Wrecking Christmas

It was one of those things you can’t anticipate.  That you can’t safeguard against.  That you can’t prepare for.  Because if you tried to prepare for every possible contingency in life you’d never be able to move, or watch TV, or work on the internet, or eat a snack in your kitchen, or play the piano.  And those were the things the five of us were doing in our own home on a Thursday afternoon when the unimagineable happened–a car crashed into our house.

From a damage standpoint it wasn’t that bad.   The teenager driving the car smashed some of the brickwork on the front of the house.  He realigned the front of our bedroom wall.  He crushed a really nice tree we had just put in a few years ago.  He tore up some other landscaping and some sections of the yard.  He flung bits of his crashing car all over the lawn.  He did a major assault on the 2-foot retaining wall between our house and the neighbor’s house.  And he lent a decidedly unChristmas-like pall to our still decorated yard by trashing many of the lights and standing decorations.

Of course I say this “wasn’t that bad” not knowing what the actual dollar amount is to the house and yard.  That bit of information will emerge next week when the adjustors start their estimates. 

But most importantly “wasn’t that bad” meant nobody was hurt.  Not even the driver.

The dogs were crated in our closet which received enough impact to buckle the lower part of the wall and snap the 10 foot hanging bar of clothes into 3 pieces raining clothes down on the dogs’ crates.  Ryan was the first to remember they were in that part of the house when he saw where the car had hit and raced back to check on them.  They weren’t even barking.  I guess the sound of the impact cowered them into silence.

Mike was in the study, which was the room at the very front of the house that was actually struck by the car.  While working at his computer, sending something by email for a meeting that was scheduled the following day at work,  he says he heard “something” happening outside and thought there was an accident happening on the bigger street that runs parallel to our house.  The Christmas decorations prevented him from looking out of the study window, so he ran to the front door after hearing the horrific crashing sound and realized that what he thought was happening a street over was actually happening in our front yard.  As he ran outside he was yelling at me to “call 9-11″ although at that point I didn’t know what I was supposed to be telling a 9-11 operator. 

Ryan was at the front of the house also, playing the piano as I said, but that was on the opposite side of the house from where the crash occurred.  He did see the woman, whom we now know was the mother of the driver, come walking up the street immediately after it happened.  But he never saw the car she was following coming around the corner, or the careening path it took through the yard.  I think that may be a good thing.  

Riley and I were watching TV in the Big Red Comfy Chair because I had been sick with a tummy bug and had been resting all day.  The noise I heard that brought me running to the front of the house sounded like something really hard hitting the front door and my first thought was that Mike had decided to take down some of the outdoor Christmas lights and had lost control of the ladder.  The “something hard” I heard would turn out to be car parts and landscaping rock flung to the front of the house hitting the door and walls. 

Michael was the one eating a snack in the kitchen and was oblivious to everything.  Sometimes I envy him that.

I’ll show you some pictures of the yard and what happened, as best we can reconstruct.  The police concurred with everything we pieced together.  The kid driving was too far gone to say much.  I’ll get to him in a minute. 

Here’s what the diagram shows on the police report, as to the trajectory the car took down the road and onto our property:

Here’s a picture of the front of the house so you can see the yard.  You’ll notice we are all about the PEACE around here… ah, sweet irony:

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The tiremarks as he entered into the yard, about 10 feet to the left of the mailbox:

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Here is where he scraped the front walkway, taking off some chunks of concrete:

And here is where he took out a few more Christmas decorations as he hit the highest point of the yard:

…and went airborne.  Yes, during this stretch of the yard he was apparently airborne, as evidenced by the lack of any tire marks or damage between the landscape damage in the last picture and the place where his car landed:

HERE being where the car landed, square on a Vitex tree and then running into the 2 foot retaining wall between our house and our neighbor’s house:

Damage to his car:

Damage to the house, on the wall outside the study and the front of the master bedroom.  The post took most of the impact, knocking off brick and exposing the wood underneath:

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this is the vitex tree on the left side of the house… the one on the right side used to look like this…

until the driver landed his car directly on it and crushed it and now it looks like this:

and the damage to the retaining wall between our house and our neighbor’s house:

Then there’s just a bunch of automotive pieces all over the yard.  Hubcaps, bumpers, a side view mirror, we can’t take a step without getting tripped up by a piece of glass, plastic or metal… Volkswagen in case you were wondering:

a piece of one of the hubcaps I was talking about:

shattered glass in my azalea bushes from the rear side window:

Sigh.

