The Story

I could write a whole book using this experience. I guess that's where focus comes from. Something to tie it all together. Something significant enough to yield perspective.

Why do people only take you seriously if it's something serious?

Why couldn't a trip to the grocery store be an event to tie a life together? I suppose there's something to be said for people showing their true colors in a crisis. My true colors are nonexistent. I am what is needed.

The book would start with the crash. That's the important part. I would talk about how I saw his wheel overlap the one in front of him, how I saw him wiggle. How I saw contact. How he jerked his bike away, exactly like everyone does. How he panicked, and overcompensated for his too-sudden reaction.

When I saw him crash, all I thought was "yup, I saw that coming." I've seen it before. I will see it again. People rub wheels. The person behind falls over. That's how it works. It almost always happens in those three steps. Contact, jerk away, overcompensate and fall. I braked, ready to tend to some road rash.

Then the car hit him.

I hadn't even heard it. I went from "well, now he knows what happens when you rub wheels" to "oh shit, he's dead" in one second.

I could have a flashback to how people fall off bikes all the time. How my girlfriend fell into a ditch on one of her first group rides. How she got up trembling. I enjoyed supporting her then. I had a lot of supporting to do now.

I ran over. The blood was already everywhere. When I saw it coming out of his mouth, I knew the internal damage was too much. Then I saw his head, and I figured he was probably never even awake.
Blood everywhere. Like I said in my previous post.

Cyclists hurt themselves all the time. It seems they only really die when vehicles get involved.

People on facebook are already using this as a prop for their own propaganda. Kim West says it's bikers versus cars, and others are agreeing.

I have no idea how fast the lady was going that hit him. Probably over the speed limit. She was passing in a no passing zone. I honestly don't think either of those things had much to do with anything. A car could just as easily have been coming from the other direction. He could have rubbed wheels in a passing zone.

This wasn't anyone's fault. It was everyone's fault. I don't care which. They mean the same thing.

I asked my dad if there was anything I could do. He said I didn't have to do anything, and that I was there too. I responded that I assumed he felt more responsible than I did. He said "the buck stops with me." I said, "The buck stops with you, with the kid, with his parents, with the motorist, with everyone in the group. Everyone gets a penny."

I will gladly bear my penny. Nobody should carry 100 percent.

A girl (can I say girl, when she was probably around my age?) got out of one of the first few cars to stop and said she was a medic (or had some training, or something like that). I skipped some stuff. I skipped how my dad was giving mouth to mouth, coated with blood. On our ride home I wondered how he would eat after that taste. I feel awkward writing this because I don't want him to think about it. I skipped over how I took the phone from my borderline-hysteric mother and tried to give information. How I dropped the phone as soon as the lady on the line said I could and started giving chest compressions. I skipped how it was the worst tease watching the vacuum I created suck air back in, making it look like he was breathing.

The girl took over for me, but not before she said "oh my god, he's just a kid." I wondered why it mattered. Would it be more reasonable to see me lying there? My parents? How old does a person have to be to die? I thought I could write a poem all about that one line. I still might.

I was happy to leave the kid. I didn't feel selfish. I almost wrote I felt selfish. The truth is, the kid didn't matter. My mom mattered. The twin sister mattered. The parents mattered. My dad mattered, but he was busy, and I knew he could matter in a little while.

I couldn't decide whether to just hug my mom or give her tasks to try and keep her busy. I alternated. I hugged her first.

My mantra became "It wasn't your fault; it wasn't anybody's fault." Believing in determinism sure helps sometimes, when it's not busy being the most depressing thought in my head. After we hugged for a while, I told her we needed to take care of the girl. Nobody knew what that meant. My mom did a good job. She coated everything in the right language. She even managed to compliment the girl's riding, which for some reason seemed to help. I don't know why. I would not have been comforted. I am not normal. That is a theme for my book.

I also would have seen through the language. She asked, "will he be okay?" and was met with "they're doing everything they can," and "help is on the way." Translation: No. She was not bilingual. When she figured out what the words meant fifteen minutes later, her scream hit me. I paused. If I had a heart, it would have broken.

 I could flashback to how I have wanted to cry so many times in my life. How I cherished the times I did cry, because it felt like I was finally doing what I was supposed to. Once, I started crying and I just kept thinking of sad things in an effort to keep going. The most effective, though, was just repeating what had set me off in the first place. My mom had told me she needed to be able to control me. That idea offended me to my core. It shook me. I had genuinely believed that the whole process was supposed to be a gradual building toward adulthood (read: freedom). Apparently, it had all been a struggle for control. A battle to limit liability. I value independence. I could tie this in to the ongoing narrative by saying how I believe everyone should get to make their own decisions, no matter how stupid. Or admit that my mom may have been right, because I survived, and the freedom this kid was granted terminated with his, well, termination. I don't think she was right though. But it's a good segue. And people like hearing that kids don't know better than their parents. Reinforcing the status quo and all that.

