Sister of crash victims: It’s not ‘ just’ a DUI

Editor’s note: Jeannie Carl of Jim Thorpe lost her sisters and brothers-in-law at the hands of drunk drivers. She still misses them and wrote this plea to prevent this tragedy from happening to someone else.

Dear drunk driver,

There is no reason you should care about anything I have to say. I’m just an ordinary person with a “not-so-ordinary” story to tell. I wish it were a story and not real life.

My family was dysfunctional in a lot of ways. We went to church and my mother encouraged all of us to believe and have a strong faith.

But it was commonplace for my father to go with his co-workers and drink “lunch.” When he came home, he made a pitcher of martinis for “dinner” despite my mother coming home from work and making dinner every night.

They stayed married for 20 years. My mother often asked him to go to AA, but he denied he had a problem.

My older sisters, Eileen and Dot, were living their lives while I was still at home. Eileen fell in love with Kenny and married him right out of high school and had two children, Amy and Adam, a year apart.

I finally had a big brother who was everything I thought a big brother should be.

I never knew my older brother, who had devastating brain damage from St. Louis encephalitis at 5 months old. My mother had no choice but to put him in a home, as it became difficult for her to take care of the children and my alcoholic father.

In 1974, Eileen and Kenny bought a gorgeous old farmhouse on 13 acres outside of Emmaus.

Dot was pursuing a career as a social worker and going to college. There she fell in love and married Art, who was also majoring in social work. Now, I had two big brothers.

Eileen, Kenny, Dot and Art lived in the farmhouse and shared the chores of raising children, horses and dogs.

Kenny had decided that the hour commute to Bell Telephone with his pickup was not the best plan, so to save money, he bought a motorcycle.

Eileen was a stay-at-home mom who bred dogs and horses and sold them. Some of my best memories are of the days spent on the farm learning how to bake or make grape jelly with my sister Dot, or planting a new garden, raising veggies and canning them.

Dot and Art had become well-known for their social work. They divided their time between the farm and the group homes they ran.

He’s gone

In 1977, while on his way home from work, Kenny had the green light at a busy intersection. He drove through his green light, but never made it to the other side of the intersection. A truck driver ran his red light, never braking. The driver killed Kenny instantly. My brother. Dot’s brother. Eileen’s husband. Amy and Adam’s daddy. Gone.

I was going to college preparing to be a preschool teacher and it was a typical night at home when the phone rang.

It was Dot, but she was almost impossible to understand.

She was trying to tell me that Kenny had been hurt. I was stunned and confused and immediately thought about his job, climbing telephone poles and working near those high power lines.

No, that wasn’t it.

I asked if he had gotten hurt during a hike along the Appalachian Trail I knew he had been planning.

No, that wasn’t it. He’d been in a crash. She didn’t know more.

The police had come to the house and escorted Eileen to the hospital while Dot stayed at the house with the kids. She would call me back when she knew more. We weren’t going to panic. He had to be all right.

Dot called back to tell us Kenny was dead.

He’d been crushed under the wheels of a tractor-trailer. The truck driver had been intoxicated, and claimed he didn’t see Kenny.

I don’t remember his excuse about the red light. It didn’t matter what his excuse was.

My big brother was gone in an instant. My brother who was quiet but who had a great sense of humor. My brother who loved his wife and children and his beautiful farm.

Gone.

As 1977 ended, I met the man who would become my husband. I told him one night that he and Kenny would have been great friends. It broke my heart that Dave and Kenny would never meet.

Carrying on

Meanwhile, Eileen carried on living at the farm. With Kenny’s insurance, she didn’t have to worry about finances. But she would rather have struggled to pay bills along with her young husband than become a widow at 27. Art and Dot helped out with the kids and divided their time between the farm and their group homes.

Eventually Dot and Art divorced and I felt like I was losing another brother. Art moved out, leaving my two sisters to manage the farm and the kids. They both continued to work. Eileen still bred and sold dogs and horses. They still grew food. The kids still played outside and swam in the pond. Eileen worked as a dog groomer and part-time school bus driver.

Triple tragedy

Eileen never got over her loss. Kenny was truly her first love. She had had other boyfriends, but he was her first “serious” boyfriend and she loved him dearly. Dot met Jim two years after she and Art divorced. He was a huge part of her life, Eileen’s life and the kids’ lives.

By 1980, I was married and my sisters and I had grown even closer.

One night I awoke to what I thought was the alarm clock. It was the phone ringing. The clock read 4:30 a.m. and I thought that any call this late cannot be a good thing. I ran downstairs to the kitchen to answer, and heard my sisters’ neighbor Rob talking nonsense.

My sisters were hurt, he said. There had been an accident.

I listened. And listened. And started to scream for Dave. I stood in the kitchen of our farmhouse and waited for Dave to come downstairs. I stood shivering and listened to Dave’s one-sided conversation. I insisted he tell me that Rob had made a mistake. It couldn’t be happening.

My sisters could not be dead. They were not dead. The whole world had gone crazy.

This was before licenses had photos, and we had to go to the hospital morgue to identify Eileen and Dot. My mother couldn’t do this. She was an hour away and hadn’t been told yet.

