thought, oh, I have hit a deer. And then a second later, I saw a young man rolling up over my hood, hitting my windshield and flying over my roof. And I just slammed on the brakes, slammed on the brakes.

Did that just happen? Did that just happen? Did that, did I actually hit somebody? Did I actually hit somebody? I had this thought of maybe he, maybe he's, he's still alive. Maybe I, so I jumped out of the car.

Maybe he's in the roadway and I can help him up and get him out of the road. I looked. He must be here somewhere. Maybe he'll brush himself off and be okay. Let me find him. It was dark, but there was a moon, so I ran up and down the shoulder. I would stop and say, are you there? Are you there? Are you okay? When I wasn't shouting, are you there? Are you okay? There was just silence everywhere.

And I thought, "He's not okay. He's not okay." There was something in the silence. It didn't feel to me like there was an injured person. I had a terrible feeling. I ran back to my car and I got out my cell phone. I pulled up my cell phone and I just kept punching in 911.

over and over, but it's a rural part of the roadway. The ocean's right there, and I couldn't get through on 911. Call dropped, call dropped, call dropped. I just kept on punching it, and finally, a woman answered, you know, the dispatcher, and I said, I'm on Highway 1. I'm on Highway 1 near the state park. I've hit somebody. I think he's really hurt, and she said,

oh, it's going to be a while before I can get someone to you. And I said, you have to get someone here. He's hurt. He's really, really hurt. I think he's dead. She said, I will try to get someone there.

I sat in my car for a few minutes and then I thought, I have to see if I can find him. And I didn't have a flashlight and I didn't know where to look. So I stood by the side of the road and I thought, I'll flag a car down. So the next car that came along, I actually went out into the roadway and it pulled over. And I think I've always remembered he was a middle-aged man got out. And I said, I think I've hit someone. I think I've hit someone. I think I've hit and killed somebody. And he...

clearly, and I understand this, thought that I was kind of crazy or hysterical. And so he just kind of looked at me and got back into his car and drove off. So I'm looking, walking back and forth up and down the shoulder. I'm looking into the fields by the side of the road.

I still don't see or hear anything. Another car comes along and I stop it. And there are a couple of young women inside. They stopped. They looked like they were the right age to be students of mine. They stopped. And I said more calmly, I think I've hit somebody. Would you be able, do you have a flashlight? Could we look for him? And, oh,

What a blessing. They got a flashlight and they got out of the car and started walking up and down the shoulder. I was in one direction, they were in another. They found him. They found him. I came running over and they were turning away. They were turning away. It was understandably too much for them. And I walked over to him. And I had been present from my mother's death. I knew, I felt that he was dead.

He was utterly still. And I felt on the one hand, I am the witness of his death. I need to be here with him. But I also felt, I'm the person who killed him. Am I even allowed to be here? I stood and I cried and I prayed. I thought to myself, what should I pray? What should I pray? I just, I just prayed. And then I

turned away. I walked back toward my car and I think the young women in their car thought I might be planning to go over to them. I saw them as they saw me walking. I saw them lock the doors of their car and I remember thinking, oh yes, of course they would do that. I am a killer. I walked back to my car and

And I got in and then I sat waiting. It was when I was back in my car with the phone that I had more thoughts like, oh, life will never, never, never, never be the same.

And that would alternate with, I can't believe this happened. I can't believe this happened. I can't believe it. How could this happen? And I remember this so strongly. I had visions that came to me of him lying in a hospital bed. I had this flash of seeing his family. He's in white. The bed's white. The family somehow were in white. And then I started thinking about his mother in particular. I thought of his mother bending over his bed.

in this vision in which he was in terrible, terrible shape. He had lived, but he was in terrible shape. And I remember thinking, oh, oh, you know, which, what should I be hoping for? What should I be hoping for? I shouldn't just be hoping that he's alive. I should be hoping he's okay. So I kept thinking, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe if I just keep hoping, maybe that will be true.

Even though another part of me, I just felt very strongly that he had died, that I had killed him. I was rocking back and forth. I had just the same thoughts over and over. I can't believe this. I can't believe this. I think he's dead. If he's not dead, may he be okay. Not just alive, but okay. The first responders came and a police officer came over to my door.

