You never get over that kind of loss.

Remembering my mother, who died 17 years ago.

Today is Mother’s Day. My mother was killed in a car accident 17 years ago. If you find Mother’s Day difficult or complicated, you’re not alone. Many of us have mothers who are dead or unavailable to us through addiction or illness or another of life’s cruelties. For us, Mother’s Day can be an upsetting, exhausting day. Please take care of yourself today and everyday because motherless life is very, very hard.

Below is a piece I wrote about my mother’s death and the rising number of people killed or seriously injured in road accidents. The statistics cited relate to Ireland, but the trend is true far beyond our shores.

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Mam & me on my communion day

It’s impossible for you to know what I know.

To know what it is to get a call that there’s been an accident, to be left sitting in the certainty that your mother is dead even if the nurse refuses to tell you over the phone. What it is to drive past the site of the accident, on a dark, wet night knowing that this is the place where her body was crushed, where she took her final breath. 

What it is to imagine her final moments, the terror of another car coming toward her too fast and out of control. How she instinctively turned the wheel enough to save her child, who was sitting in the passenger seat. 

I think of the woman who rushed from her home next to the site of the accident and prayed with Mam in her final moments. I remember that woman from the court date, when the young woman we refer to as “the other driver” was convicted of careless driving and fined €1,000. Her hapless legal representative piped up to say that she was unemployed, so the fine was reduced to €500. 

I try to remember when I heard that the site of the crash was an accident blackspot, that the people who lived in those houses had witnessed several crashes. I remember driving past the place where she died and seeing the council repaving the road. Someone somewhere decided that the death of a young woman, mother of 4 young children, justified whatever it cost to have a few guys there for a few days making the road safer. 

Tears come to my eyes as I think of it, even though it’s been almost seventeen years. 

I was learning to drive when she died, my teaching accelerated by the need to have a car if I wanted to continue living in the last place she called home. I spent hundreds of euro I didn’t have trying to get on the road, despite the terror it awoke in me. To this day, I can’t get in a car without a ripple of anxiety flashing through my body. My fear is justified. 

Few drivers have experienced what I have. They drive routinely, unthinkingly to get to the supermarket or the gym or to drop the children to school. Cars are status symbols, a way to communicate something about who you are and what you value. To me, they are death machines, symbols of the most common form of accidental death. But when you drive every day, in the midst of everything else you need to do, it becomes routine. 

It has been almost impossible for me to live a normal life without conquering my fear of being on the road. For most people, getting in a car is so habitual they barely notice it. But every time you do it, you take your life and the lives of the people around you in your hands. I wish there was a way for you to understand that viscerally in the way that I do. I suspect that’s not possible unless someone you love becomes a statistic. 

Last year 155 people were killed on the roads, up 13 per cent on the previous year. In January 18 people were killed, the highest number in a decade. The biggest culprit is driver distraction, largely due to people being on their phones. 

I wouldn’t wish the trauma of road accidents on anyone. I don’t want anyone to experience the terrifying grief of having your life as you knew it pulled out from under your feet. I was 19 when she died, preparing to start my final year in college. I went to see one of my professors a few weeks after the funeral. I was barely coping and would need some allowances if I were to graduate. “You’ll never get over it,” he said, when I explained what had happened. At the time, I thought it was shockingly cruel. He said it flippantly, as if he were simply stating the truth. It stung bitterly at the time but more than a decade later, I see that he was right. You never get over that kind of loss. 

When you’re driving, particularly at speed, it takes very, very little for something to go wrong. The night my mother died, “the other driver” drove too fast around a series of bends. There was water on the road after a summer rain shower, which made the roads slippery. It was August 2007 and we’d enjoyed a prolonged period of dry weather. “The other driver” lost control of her car, momentarily and my mother is dead because of it. 

It wasn’t my mother’s only car accident. Years before, a driver, still drunk from the night before, smashed into her car on Christmas morning. Her knees always gave her trouble, stiffening when she sat too long and aching when she kneeled at mass. Twice in her life, she suffered because someone else was careless. 

It doesn’t take much for your life to be upturned. I know that in my bones. My body will never recover from the trauma of that night. There are thousands of people like me, who’ve lost a loved one or been seriously injured because of someone else’s mistake. And it was a mistake. I don’t think “the other driver” should have been imprisoned. Though I don’t know her, I suspect that night haunts her too. What must it be like to start your adult life knowing you killed the beloved mother of four young children? 

If you knew what I know, you’d never drive drunk. You’d never get behind a wheel with drugs in your system. You wouldn’t dream of having your phone in your hand when you’re driving.

You can’t know what I know. And I hope you’ll never have to.

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Beyond Survival is written by me, Clare Egan, an award-winning writer and journalist. You can read more about me here, or look at some pretty pictures over here. Click reply to say hello anytime. Thank you for being here!