Newly married young people should not have to go to the hospital in the early morning hours, stand in a cold morgue and identify family members.

Dave’s parents agreed to go with us. Dave’s mom stood behind me and tried to comfort me, but there was no comfort as I stood in front of two sheet-draped slabs. There was emptiness and heaviness. There was the feeling that if I screamed loud enough and long enough everything would be OK. I crushed Dave’s fingers as I gripped his hand.

The attendant asked me if I was ready. How does one become ready for this? How does one prepare for this? I nodded. She pulled back the sheet and there was my sister Dot.

No, that wasn’t my sister. My sister laughed and danced and sang badly and off-key with the radio. She did this funny harmonic sound as she expelled air from her windpipe. My sister did cartwheels in the dining room and played field hockey and baked the best Christmas cookies. My sister loved life. My sister made grape jelly. My sister did not lie on a slab in a morgue.

I asked to speak to Jim. The woman looked at me and told me quietly that he, too, had been killed. I lost it. He was the one person who could tell me how this terrible thing had happened,

Dave tried to talk me out of seeing my sister’s car, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

We walked up to Dot’s car and saw a brutal mess. It was crumpled. The doors were cut off. I stood and stared and tried to digest it all. Dave stood next to me silently, his arm around me. There were no words.

On the floor on the front seat was a package of black licorice “Nibs.”

My mother and Eileen were black licorice fiends.

I so badly wanted to reach into the car and take them, but I could not bring myself to do it. I wanted to touch the last thing my sister had touched. I thought if only I could hold that package of licorice that perhaps I could hold on to her in some way … for just a little longer.

I tried on my own to piece together what had happened. The three of them went out to dinner. That’s what Amy and Adam had said. Years later, my niece and nephew both said to me on different occasions that they had regret because they hadn’t really said goodbye to Eileen. When she left, they thought she’d be back.

The investigation showed that neither my sisters nor Jim had any alcohol in their systems.

The young man responsible for this crash had been known by a few of Dave’s friends as a barhopper and quite a drinker. We found out that he had visited a few bars that night, and by the time he was destined to cross my sisters’ path, he was more than drunk.

According to witnesses, he’d sideswiped a car while trying to pass. This forced him into the other lane and headfirst into my sisters’ car.

He not only destroyed the lives of two very talented and beautiful women, but my sister’s soul mate.

I never found out what kind of person the driver was. Perhaps I didn’t want to know. Perhaps I would have to mourn his life as well if I had found out what a great person he was destined to be. I couldn’t afford to know. When I was told of his death, I had one word. “Good.” I was glad he was off the streets and couldn’t do this to another family.

I haven’t forgiven him. I can’t. I suppose in order for me to heal fully, I have to. But after 32 years, I’m not there yet.

Picking up the pieces

At the time of the crash, my mom was 60 years old. She was supposed to be a part-time “Grammy” who came up to the farm to spoil Amy and Adam. She wasn’t meant to become a full-time guardian to these two children. My stepfather was 79. He wasn’t in any position to throw a football or attend Scout meetings. But they both did it.

When the toll was too much for them, Amy and Adam went to live with my stepbrother and his wife and their children.

It didn’t work out at my stepbrother’s. We’d recently welcomed our own baby, Andy, and figured, “What’s two more?” Our old farm house transitioned from two newlyweds, to new parents with a baby to new parents with a baby and teenagers. I won’t say things went smoothly. There were the usual teenaged dramas. But all the kids were loved, and we did as much as we could for Amy and Adam as guardians.

Amy, Adam and Andy grew close living in the same house. For that I will be grateful. I hoped that my sister was happy knowing we were taking care of her children.

Amy is now an incredible woman. She has a farm. She trains horses. She is her mother. Her laugh. Her physical appearance. Her values. I look at her and see a beautiful woman inside and out. I also see the woman Eileen would have become if she had had the opportunity to grow old. I look at my niece and see my sister.

Adam had a much rougher time of things. He was an angry young man. Finally, after many rough patches for him and for us, he met the most unlikely of mates. He is a rocker in a band, and watching him perform is bittersweet.

Still angry

I drove out to the cemetery once and ranted and raved and bitched at my sister. Why did she have to go to dinner with Dot and Jim that night?

They say time heals all wounds, but I believe that there are some things one does not recover from. Until my mother’s death in 2002, I was very careful not to mention Eileen or Dot’s name. Every time I slipped and mentioned either one of them, the pain in my mother’s eyes was almost too much to bear. Parents should never bury a child; no matter how old they are. It is not the natural scheme of things.

The things they have missed, births, deaths, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, weddings, the list goes on. I miss them. I find myself talking to them.

When I have to deal with community service hours at work, when someone says, “Oh, it’s no big deal, it’s just a DUI,” I could just scream.

It is never “just” a DUI. That person is as guilty as a person who picks up a loaded weapon and points it at someone. Only the “loaded weapon” weighs 3,000 pounds, and it’s every bit as deadly as any other weapon.

My mother used to go to schools and talk to high school students. I am her legacy and need to continue to do this. I owe it to her. I owe it to my sisters. I owe it to myself.