He, as I remember him, was really matter of fact. And, you know, he walked over and he tapped and he said, ma'am, can I see your license and registration or something like that? And I remember thinking, what? I thought, I have to pull myself together. And meanwhile, you know, an ambulance had pulled up by the young man I had hit. I knew he was a young man because I had seen his face in the windshield.

So I gave him whatever paperwork and he had me get out of the car and he smelled my breath. I hadn't been drinking. I actually have never been a drinker at all. And he said, well, you know, what were you doing in the last hour or so before this? And I had stopped at a McDonald's about, I don't know, like 45 minutes up the road, the last town. And he said, what did you have? And I said, a Big Mac.

And he said, oh, you know, the onions in a Big Mac, they can come across just like alcohol in the breathalyzer. I said, oh, oh, well, it wasn't that I'm drunk or I'm high. And he looked at me like... And he said, I was joking. And I thought, I'm just in another world. Am I supposed to...

like, calm down and be joking? That is, no, I can't, I can't do that. But then I felt like, well, but is he telling me I should be less, you know, hysterical or more calm or more something? And then he just turned and went away. I was like, oh.

I know that the men and women in the highway patrol, I know that these police officers, they see people dead in car crashes all the time. You know, 36,000 people a year in this country die in car crashes. I just felt like, oh, I am in another whole world of one here.

They were starting to set up floodlights and redirect traffic and get out measuring tape and get out spray paint. And I thought, an overwhelming feeling of the world is going on. They're doing their thing. And I can't, I can't join them. I can't, I just killed somebody. And I will never be part of that kind of easy, ordinary world again. I felt totally, totally separate from the world.

Strangely, who I felt was with me in this world. And I felt this when I first got out of my car after stopping and stood and listened in the stillness. And I felt this when I was standing by the young man I hit. I felt him. I felt him. I felt somehow him.

And I feel this is presumptuous and I have no idea, you know, what his family would especially would feel about this. But I felt almost as if he and I were in it together. And then I felt, no, no, no, you don't. No, you're his killer. And yet on some level, I felt like there was this very small separate world now that I was in and the only other person in it just kind of hovering in it.

was this young man. Only he and I had been on that road. Only he and I. I just cried and cried and cried. And I was in that when I heard a knock on my window. And this incredibly tall woman, EMT, was standing there. And she leaned into me and she said, it was an accident. And I thought, you weren't here. You don't know.

I think it was, but I don't know. And I remember thinking, I would like to think that somehow this was an accident, that I didn't do something wrong, but you don't know that. And she, it was like she had read my mind. She looked at me again. She said, it was an accident. Oh, I wish I could believe you. I wish I could believe you, but I don't know. I don't know.

Then I started thinking, I started thinking, okay, think back, think back, think back. You're coming around the curve. You were just up the road. What was going on? You know, what was going on? And I thought, was I, you know, reaching into the back seat? Was I looking in the rear view mirror? Was I doing something with a CD? And I couldn't remember doing anything in particular. But I also remember thinking, but Shane, you must have been doing something. How could you not see him?

How could he just be there? I thought, well, they're investigating over there, right over there. And I could go to prison. I could go to prison. Whether or not I did cause this, I could go to prison. And at that point, I had worked with prisoners. I had been to prisons. And I thought, okay, okay.

I remember thinking if I do go to prison, I can think of enough things that I've done in life that I don't feel good about, that that would be okay. If that happens, that's okay. That's okay. I just killed somebody. I just killed somebody. My life as I've known it is over. It's over. Whether or not I caused it, it's over. Life is not going to be the same. I have killed somebody.

After you kill somebody, should you wait? Are you are you allowed to go on living? If I do go on living, I certainly do not deserve a good life. That young man is dead. I am the person who brought him death.

And I don't think I consciously thought this, but behind the how could this happen was, I am just a 41-year-old person driving home from a really great weekend with my family in the city at Christmas. No, no. Everything I have done in my life to this point is worthless. I have killed somebody. Nothing that I've done matters. I have killed somebody.

You live in terms of that for the rest of your life. So it didn't have the quality of guilt for me. It had the quality of this is a fact of life. This is just the way it is. There's no, you know, guilt as a feeling that sometimes can be negotiated or reduced. Not so much I'm a bad person as really simply I am a killer. I will have to have, if I go on, a really different life. And that means not much of a life.

