Huffmeister and Hempstead

All I can do now is remember being in the passenger seat of my father’s gray Camry. Looking back, I never truly felt or understood the sheer agony that arises from losing a loved one in an accident. I shudder to think of that split moment, the seconds in which it all went so wrong when the front of the car crumbles inward, the driver helpless and forced to endure it all, and their life flashes before their eyes. And never had it occurred to me that it would happen to my father. It almost happened to my mother, too. After what happened, I have an innate fear of being in a car, gnawing away at me from the inside. Whenever I sit in a car for up to 10 minutes, the flashes of a horrible scene come to my eyes. The dashboard pushed into me, my seat depressing into the floor, my blood splattering into the backseat. Then, I must sit in solace, thinking about how quickly he was taken from us. In just one day, the man who raised me for 17 years was gone. I worry about my future 34th birthday when he will have only been part of half my life. It is a stinging lesson, a glimpse into the reality of driving in America: unpredictable at best. I merely recount my experiences of my father giving me advice: “Whenever I drive, I look at the car furthest away. When its brake light is on, each car has a delay, so when the car in the front brakes, I’m ready to brake, too.” That was one thing I remember him telling me. He used to say to make sure you can see the car’s bumper when you stop behind it. I used to go with him to Discount Tire when we had to check our tire pressure monthly. Every time the car needed to be fixed, I was there with him, watching. When I could start driving, I was supposed to take it. After getting into 12th grade, I stopped going with him, and now I’m left with a heavy feeling that maybe I should have been with him more in those final days.

That day at school, after I left my Calculus class, my friend texted me about an accident that took place on Huffmeister and Hempstead, near my school. Whenever I hear about an accident, I feel remorseful, but I keep on with my day. People talked about it in class for the rest of the day, saying it was a major accident. In 7th period, I got a text from my mom telling me to cancel my afterschool activities because of a family emergency. I immediately thought about the accident that morning, and I froze, barely able to speak or concentrate. As soon as the bell rang I asked if Dad was okay, and my mom’s voice felt strained, and she didn’t answer after I asked about him. It was the most stressful moment of my life. A neighbor picked me up, and I ran home to see my mother crying, telling me that my father had passed away in a car accident on Huffmeister and Hempstead, the one everyone in school was talking about. I lost it then, unable to stop myself from screaming in anger. My father, the greatest and safest driver I had ever known, was killed in a car accident, the type of death he always believed he would never get. My mind flashed with scenarios, replaying a sort of hallucination of what had happened. I thought about the last time I saw him alive, driving me in that car he always loved like a child, waving bye to me as he drove off. He went at the worst time, my mom was going to turn 50 and my sister was going to turn 13. I was going to submit my college application with him, the day before he was killed he was so excited to read my essay and click the submit button with his hand on mine as I pressed it. I wanted to know about the other driver, I wanted to know whose fault it was. I was left with no answers to all my questions. Over time, the fog cleared. The reality set in, I would never see my father again, forced to do his final rites while not even being 18 yet. The moment that had the most effect on me was when I had to go and see the car. The police told us it wasn’t a pretty sight, but we had to face it. It was there in the lot, the car I grew up with. When I was four, I was in that car playing with my stuffed toys. When I was 12 I used to travel in that car with my father to the library. The last time I saw my father alive, I sat next to him in the passenger seat and he drove me to school. Now I had to see it in the lot, the hood pushed inward, the seat pushed under, my father’s blood splashed around the front, some drops of blood splat in the backseat. It was a true horror for me, but I couldn’t just cry as my mother did. The car went right on top of him, if the car missed him by a little he could have lived. I remember how I almost lost my mother in a car accident when I was in middle school. Why did my dad have to die? It was a constant question and it still rages in my mind.

Today I am facing more mental ordeal than ever, the details of my father’s death were told to me near the end of October, and I was left negatively affected for weeks after. The other driver was my age: 17. That detail hurt me more than a gunshot or a stab from a poisonous dagger could. My father was killed by a driver the same age as me, his son. The other driver ran a red light and was speeding. I felt enraged, my father was murdered by a boy my age who was driving a tank, a white Chevy Tahoe. Now there are legal entanglements, and I feel overwhelmed because of all that has happened. Despite that, I have now had time to think about how I can learn from this experience.

I was going to learn to drive after my 18th birthday. My father didn’t believe anyone younger than 18 or even 20 should be able to drive if they didn’t have to, and after his death, I agree with his opinion. When I first heard the age of the other driver, the first thought to dawn on me was my father’s belief in driving age. It angered me that he was ironically killed by a driver he felt was too young to handle the responsibility. Now I see he was right. When my mom drove me somewhere and another car swerved onto the lane without using the indicator or giving any warning, expecting other cars to perfectly accommodate them in their delusion, it angered me, especially after this tragedy in my family which could have been prevented if one driver had just properly abided by traffic law. That is the deepest wound I feel because of this accident: that it could have been easily avoided.

My mother was also in an accident where the car got totaled, but she luckily survived. It was when I felt so lucky; no one was injured, my mom only got a sprained neck, and only the car was totaled. My mother was taking medicine to help with a fever but felt she could go to the gym anyway. After exercising and en route home, she passed out, and the car drove into the high school campus near our house. The vehicle hit a stoplight and was totaled, but my mother was untouched. It could have been so much worse, and it happened in the high school I would go to in the future. I shudder to imagine what could have happened if my mom hit a student and caused someone’s death. It would have made our family experience hell even earlier. Though my father was not as fortunate in an accident that was not his fault, I still remember my mother’s accident as a lesson and a case where the worst scenario didn’t occur.