I haven't cried since a week or two after my girlfriend broke up with me. I tried to make myself cry right after the phone call ended, but again, it happened exactly as I had imagined. It's hard to cry when things go as expected. And when things happen over the phone. I spend a lot of time constructing hypotheticals and picturing how I would react to them. My reaction was not as planned when it came to love. Despite having braced myself, that pillar being gone needed more compensation than I could provide, and after weeks of sleep-deprived striving, searching for answers, I succumbed. I knew time was the only real solution, but time has a funny way of not being rushed. Watching a kid die, though, went exactly according to my imagined scenarios. So, no tears. My heart wrenched, then carried on through the second and third screams.

The ambulance took forever to get there. The police all knew he was dead, but wouldn't tell his twin sister until the parents showed up. Which meant her hopes were somehow surviving. I knew that was bad. I didn't do anything. I think I should have. If anyone should have, it was me. He had a sheet over him for a while before the parents showed up. The screams occurred as I was scrubbing blood into my hands. Some of it came off. The rest turned brown.

Will my dad's glasses always be the glasses he had to wipe blood off of? Or is he like me? Are they just glasses?

Our consoling/distracting/misleading of the girl was over. I hugged my mom. I rationalized in response to whatever she said.

I pointed out that the day before she had asked me how I couldn't believe in God (I found a free place to stay next year, or rather, it found me, like things usually do). I had responded with "what about the kids he kills?" That might be too perfect, even for a book. The truth is stupid that way.

The riders powwowed. We briefly discussed what had happened. I stuck to my mantra: nobody's fault, everybody's fault. We tried to figure out whose wheel he hit. I advocated for "he hit 1/7 of all of our wheels." The group seemed okay with that. It was my dad's wheel. I forgot about that, because he wasn't in our powwow. I looked up, and he was with the parents. I wondered if that was a task to distract my mom. She declined. I walked over. My dad was crying. I finally felt a bit weird for not crying. We awkwardly put our arms around each other. A friend once expressed his surprise at the Pesch family touching, as though it was a rare observation of an endangered species. We don't have much practice. Maybe this is our chance to get good.

I walked a few steps and asked what my dad had said. He didn't have the words. I asked if I should say something. He said there weren't words. I told him to take care of mom and turned back around anyway. The dad was stone-faced. Was he like me? Or was he in shock? Or was he some other variety? I approached and he asked me if I saw what happened. I told him everything, and he double checked that the kid had crashed before he was hit. I confirmed. He nodded. Then things got awkward. I am great at relaying facts. Not great at relaying condolences. I started by being defensive, because that's obviously what a grieving parent wants to hear. I absolved my parents of responsibility, and then, coming to my senses, said we would do anything we could for them. I bid a retreat. It wasn't hasty. I clenched my fists because I knew I could have done better, but I knew turning around was not an option.

I found the girl who had jumped in. I thanked her. I figured she was the one who had most likely been overlooked. She was surprised. I felt good again.

The group was fragmenting. I tracked down bicycles. My dad's was the hardest. He had thrown it eight feet into a ditch. I hadn't seen that part. I could only imagine his reaction. I didn't want to imagine it in too much detail. My mind is safer than putting myself in his. This held true for the parents. It holds true even for my future self. I can induce panic attacks in myself just by imagining how scared I will be when I die. I can skirt the edge of despair by imagining my parent's dying. I alternate between hoping I die first and my normal self-interest. I have gotten better at living in the present. I feel guilty for living in the present. I owe it to myself to prepare for these things like I have for children dying and for blood pouring out of bodies. Why are they so much harder?

I ran the girl's bike up the road to a minivan. I found my mom's helmet across the road. We were going to ride back. I wanted to ride back. I wanted to do something. A police officer asked for a final statement. I gave it. I told the story again. He looked helpless. He kept asking to hold our bikes, as if having his hands full would make him less useless. We had things under control. He still had blue rubber gloves on. When he finished, I thanked him for everything (nothing?) and reached out to shake his hand. He hesitated. I could see him thinking he didn't want to get my hands dirty in case his gloves were dirty. He saw me thinking come on man, like you're going to get my hands dirty? Did you not see my hands? We shook. We rode off.

Or, we tried to ride off. Our shoes didn't fit our pedals. We had driven rocks and mud into them. I cleaned my mom's shoes like my sister used to clean horses' hooves. The same for my dad. They took off. It was just me and the police officer. I propped my foot on my bike seat and cleaned my cleats out. I thought about saying See, my hands are dirty now anyway. I didn't. Just rode off.