And I thought, how is life possibly going to go on? Beginning with, here I am sitting in my car at the side of the road with the front end of the windshield totally smashed up. From this moment on, what happens? Finally, a police officer came over and said, do you have someone who can pick you up? And I believe he said, his brother is coming. You should get out of here.

I felt like somehow maybe I was ducking out on something, but the police officer, you know, just for him, it was like totally taken for granted. You need to leave. And I thought, okay. I rented my cabin from a couple who lived very close to the cabin. So I called my landlord, I guess, my cabin lord, and he was really shocked.

He sounded to me, I don't know if this is really true, it may have been where I was that night, but he sounded to me like his feeling was, how could you possibly have done that? And he did later say to me, weeks later say to me, I don't understand how anyone could not see someone crossing that stretch of road. I felt, as I felt with the man who'd gotten out of his car earlier a certain distance,

hmm, I felt a real distancing, which was very confirming for me. Oh, this is something that is really going to distance you and set you apart, as it should. But when his wife came and picked me up, she was so kind to me. She actually gave me a hug. Of course, I felt I do not deserve a hug, but she gave me a hug.

and let me get into her car. You know, I was like, wait, I get to be in a car? Someone's going to have me in their car? Someone's going to talk to me? And I felt guilty accepting her kindness, but she drove me back up to where we both lived. Some part of me wanted to stay with her. I wanted to be around that kindness and that warmth. She kept saying, I'm so sorry. And I got up and I went into my cabinet and I remember getting into bed and obviously I didn't sleep at all.

I remember thinking, so now begins the rest of my life, and it's going to be very, very different. In the wake of this person actually dying, I wasn't really thinking in terms of guilt or bad or good the way I thought about that in my life before. I just seemed to be in this very, very stark, stark place. The days immediately after the crash are just a blur.

I don't mean to unduly medicalize, but it is clear to me that I moved into PTSD. Various people would suggest, well, don't you want meds? I never took any meds.

I hesitate to say what I felt because I do not in any way judge anyone in their particular approach to their experience of PTSD. It's just that for me, I felt I should be with this. I needed to feel like I was right up against it. I thought I'll go up and be with my family, although I was scared to be with my son, stepson. I didn't want him to see me broken and crying.

and needy. And then I thought, how will I drive? The idea of driving. And my partner could only drive very short distances. She had long had a driving phobia, which is spooky. She had had a driving phobia all her life. I had to call my boss and I thought she is going to tell me I'm fired. To my amazement, when I called my boss, she was kind.

And she said, I'm so sorry. And I did not feel I deserved anyone saying to me, I'm sorry. But I accepted her kindness. And she said, how much time do you need away before you come back to your job? I thought, I get to come back to my job? And I felt uneasy. I felt like, wait a minute, am I getting away with something? Why aren't people being harder on me and asking tough questions? People were really kind to me.

Now I will say I mostly stayed away from people. One thing I did right away was withdraw from all but, you know, my partner, my stepson, my boss, the people right, right, right close to me in my life. Then I had weeks of what I called life after. I got up in the morning. I went to work. I went to bed at night. I didn't smile. I certainly didn't laugh. I didn't even know how to talk about the crash.

And I really, I said almost nothing for quite a long time, except as I had to in my job or with my family. And even then, wow, what a difference. The accident, or I should say the crash, I do try to say crash, not accident, happened in mid-December. And I actually remember the first time that I smiled, which was in July.

So over that time, I moved. I moved to campus. That was sort of a funky temporary situation. I had roommates for a little while. That was kind of funky and temporary. I thought, I'll move in with my family, although I didn't feel good about how present I could be with them.

Worked long days down in Santa Cruz, so I didn't have to go down every day. But I resumed driving and I felt like even now it's hard for me to say there's a part of me that thinks I should never have driven another mile. And yet I went back to driving. I commuted to my job until I could find another one. I found a place in myself where I could drive. But incredibly, I got the same car back.

