It was unclear from my earlier report, but the Mercedes driver that caused the horrific crash on 2222 fled the scene. The police found him and have interviewed him. No charges have been filed at this time. Possible charges range from a traffic citation to a felony charge for failing to stop and render aid.
Yeah, I have some thoughts about that, if anybody cares.
After work Thursday, I went to pick-up my dad and run him to the grocery store. While I was driving to his apartment, I thought about how I have been struggling with some heavy thoughts and feelings having to do with my experience on Tuesday morning. I have been wondering how those thoughts would shake-out in my mind. How and where would I shelve them in order to move on? Well, it suddenly dawned on me that I had an expert right under my nose. What had I been thinking? All I had to do was ask my father. My dad worked the roads around San Antonio as a DPS trooper from 1960-1977. He must have seen it all.
He had.
After we had run his errand, I asked him if he had ever had any trouble dealing with fatalities when he was on the road. He hadn’t been on the road as a trooper in almost 30 years, but his voice was pained as he talked to me about it. He had seen things that were ghastly, but admitted that he never much talked about them, even to my mother. He said that maybe he had talked to her about two or three particularly grisly suicides, but that was all. He compartmentalized most of it and cleaned up the rest with gallows humor. How awful. It made me very sad for him. Then he said something that really dropped the hammer on my perspective. He said, “I used to have a DPS record; I don’t know if it still stands or not. In 1963, I personally worked 144 fatalities on Loop 13 in San Antonio.” I didn’t know what to say. Dear God, how does somebody do that?
He did it the hard way, but I have been trying to talk (and write) my way out of it.
Several friends have told me that there must be some reason for me to have been there. I admit that the idea resonates strongly with me. Did I provide some sort of comfort for the driver? I addressed him directly and prayed for him under my breath. Did my grandmother know that I was there when she took her last breath? Will I provide some sort of comfort for his family? I called the funeral home on Thursday and asked them to give the family my contact information, in case they would like to speak with me about what happened. I keep thinking about my deeply felt belief that nobody should die alone. Denise died alone. I think about the subject of my film Luna. I think about the times I have come upon other accidents, sometimes when it was too late. I think about the times I have pulled a wounded animal off the road and sat with it while it died. I keep thinking about the angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, as they provide silent compassion for the anguished, lost, broken, and dying.
“I saw it all clearly: the Mercedes, the pool of oil…”
As a Christian, I have been taught the concept that I am helpless and completely dependant on God. I am taught that I can do nothing without the strength and grace given to me through Jesus Christ. I understand and believe this. But it is a state of perfection, if you will, that I rarely actually achieve. My pride, my ego, sin, Satan, and the secular world all conspire to convince me that I don’t need God. Or, that I only need God for the really hard stuff. I sabotage my own faith by falling into the trap of believing that I actually have some strength of my own and that I don’t need God in every single moment of my life.
But when I have been present at the death of another, I have been immediately taken to a place of full awareness of my utter helplessness. In that moment of death, like an alcoholic’s moment of clarity, I believe that God gives me a moment, a moment of ultimate clarity, perfect clarity of the truth – the truth of his sovereignty, the truth of my eternal life, the truth that I am helpless, the truth of his love, and the truth that he will comfort me. Perhaps he makes me perfect in that moment of death, so that I might walk with the dying on hallowed ground and approach with them a doorway through which they pass, but I do not. I don’t know. But I do believe that God is trying to show me the way of humility and dependance. Whatever it is, God’s will be done in my life.
Amen.
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