When It's Not Us

By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

It is early last summer and we are on a road trip.  

Not fifteen minutes on the interstate, it’s the usual routine: according to me, my husband is driving too close, too fast. According to him, I need to relax. 

Please, he says to me, not wanting to engage in the argument we’ve had on repeat for the last twenty years. Please. Remember I drive in this traffic everyday; remember who doesn’t have your driving record; remember I do realize our whole family is in this car and no, I really do not want to get in an accident and kill us all. 

Years ago, straight out of college, I began working as a nurse on a burn and trauma intensive care unit. Every day, every shift, every patient I took care of would lay in their hospital bed connected to tubes and drips and drains because something they didn’t want, expect, or plan to happen, happened. House fires. Assaults. Falls. I began to see danger everywhere.

For example, Chris and I would drive down the road, maybe headed to the cheap-seats on a mid-week date night, and a car would start to turn right from another road into ours. I would not simply be peripherally aware the car could swerve and crash into us, I’d actually anticipate and react to the collision—gasping and bracing—for a very real, yet totally non-existent threat. 

“We’re not going to get in a car accident every time we drive,” Chris would say.   

And I’d gesture vaguely in the air in obvious reference to all the people on my unit in traction, on a ventilator, and on a morphine drip then quip, “That’s what they all thought too!”

But the years passed and I stopped anticipating tragedy. Everywhere, that is, except for in the car. 

So there we are, back last summer, driving south in four lanes of heavy traffic. 

In reply to my husband’s please, I say a please of my own. 

Please consider all I’ve seen in my work. Please remind yourself I’m actually scared, not unreasonable. Please, concede that accidents do happen (and remember that severity of injury decreases proportionally to a decrease in speed).

So Chris slows down. A little. And I relax, a little. The kids chatter in the back and we all settle in for the duration. 

An hour or so later, the kids ask to watch a movie on the entertainment system we swore all those years ago, should we ever become parents, that we’d never need and never want. (We’ll play I-Spy and 20 Questions and the License Plate game …) Very over our younger, childless selves, we say an emphatic yes and do our best minivan flex by having them wear headphones and we, in what feels like actual magic, press the right buttons to start an audiobook for us while the movie plays for them.   

Chris and I dive into our nerdy fact-filled non-fiction bestseller but quickly realize the author quotes an alarming number of people who have very serious potty mouths. With each swear, I cringe, desperately fearful the kids will hear. I can’t help myself from turning around and double-checking they’re paying us no attention.    

After one particularly colorful rant, I wave to get my oldest daughter’s attention and give her a “thumbs up.” She lifts the right side of her headphones and I say, “You okay?” 

I get a quick ‘yeah’ and her eyes return to the screen. 

Before I turn back around, Chris starts to yell, “Woah, WOAH, WOAH!” 

Time stops, but only for a second. Then it warps, twists what isn’t happening into what is; buckles around what could be in front, behind, and beside us, but we don’t know yet. We see smoke, but don’t know its source. With hands at two and ten, Chris slams on the brakes, stays in our lane. Speed and time decelerate respectively. The car in front of us, frame by frame, peels off to the right. Then the van that was once in front of them, is now in front of us. 

Then CRASHjamPop! it jumps to a stop.  

Brakes shriek. I scream. 

But there is no impact. 

I open my eyes and the entire interstate is stunned. We are just feet away from the car in front of us. The two collided cars smoke, their airbags deflate. Time shakes itself out, cracks its neck, and begins again like normal. 

“Oh my God,” I breathe, adrenaline pooling into my hands. 

“Call 9-1-1,” Chris says. 

I look back. Four kids. All safe. Thank God. 

“What do you want to do?” Chris asks. Given my training and his experience with me helping in similar situations in the past, he wants to know if I’m getting out of the car. But my mind is not connecting with my body. I’m trying to stop our book, make the call, but I cannot remember how. This phone I use all day everyday is suddenly, foreign territory. I don’t know what to press. I’m a dog chewing jello. “What do you want to do?” he asks again. 

“Just pull over,” I whisper.  

Traffic beside us begins to crawl forward and we inch past the crash we were almost a part of. Everyone we can see is conscious. A man in a white tee undershirt runs from the side of the road toward the cars. Another man joins him. 

When we get to the shoulder, Chris asks me one last time, “What do you want to do?” I look back again at the kids. Three of them sit quiet, stunned, looking at me with wide eyes. The youngest is still watching the movie and her oblivion is the heartbreak of childhood. 

“You guys okay?” I ask with a fake shaking smile. Yes, they all answer. 

“We’re okay,” I say, declarative. Grateful. “We can go,” I whisper. But we’re not quite ready to keep driving. We pause and take in the scene.  

The hood of the van in front of us snarls accordion-like together with the hood of the second car. But this doesn’t make sense to me. It all happened so slow and so fast, but I didn’t see anyone spinning.

“How ...” I ask, “... how was that a head on collision?” 

It takes Chris a few seconds to answer. Without looking at me, he says out the window, “He flipped over the median, Sonya.”

The smoke? From the northbound side of traffic. 

The brakes? Ours.

The seconds that chopped themselves into little pieces so the car in front of us could react, and allow him to react? Providence. 

“He what?” I say. “You saw that car flip over—from the other side of the highway?” 

Of all the insane things I’ve ever worried about while driving … 

“Yes.”

His answer takes my breath away. I reach over and squeeze his shoulder. What do I say? Are you okay? I’m so sorry you had to see that? Thank you? 

He shifts the van into Drive and eases back into traffic.

Half a mile down the road, I put my two hands up to each side of my face, as if I’m trying to stabilize my thoughts from falling out of my head. If we’d been just a little faster. Passed one more car. If the man flipped less than a second later. If we were in a different lane. An infinite number of little choices and unpredictable variables put us right where we were, right then. 

So so close to tragedy, so completely unscathed. 

From the shocked, scared, relieved depth of my heart, I cry out, “It could have been us!” and I move my hands in front of my face and begin to weep, overcome with soul-honest gratitude.  

In his book, A Praying Life, Paul Miller describes a theology of prayer which overspiritualizes  sacrifice and frames itself in a sort of fatalistic scarcity (ex. if I take this tragedy, no one else will have to). In this line of thinking, he writes how if a person hears a firetruck, it would be wrong to pray for their own house to not be on fire. But Miller sees this as problematic. Why? Because it’s not honest. It’s not human. Who wants their house to be on fire? 

We all know this life will have suffering. And we understand that each of us, in time, will face hardship. No one wants to be in the car accident. No one wants to lose the job. No one wants the chronic illness or a cancer diagnosis or to see their child hurting. In this present moment, none of us wants to die from the coronavirus.

So when we pray, Miller encourages us to be completely truthful with God. If we aren’t, it fails to be a real conversation. It fails to be real prayer. He writes, “It is perfectly natural to pray, God, please help whomever’s house is on fire. Keep them safe, and help it not to be our house.” 

It’s okay to be thankful when we are spared. Our gratitude doesn’t cancel out an awareness of someone else’s pain.

I stop crying and take a deep breath. The skin around my eyes is as thin as crepe. I wipe my face and I fake-yell, almost laugh, “Auuuugh!” and turn back to the kids once again, “You guys okay?”  

“That was so scary,” my oldest says.

“I thought we were going to crash,” says one of the boys. 

“Yes …” I agree. That was so, so close. We keep talking. Try to give words to what we just saw. 

And then, as a family, we pray.  

For the ones who are hurting. 

And also for the rest of us.