When I returned to my hometown in Central Massachusetts this weekend, I gathered with many of my high school friends to share hugs and memories. However, our reason for leaving our current lives, as college students scattered across the country, to be together wasn’t a reunion and a homecoming. We returned home to bury one of our close friends.
A week earlier I woke up to sunshine and the anticipation of a visit from two high school friends. But shortly after their arrival, we received a call that we will always haunt us: my mother was on the other end of the line, saying “I’m sorry, honey, Chris died last night.” Her troubled voice made me understand what shock prevented me from hearing in her words.
Between sobs and dry periods of shock and denial, my friends Sean, Heather and I tried to make sense of what we had just heard: Chris had been killed when a drunk driver headed the wrong way on the interstate crashed into the car he was driving. Of the four other Minnesota college students in the car, two died.
From Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) and health class, I knew that drunk driving was a dangerous and serious problem, but only recently since coming to college have I become aware of just how common it is. Within the last year I have learned that several people I know had driven drunk or had friends who do, and many of these people do so on a regular basis!
I don’t know how anyone could take drunk driving lightly, but I think we as humans have a tendency to believe that we are immune to such horrors. We never will accept the possibility of such grim occurrences until they happen to someone we care about. I know that if someone received the heart-shattering phone call or caught the reflection of her own tear-washed face on the shiny, mahogany surface of a casket (closed because the contents are unrecognizable due to the impact of the accident), she would think twice about driving home from a bar or a party.
People, especially at our stage in life, often make reckless decisions that can endanger their lives or cause serious health threats later on. As far as I am concerned, what others do is none of my business; unless it affects how I am able live my life. However, drunk driving threatens all of us: our families, our friends, our neighbors, ourselves.
I wish the man whose recklessness took Chris’ life could have seen him alive the way I did–winning a track event, playing a clarinet solo, watching his younger sister perform the lead in the school play or just goofing around with his identical twin. I wish he could have known the good person Chris was–always volunteering (that’s what he was going South to do over his Spring Break when the accident occurred), doing things for his church and being a friend to absolutely anyone who needed one. I would have loved for the driver to know all the lives that Chris touched, to have seen the 1,000-plus people who each waited three hours in the rain to pay respect at Chris’ wake where he lay wearing a tuxedo, reminiscent of his prom less than two years earlier. And I would have wanted that man to realize that two other towns, one in Illinois and one in Michigan, are grieving similar losses for talented, bright and generous young people whose lives ended too soon. I would also want for him to know the pain of the two survivors who are coming back to their dorm room this week to find an empty bed because Chris will not be returning with them. If he saw what he would take away, I wonder if he would have gotten into his car last weekend after all those drinks. Would you be able to?
[ Brianne Lufty is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. ]
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