Couldn't afford another car. Got the same car back. Every time I got in that car, I thought, deathmobile. I had a thing happen. I started bleeding and bleeding and bleeding in what could be called a really, really heavy period for a woman. I just was bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. And for a long time, I didn't do anything about it because I thought, yes,

This is the physical. I left him bleeding, whether that's literally true or not. And so, yes, this. But I got to a point where I just couldn't function at all. And I finally had some light surgery to stop the bleeding. But there was a part of me that felt, yes, getting into that car and bleeding, that has a certain rightness. All of this is to say, I was in a very, very, very, very hard place. And I also felt I should be. I've killed somebody.

He, I later found out, he died at 18. I've had so many more years than he. I had my chance. He didn't get one. After several months, I felt this is not fair to my friends and my family. I mean, I'm barely functioning in my job. This is not fair to my family.

I'm not going to be taking medicines. I need to at least be in some talk therapy. And I was telling this to my partner who really, really understandably needed and wanted me to become more present again. And she said, well, what about? And then she named a career counselor who'd been a fantastic mentor to her. And I thought, my mid thoughts, oh, right, a career counselor? But she'd always spoken of him in a certain way.

And so I agreed, I agreed, I had to do it for my family. I agreed to go see him. And I can say our conversations brought me back. All I did was go and sit on his couch and cry and cry and cry. And then there were a few words and they were very repetitive words. And that man just sat with me. That man just sat with me. And when I started having more words,

How do I know that I didn't see him, that I couldn't have seen him? Maybe I was looking in the rearview mirror, just as he came across. And he said to me, what if you were looking in the rearview mirror? Are you saying you should never, ever, ever look in your rearview mirror? That people should not do that? That was a moment when I started thinking, at least for the sake of my family, maybe I needed to break out of my repetitive self-hating thinking.

Another moment was he flashed a paperback book at me as I came into his room. And he said, hey, I was just in a bookstore and I saw this book and I thought of you, so I bought it. And he said, I don't know who this woman is and I don't know what this book is about, but the title. And he held it up and it was a book that's now very, very well known. At the time, it wasn't Pema Chodron's book, The Wisdom of No Escape.

And he said, you get to sit with us. We're just going to sit with us as long as we need to. There is wisdom. There is wisdom in not trying to escape it. Be with it, but be with it as openly as you can and trust that some things will shift.

And after I had seen him for about three months, I felt capable of traveling for the first time to a women's spiritual retreat center. Three wonderful women ministers ran across the country. I remember for the first time since the crash, I smiled at the beauty of their land. And I felt something shifted me. I thought, maybe, maybe I can be with beauty. Maybe I can be with my family. Maybe I can find a way to really go on.

And I got back to California, got back to the Bay Area, and I couldn't wait to call David, the name of the man with whom I'd been talking. Couldn't wait to call and tell him. There's been a softening. There's been a lightening. I left him messages, and he didn't return them, which was totally unlike him. It turned out he had had an aggressive cancer recurrence. Very shortly after I got back, the softening, the lightening, he died. He died.

What is so remarkable is that we had worked deeply together. His compassion and his presence had been so immense that he was just in his late 40s. Even his sudden death, I was able to go on. I remembered what we had said to each other. I remembered what he had said to me. I was able to go on, and I felt like, oh, that I can survive this moment.

shows how great a gift he has given me. And I almost felt that I needed to stay with my healing, this healing process to honor him. It wasn't magic. You know, there are a million things I could say, but over the next 15 years or so, I was able to lead a life without constant pain. I was not the way I was before the crash. Was that a bad thing though? I don't know. I don't know.

I wouldn't say I was a better person. I put one foot in front of the other and I just went on. I went on and I began a little bit to smile, a little bit to laugh. I talked more. I came out of PTSD. I consider myself very lucky. I had good help.

I certainly had signs of it. I was, you know, this is a medical word, but I really embrace it. I was hypervigilant. There is no question. I was super protective of my family. I mean, I was always thinking of something that could go wrong and trying to prevent it, which was not good. So I was hypervigilant. I was very sensitive to sudden movement and noise. I can intuit when I'm reading a book or watching a TV show or in a movie that

I can sense when there is about to be a car crash. And there is often a car crash. Because car crashes are used to get people's adrenaline going as readers or viewers and to enable sudden plot shifts. So everything changed because there was a car crash. I mean, it's the form of sudden death. This is incredibly common in our society. So it's all around. And I can feel it coming.