I tried to muster up disgust when I saw a news camera, but I didn't care that much. Sure, why not.

We talked a bit, though we didn't really say anything.

I stuck to my mantra. Accidents happen all the time. Another case of wrong place, wrong time.

The worst was when silence fell. I got to thinking. It turned out, I was hungry. I broke the ice, "Sooo... I'm not really sure how to say this..." My mom just nodded, ready for things to "get real." "But what do we want for dinner?" She laughed. She caught herself. She said she wasn't eating.

Eventually I wound up making pizza. I advocate for continuing on with our lives as normal. I know I can. It's harder when they can't, but I think I can manage anyway. In the meantime, I will do everything I can to make things easier until they are as close to normal as possible. Just bear our pennies and move on.

There were couple of attempts to elicit from me some reaction. I heard my dad tell my mom I was acting strong. My mom told me I didn't need to. I'm not. I asked my dad if he wanted to talk. He asked me if I wanted to talk. I said we all know I don't talk. Obviously what I meant is that I do my talking here.

And that's pretty much the story of how my night went. Like I said in my other post, it feels so weird that it's a story. It's already just a thing I've experienced. Is this me separating myself, compartmentalizing? It doesn't feel like it. Am I too rational? It feels like it. But it sure comes in handy sometimes.

If I've made this sound too self-aggrandizing I apologize. I don't mean to take away from the amazing things other people did in this crisis. My dad was incredible, and the other members of our group all did the best they could and performed admirably in my opinion. I can't imagine what the family is going through, and I don't want to. It's possible that part of the reason I'm so eager to do things for people is that this has made me appreciate my family more, but I'm not sure about that yet. I may write more, I may not. I might not return to this subject for a long time. I might write 20 pages tomorrow. If ever there was a time to play it by ear, I think this is it.

When Sarah joined the military I sometimes wondered what she would do if she saw action and had to watch someone die. I never thought my hands would be bloody first. Weird how things work out.

I'm afraid people won't think I'm actually okay. My mom asked, and I responded with "I am as okay as I ever was." Which is true. Which may have frightened her a bit. It's like how you give work to busy people because they know how to get work done. Give the shit to me. I'm going through it in my own head enough anyway that if anyone is equipped for it, it's me.

If you have questions or comments, you know how to reach me.

Trauma

Today I watched a 14 year-old boy die. (It's amazing how fast that has gone from an adrenaline-filled, frantic state to me already thinking "yeah, that's a thing that has happened in my life.")

I have never witnessed someone dying before. It was exactly as I thought it would be. Which is not reassuring. It comported with my preconceptions, right down to the blood flowing from his mouth.

(Will all manners of dying be exactly as I imagined?)

I have had bloody hands before, but this was different.

The paramedics thought I had been injured because of the blood running down my leg from my knee. But I had been kneeling in his blood. I was fine.

That's a problem, isn't it? I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be fine.

I have written eight notes in my phone. There are so many poems. But I don't feel like it's really my experience. I could use this, use the description, the fact that something "traumatic" finally happened in my life, and I know I could make it sympathetic. I could write compelling messages. Perhaps I'm not a writer.

I watched a twin sister lose half of herself. I watched a stone-faced father. I told him the whole story.

I watched my father be a hero. Unfortunately, heroes at the wrong time don't have their stories told. I will tell the whole story at some point. But I don't want to forget the sheer respect and admiration I felt for my dad.

People keep saying I don't have to act strong. It's not an act. But I am also very aware I am not strong.

My mom feels guilty for not feeling even worse than she does. She has cried. I have not. I don't feel guilty.

I revel in consoling people. It feels good to know I feel better than someone. I do everything I can for them as penance.

Do other writers feel guilty for telling stories, knowing that the description of events will produce emotions they didn't actually feel?

I knew him for all of 45 minutes. I washed his blood from my body, but it just turned brown. The stains are obviously metaphoric, but right now they are too literal to be turned into metaphor.

I heard the scream of a 14 year-old girl so clearly. I wonder if I should have prepared her for the news. I knew he was dead as soon as I saw the car go over him. None of us wanted to say what we all knew. Somehow, that was the parents' job. As if they didn't have enough on their hands.

We all knew.

That didn't stop my dad from doing everything he could. I pumped on a dead chest for a while.

Squeezing the air out with blood.

I watched the abdomen turn purple and swell. All he was was blood.

I forced a bit more blood out before a car stopped and a medic jumped out. I was waiting for an excuse to leave. There wasn't a point to what I was doing. I could still help my mom. I did a lot of hugging. I held a twin sister. I had to move her head to my other shoulder so she couldn't look at the scene. I shielded her even more carefully when the pulled the sheet over him.

She pleaded to wake up from her dream.

I've echoed that plea so many times.

The dream continues.

And weirdly, I am fine.