It was to be a pleasant weekend, a pre-Easter visit with my parents and children in Lubbock. I missed my kids very much and was anxious to see everyone. Robert and Brandie were coming home to Dallas later that summer, but we needed see each other. We had been separated for almost a full year. Full of excitement, I was eager for the kids to see their new sister, and for Mom and Dad to meet their newest grandchild.
My brother’s wife, Kathy and I drove to Lubbock from Dallas with Tina Marie safely nestled in her infant seat in the back seat. It was Friday, April 6th,1979. The trip was pleasant, without incident though tiring. When we arrived at my parent’s home that evening, Robert, Brandie, and Tina, squealed with delight upon seeing each other for the first time. Everyone was happy, laughing, giving and receiving hugs and kisses. But we were really exhausted, so all retired early to could get an early start visiting in the the morning.
Mom, Kathy, and I, lounging by the swimming pool Saturday morning were warmed by the golden sunshine. Robert and Brandie, splashing water everywhere, would dive and resurface showing off their swimming skills to their baby sister…every few minutes stopping their play long enough to give us a wet kiss or hug.
The “big girls” caught up on all the family gossip, talking and laughing, while Papa worked in his garden. Tina and her Grandma wasted no time falling in love, instantly recognizing a deep kinship within one another. Straight away, they were playing and cooing at each other. Both pairs of crystalline blue eyes, so alike, connected in undeniable affinity and affection.
That Saturday was the only day we were all together. Mom and I and all four of my babies. Unknowingly three weeks pregnant with Pamelia, I was so content that beautifully sunny, spring day.
Around five that afternoon, we decided to drive downtown to buy hamburgers for supper. Mom, driving, chatted with Kathy, sitting in the passenger seat. I sat in back, Robert on my left, Tina in my lap, and Brandie on my right. I’m still haunted by how cheerful and content we all were, for those few minutes. Reaching the end of the block, everything quickly changed.
Tina, giggling, bouncing on my knee, Robert tickling her hand, Brandie pursing her mouth, making little baby noises. Tina”s laugh, such a darling little laugh. Then a deafening explosion, a sudden shrill scraping noise, everything turning, rolling, upside down, disintegrating.
I opened my eyes to complete chaos. A churning, whirling roar with smoke and glass filling the air; a nightmare. Blinking to clear my vision, I witnessed a large arm come through the driver window. Moving in slow motion, a huge hand reached down and turned off the ignition.
Distant voices filled with panic and confusion added to our fear. Kathy’s head leaning to the right, towards a window no longer there. The front seat and the left back door were a tangled mash of torn metal, foam and fabric, covering Robert’s lower body, pinning him to the seat, legs completely hidden.
Brandie covered in glass, her little hips wedged against the right back door, had the entire weight of my body thrown on top of her.
I frantically searched for Tina, trying to see over my skinned knee, or what I thought was a knee protruding from my jeans. In the floorboard my little baby was lying very still, quickly turning blue. I tried to reach her, screaming for someone to help us, to help my babies.
I couldn’t move, my body was pinned to the seat by my own mangled leg. My eyes searched for Momma, screaming for her.“Momma! Momma?” And then, I saw her. My mother’s head, lying in Kathy’s lap was almost completely severed from her body.
What had happened? Everything was moving in slow motion, indistinguishable voices…loud but muffled…..I couldn’t understand what the voices were saying. What? What had we done? Wailing , frightened, and painful sounds coming from my Daddy. I had never heard sounds like that from him in my life. “That’s my wife in there! That’s my wife! Those are my grand babies!”
From his beautiful garden, in his perfectly manicured back yard, Dad had heard the deafening impact. Daddy had felt the shock of the collision, the violent encounter that had taken his wife from him. He had run as fast as he could down to the corner where he saw Mom’s disfigured body.
There in the smashed ruins of the vehicle lay the mother of his children, his partner in life for forty years. Lying mutilated before his eyes, Dad could not contain himself. His pitiful, heartbroken cries were unbearable to hear. I can only imagine the agony, loneliness, and grief he felt for the remainder of his life.
Mom had stopped at the stop sign posted at the intersection a block from their house. The intersecting road was a very busy highway. Mom, being very short and plump, had leaned forward looking from left to right, when the fast moving automobile smashed into our car, striking broadside on the driver side.
Apparently, letting her foot off the brake just enough to slowly creep forward, placed us too far into the line of oncoming traffic. Two young women occupied the car that collided with us. Since there were no skid marks, it was evident they had not seen our car. Fortunately, both young women suffered only cuts and bruises, even though the police estimated the speed of their vehicle at about sixty-five mph.