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We stick it in movies and novels and TV shows. This should not be mainly appearing in fiction and movies and TV shows when it's not getting the attention it deserves in our society. I kept on asking myself, how did it happen? How did it happen? How did it happen? Meaning that in a really straightforward, mechanical way. And one gift that David gave me as I pounded away at that question

was he pointed out to me that the answers were not coming, that if answers were ever going to come, I should just trust that they would come at the right time and move my energy, move my questioning, change my questioning to how can I help?

what started out as just hyper, you know, vigilance and intuition, there's a crash coming, became the beginnings of feeling like this isn't just a huge source of sorrow and grief for me and my own life. This is happening to thousands and thousands and thousands of people. It isn't enough for it to be in movies. We have to start talking about this.

And so after 15 years, when my stepson was grown, I felt like I need to step back from work. I'm about to turn 60. I need to ask myself, am I doing the work I should really be doing? And I wasn't consciously thinking, oh, about the crash, about the crash, about the crash, but...

I pulled myself out of full-time work and I started writing. And I wrote about my asphalt-laying experience. I wrote about coming out in a really different world of the mid-70s. And for the first time, I wrote about my crash. I shared it with some people. And they said, after I read your story, I drove home really differently.

This is my greatest fear as a driver. I worry about this all the time, especially after dark. Thank you for writing about it and getting me thinking about this more. And I thought, well, no, no, no, you shouldn't be thanking me. I'm someone who killed someone on the road. But I'm so glad you had the reaction you did. My partner was so kind. She sent it out to a number of her friends. So it wasn't just, you know, people I knew who were being nice to me. I had the opportunity of saying, oh, even people who really don't know me very well or at all, this reaches them.

In March 2015, someone who had worked with me at that women's newspaper in Boston, a beloved person around town, she was bicycling out of a grocery store parking lot and she was hit and killed. So I started sharing the writing more and talking more about what had happened to me to people who had known her. And they said how helpful it was to their driving to just kind of surface their fears and drive a little differently and

And in the coverage of her death, she was really beloved, so there was a lot of coverage of her death locally. I learned that for the first time in years, car crashes were going, auto fatalities, people dying in car crashes, were going up in our society for the first time in years. And I thought, the story, my story, maybe in this world where she's died and so many have died and the rates are going up, maybe I should really try to share this story.

The talking that does happen in our society about crashes is mostly from the families of those who've died and a lot from bicyclists who are demanding more safety on the roads. If okay with them, I'd like to add my voice as the driver in a fatal crash, saying it's not only a matter of not hurting other people, other families. Don't hurt yourself by becoming me.

I know I brought him death. I don't know if I'm allowed to remember him, but I do. He is with me. I will not cast him out of my heart. He is with me. I was there at the time. I remember him. I remember him. Your son, your child is not forgotten.

Everyone's process is different. Everyone's journey is different. But for me, I wanted to send that message. It was important because I believed for so long in sharing stories of suffering and what that can mean. I just felt like for me, I want to say, I remember he's in my heart. He will always be there.

The police report wasn't finished till May, and it's very extensive. It did tell me about the young man, a little bit about the young man, and there was one very short newspaper article. So I learned that he was from a particular part of Mexico, and I have had the feeling many, many times, the impulse to reach out to his family, and I've been stopped by a couple of things. One is...

I just don't know whether literally showing up in the life of the family of someone you've killed is a good thing. And I get very different opinions about this. Some families actually reached out to me after they read my story and heard me talk about it, who reached out to me and said, it was so good for us to hear you talk about how vividly you remember the young man you hit.

I know there are other people who do not, not, not want to have anything to do with the driver. And it's been very unclear to me, and I know it's unclear to a lot of people in this situation, for whom it's an option. I mean, some people, they are criminally charged. There is a civil suit. They do have some contact. I was not found at fault in the police report. So I did, there was not a charge. There was not a civil suit.

I would need to find his family, and that's the other hitch. I have actually tried to learn Spanish to be able to go to his part of Mexico. All I know is the region, not the town, and try to find surviving family members. This is very much an alive question for me.

