In church today, the women’s group was having a discussion about the value of service.
One friend, probably prompted by a wedding invitation that had just arrived in the mail, brought up the memory of John T’s accident. Of all the things people had done to rally around his family. Of how much of a difference it had made to everybody to be actively involved in praying and in reaching out to try to make the burden easier on the parents, who were driving to Children’s Hospital in Oakland, 70 minutes each way across the worst of Bay Area traffic, every day for three months. (This is before they added Lucile Packard Children’s onto Stanford.) Of how close everybody felt to everybody.
I looked around and realized how few of the people in the room had lived here long enough to carry memories of that terrible time. John had been 12, crossing a busy street near his home one afternoon on the green (his brother was with him) and they had been hit by an older woman who was too drunk to know she’d hit them, much less that her light had been red.
His brother had a broken leg, but John…Â Somehow, he was still alive, at least, but there was no medical expectation that he would ever be anything more than that again.
But he was one of the lucky few who beat the odds. He woke up from his coma after six weeks, not remembering even his family. He had to relearn everything.
They said he wouldn’t walk, they said he wouldn’t talk, but he did. Twenty years later, he still has a slight limp and it frustrates him that he’s a little slow at times, but he’s a good, kind soul, the kind who, when you meet, you instantly know you are in the presence of a friend.
There was intense joy when he was able to go off to college, and now those invitations showing up are happily announcing his coming wedding.
The woman teaching today’s lesson, someone younger who hadn’t been here back in the day, thought she was going to change the subject now. But I raised my hand and told a part of the story the others didn’t know:
About ten or twelve years afterwards, I was stopped in the dark on that same road within a block of where John had been hit. It was a drunk driver checkpoint, and cops were checking out each car one by one. There was quite a backup.
I thought about it. It took me a few days. But the feeling would not let go of me, and I finally sat down and wrote a letter and put it in the mailbox to the police department in town, telling them thank you for that checkpoint and telling them it was so important to me that they do that. I knew they got a lot of flack for those, and I wanted to be a voice of support.
And then I said why. I ended it by saying John had beaten the odds and was in college now.
I got a letter back. It was from the then-chief of police. He told me this:
I am the cop who had to go knock on that child’s door and tell his parents what had happened to him.
And I never knew how it all came out.
Thank you.