There was another accident I had heard of. My mom’s friend had a babysitter who took care of her children, and she was friendly to her. I do not remember that woman’s name, but I remember my parents talking about her after her death. That woman was driving with her whole family in the car with her, and a drunk driver in a pickup truck killed everyone in that car. I do not know the punishment of the other driver, though I believe his punishment was tame for something so sickening. My father called it a tragedy, saying how life would end so abruptly and without warning. Writing this today, looking back at my father’s death, it hurts even more because he suffered a similar fate. It pained me to remember this now, and this ties in with the three experiences I have, one of my father’s passing, the other of my mother’s incapacitation while driving, and the last of this woman who died with her whole family at once, killed by a drunk driver.

Facing this painful reality makes me sympathize with others whose loved ones lost their lives due to irresponsibility on the road. A part of me wishes there was a way to make everyone a safer driver with the snap of my fingers. I can’t get what I want by wishing for it, but I can express my desire to make the roads safer in this essay. I cannot sit idly by and think about what should be done to change the past or wallow in the unfairness of the world.

Deaths on the road are inevitable, and even if we educate all people about minimizing risks while on the road it only takes one driver to cause a collision and a death. Driver education is important, yes, but driver education with an effective teaching method is important. I believe the state should be more involved in creating overall structure within the driving schools in the nation, focusing on having students understand the real consequences of not following the road laws provided to us. For me, my father’s death serves as a lesson, and I am going to be heavily cautious on the road. However, for most people who have not experienced the reality or pain caused by negligent driving, I believe there should be a focus on checking drivers and their habits yearly at least, as well as keeping a watch for signs early on that could help indicate that a driver is not fit for their responsibility. However, this will not completely stop accidents and deaths resulting from unintentional mistakes. I must admit that accidents will happen, and deaths will occur, but those accidents that are truly no one’s fault should be considered as such: accidents. I find education as a sacred aspect of life, the beauty of humanity comes from being educated about all aspects of life, and driver education is very important in making our roads safer. While Houston does have more dangerous roads than most cities, driver education is our first front in making all drivers uniformly understand their responsibility and put that effort towards safer roads. Some bad apples exist in society, mainly those around my age who joyride or ignore the rules. The greatest lesson comes after an accident for some people, unfortunately, but the resulting death as it happened with my father scars others’ lives. Driver education first lets people understand their responsibility and the general range of student drivers should understand the severity of an accident should one occur, so they avoid it.

One question that has raced through my mind in the last month has been concerning reducing deaths in car accidents. It pains me greatly to know my father had to go through such a brutal type of death, but this experience should serve as my drive, not my fall. With increased determination for the future, I pondered on the ways we can reduce deaths. As our cars begin to advance in vehicle safety technology will truly aid in reducing deaths, but not all can remain up to date with the cars of today. Another approach that can be taken to reduce deaths should be to improve roads themselves. When I sit in the car on the same roads 18-wheelers drive on, or with big cars like the one that hit my father, I am led to feel anxious in the case of an accident. The cars of greater mass will lead to a higher collision, and while both cars will experience the same force according to Newton’s third law that all forces in collisions are equal and opposite, the smaller car will experience more damage and the occupant is more likely to die. This drives me to believe that our roads should be organized so that different cars can be on certain routes. Simply put, there should be big car roads and small car roads along with an extra road type for larger commercial trucks like 18-wheelers. I believe it leads to safer roads since in the case of a collision both cars will experience forces that should not cause extreme injury unless in a case where one driver was speeding. Even so, distributing the types of vehicles allowed on certain roads could make roads safer, even though it will cause routes to take longer or will make it less efficient to go from place to place. I find it a fitting sacrifice to have slightly longer routes for certain vehicle types to maintain safe roads. Another option can be to foster community engagement in making the roads safer, making a shared goal to have safer roads. We must also increase our use of data analytics and predictive modeling to determine areas where crashes happen more often, and efforts must allocated to detecting any defects in infrastructure that could cause the accidents and resolve them quickly. As an aspiring engineering student, I look forward to making our city more like a “Smart City” concept of the future. The idea of developing our city’s infrastructure can surely make our rate of fatal car accidents decrease. Dynamic traffic light timing can be implemented here, for example, to adapt to the shifting conditions of the road, both reducing delays and maybe preventing fatal accidents near stoplights from occurring. I know that if there had been an advanced stoplight that may have detected the Tahoe speeding toward the crossroad, my father’s signal could have seen that a possibility of an accident would occur and would have remained red until the Tahoe passed with police pursuing him sometime later for speeding and running a red light. Oh, how I wish that could have been a reality, but I am only left to express my ideas, using my mind to dream up anything that could have stopped an unfortunate event long passed.

The greatest gift is to learn from our experiences and to use them to shape us and our future goals. I am molded by my experiences, by circumstances out of my control, to build a safer future, and while I’d always hoped to help the world in some way before, I am now pushed to be a responsible driver myself, to take the advice my father gave me on driving before he passed to heart and be like he was: a lawful driver on an uncertain path. It is through this lesson that I understand the effect even one mistake on the road can have, and I am dedicated to standing against those who, in their carelessness, get a person killed. I have to come out of this with a heart of iron, I don’t want more to go through this, though I know there will be more unfortunate souls who do. I don’t want to be responsible for making more share this pain.