There are things I learned from the crash, and I used to really kind of bristle at that terminology, like, here's what I learned from killing someone. Learn. And people would ask me, what did you learn from the crash? And I think, are you allowed to just sort of present learning from a crash? But the truth is, I learned really, really deeply over time, really deeply. We have so much less control than we think we do. So much less control. Many things, many more than we acknowledge are a mystery.

Death is really close at hand. And we do not do ourselves often any favors by forgetting that. By forgetting, for example, that a car is not just friendly and convenient and sexy and powerful. It is a death machine. It is a death machine.

Death is at hand. And I also really got, oh, everything can change in an instant. And often there is nothing you can do about it. For me, I would rather go through life being with that truth. Death is close at hand, which encompasses that young man on that road.

that death is close at hand, and I brought it. You know, I pierced that veil. I would rather be with that truth and know that truth and live in terms of that truth than live in what seems like a happier reality of, oh, or not even a conscious thought, oh, that doesn't happen. And if it does happen, it won't happen to me. It is really, really hard to live with the knowledge of how close death is, especially in our friendly, convenient cars.

I think one thing that is hard for people is that bringing death by car is something that any of us could do in a world where there is so much that we cannot control and in a world where cars really are death machines. Don't increase your chances of becoming me. Don't increase your chances of becoming me. I so, so deeply wish that had not happened. I think the fact of killing him

I will never not feel that keenly. And I feel it all the more keenly because from when I was five, I wanted to save lives. I had the idea of rescuing and being of service and being a do-gooder. I always, always hoped that in my own modest way, I would even if by just a little bit, have a life that did more good than harm.

That was a bargain I thought I had made with life. When all is said and done, I will somehow have done a little bit more good than harm. That was completely busted. So it's especially hard for me that with all those aspirations, I actually ended up taking a life. That little calculation at the end of life, oh, I did a little bit more good than harm. That ambition is out the window.

I know a lot of people, really understandably, I get this, think that I talk about my crash because I feel guilty about it. That I'm trying to make amends for it or atone for it. And I totally understand why people would think that. But what I actually feel is not quite guilt. It's grief. It's just huge grief.

even all these years later, that someone 18 at the beginning of his life died. The only way that I can live now, the best way I can live now, is to act as if, to very lightly and gently, without attachment, just keep on telling the story. It is mysterious to me whether it will ever have an impact, but it is, for me, the right work to be doing

People sometimes ask me about closure. They wish it for me or they think I've reached it, maybe. And I have to say for myself, this is not at all a judgment of anyone for whom this word has a lot of meaning and importance. That word closure isn't one that feels right for my experience. For example, whenever I hear a crash or something that sounds like a crash or

I shake. I have tears. And that could be seen as a classic sign, oh, no closure. She's as raw, sensitive, we might even say traumatized, as she was the week after the crash. My feeling is, and I don't think this is closure, I might use a word like deep acceptance.

For myself, I don't want to hear the sound of a crash and not have tears and trembling. I think, for me, that's the right way for me to respond. It doesn't look like closure. It looks like ongoing vulnerability. What I think there is is ongoing remembrance of what happened and story sharing about it.

And I think that's not closure. I think that's just being with. One thing I, even though I'm named Shane, I have had never watched the movie Shane from beginning to end until recently. I've always felt like the name really suited me. The story of Shane is that he is a do-gooder.

Having been a gunfighter for a number of years, he comes to a farming community, and even though he doesn't want to use his gunfighting skills, he ends up using those skills and killing some bad guys in order to protect the community. And in the final scene of the movie, the little boy who's come to really admire Shane is upset because it looks like Shane is leaving town.

He has used those gunfighting skills that he hoped to set aside forever. He's killed and he's leaving town. A little boy says, no, no, come back. And what Shane says is to little boy, there's no living with a killing. There is no going back from it. Right or wrong. It's a brand, a brand that sticks.

And I think that's how I hold this. He's not full of self-recrimination, although he is, he's setting himself apart. And I do that too. I think I will always be apart in some sense from the rest of the human race. There's no living with a killing. There is no going back from it, right or wrong, right or wrong. It's a brand. It's a brand that sticks. Yeah. Yeah.

Today's episode featured Shane Snowden. You can learn more about her at her website in progress, thecrashproject.org. That's thecrashproject.org. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein. If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at actuallyhappening.

You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned.

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