The brake pedal in our car bent over onto the accelerator, causing our vehicle take off. The car sped directly onto the highway before striking the center meridian. Witnesses to the accident reported that our car went airborne, before rolling and grinding to a stop right side up in a field of cotton. We plowed dirt for a quarter of a mile.
The sounds I had heard were the initial impact, the rasping of the wheels in the dirt field, and the roaring of the engine before the key in the ignition was turned off.
James had stayed in Dallas that weekend, thankfully choosing fishing over “tagging along with the girls”. When notified by his family, that we had been seriously injured in an automobile accident, he and a friend, drove frantically to Lubbock to be with us.
Mom had died instantly. Brandie, Tina, and I were in one hospital, while Robert had been taken to another hospital across town. Amazingly, Robert’s only physical injury occurred when his left leg was severely pierced by the jaws-of-life while he was being extricated from the mangled vehicle. This scar was to be an important one, an identifying mark later in his life.
Brandie had suffered a broken pelvis and cuts from the broken glass. But, worse than the physical injuries, those kids were very traumatized by the loss of their Grandmother. I had sustained a compound fracture of the left femur, lacerations on the forhead and some internal injuries. Except for the initial grogginess caused by impact, I remember that day with crystal clarity.
I did have hope that Tina would survive, and as the hospital emergency staff began cutting into my bluejeans, I heard a baby cry out. Thinking the cry may be from Tina, I asked a nurse if that was my baby crying. Whispering, she said “No, honey, that’s not your baby. Your baby is really, really sick.” I could tell from the expression on her face, that Tina was not going home again.
Robert and Brandie’s injured bodies would heal, but the emotional wounds of loosing the grandmother who been like a mother to them, would leave deeply and long-lasting broken hearts. Our precious baby never regained consciousness, and was taken off her ventilator eight days later. On Easter Sunday, April 15, 1979, Tina Marie returned…from whence she came.
There are many details regarding the accident, such as the physical healing process of our injuries, that are not crucial to this discourse. The emotional effects on all of us are important, because wounds inflicted on the psyche, are more often scars that a person must bear for the remainder of their existence on this earth.
I don’t want to get too hung up on the grief and the sadness of it; that is just not a place I want to go. I will tell you this, though, there was a reason Robert, Brandie, Kathy and I survived that accident.
After about a month of physical recovery in Dad’s home, I returned to Dallas on crutches. I felt so alone without my children. Robert and Brandie were being tutored in my Dad’s home in order to finish the school year, and would return to Dallas in July. It was a very confusing and lonely time for them……it was a very lonely time for all of us.
Brokenheartedly, I began a somewhat skeptical, but honest spiritual journey; my private quest for “truth”. Deeply troubled by Mom and Tina’s deaths, and taking no time to properly grieve, I was besieged by guilt, brimming with anger, and wretchedly dispirited. Bitterness was waiting around the corner, insidiously prepared to slam the door of my heart; to cement it permanently with a seal of self-pity.
My mind, in perpetual overdrive, tried to determine some reason……any purpose which could possibly be served by their deaths. Especially Tina! She was so very young! Children are not supposed to die before their parents, are they? How could the candle of my baby’s life, that brilliant, wonderful flame, flicker and die, leaving only a small vaporous haze of who she had been? Why? Was I being punished for my misdeeds? Was the Almighty, whomever He was, angry with me? I was definitely not a saint, by any means, but what could I have possibly done to deserve this kind of pain?
Deciding Tina and Mom had to be somewhere, I made up my mind that wherever they were, I was going to get there, too. I was going to join them. I began attending various churches, physically and mentally performing properly all of the “established” acts, and “necessary” tasks, to be “born again”, and “saved”.
I was sprinkled, dunked, dipped, and darn near drowned. Still, I felt no great spiritual awakening. I felt the “truth” was there, but it seemed elusive, slightly out of reach, beyond my mental ability, or physical power to get hold of it. Kind of like “just on the tip of my tongue”. I did not feel that I was saved.
I was a newborn babe, and needed to be fed. My Bible, became very important to me. I pored over it, searching out specific passages of redemption, every message of forgiveness, and all reason for life. A voice within me softly whispering that all truth, the answer of eternity, was embodied in those pages.
My hit-and-miss attempts at religion were not working very well. I wanted to believe. I needed to know for sure! I knew God was real. He had to be! If there was no living God, then what was the point of being here at all? Could there be any other valid reason for life? Any reason at all? If God was not alive, I might as well have died, too.
It would be several years before I got a clue of God’s reasoning for anything. Meanwhile, I came to the conclusion that some people had to be” knocked off their high horses” and “have their noses rubbed in it”. For years, I thought that was true… and worse yet, I just knew that I must be one of those people.
Before I would gain any spiritual peace, or true knowledge of the One I was to call Lord, there were miles and miles to go, and many more storms to weather.
life