So anyway back to the kid.  I’ve heard various things about him since he landed in our front yard.  He’s apparently one-third of a set of triplets.  His mom commented that of these 3 teens he’s the only one who’s ever given her any trouble.   He has been described as “the druggie” in the family (although the police report showed no drug or alcohol involvement at the time of the accident) and we know now that the last thing he said before he ran out of his house and jumped in his car was that he was going to kill himself. 

That last part seems consistent with everything we saw and heard from him in our yard.  When he climbed out of the car he was screaming, “Why didn’t I die?  I should be dead. Why can’t I be dead?” and things of that nature.  Not knowing this boy at all, I didn’t know at the time if he was just being highly dramatic about being involved in a freak accident, or if he seriously had a death wish that had not been granted in my front yard.  What I did know was that he was imbalanced enough to make me afraid to go near him and I didn’t want Riley exposed to the things he was saying and doing.  So Ryan and I took turns keep an eye on her and Michael inside until things were calmer outside.

Then a little while later, the police came and the driver began hollering random things and they had to restrain him and cuff him and hold him down on the ground, while he screamed “Just shoot me!  Just kill me.  It’s what I want anyway.”  Hearing that confirmed to me that he was fairly earnest in his desire to die.  And made me doubly glad we’d made sure to keep Riley in the house until this kid was safely in the squad car.

What we don’t know is whether he intended to use our house as an actual instrument of his death, or whether he was on his way to a different location and lost control of his vehicle, veering into our house as he was coming around the corner.  I don’t know how much of an exact plan he had formed when he ran out of his house away from his mother with whom he had just had an argument. 

I saw in the police report the number “1″ in one of the boxes which indicated he was wearing his seat belt, specifically a shoulder/lap combo.  Which of course got me (and at least one other neighbor) wondering: do you set out to kill yourself in a vehicle and buckle yourself in with a seatbelt first?  Was his plan to drive somewhere else to do himself in, somewhere that didn’t even involve the car?  Or was he on autopilot when he got into the car, and buckled it out of habit.  Then I started wondering how  the police knew he was buckled in in the first place.  By the time they got there, he was out of the car and in a fetal position beside my trash cans on the other side of the yard so how would they know if he was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident?  So maybe the “1″ was just referencing that that was the type of seatbelt that the car was equipped with.  I don’t know.

So many pieces of the puzzle that we may never have to solve this.  Answers we may never get.  And does it make a difference?  Would I feel differently if I knew he HAD been aiming for our house, or if he HADN’T been aiming?  And differently how?

I have run the gamut of emotions since this all happened.  I’ve spent time feeling frighteningly vulnerable by the violation.  This was my HOUSE we were in.  The bricks and mortar and wood that protect me from the outside world.  That protect my family.  You’re not supposed to be that exposed to the outside world while doing inconsequentional things inside your house.  Yet there we were.

The fear of what could have happened has caused me to spontaneously cry at varied and random times: while pulling up the Christmas lights in the yard so the tow truck could get the car out of the yard without causing any more damage to our once festive decorations; while letting a neighbor give me a reassuring hug; while trying to gather a semblance of normal and eat dinner a mere 2 hours after the crazy afternoon began; while driving by the totalled car which now sits in their driveway, a single block from my house; while reading the police report; while typing this paragraph….

And there was a lot of anger.  I was angry at this teenage man-boy-child who was so wrapped up in his own small life that he didn’t care if his selfishness bled over onto us.  How DARE he inflict himself on our family!  How dare his issues become something we have to deal with!  How dare his crap trail into our yard!

Yet as a mother I wavered and couldn’t harden my heart entirely to his plight.  He was just a child.  A child with obvious demons.  I know that getting to that point in his life where he felt he had no recourse but to end his life, has to be a dark and dismal place to be.  And I know that by me saying I wished he had thought about what he was doing when he decided to endanger my family with his recklessness doesn’t make a lot of sense.  How much sense does it make for me to wish that he had been more rational during his most irrational mindset.  If he didn’t care about the pain he was going to inflict on his own family, I highly doubt he was thinking about what might happen to my family.

Also as a mother there was a part of me that felt empathy toward his mother.  How we who have parented or are parenting teenagers hope to never have to deal with all the things she was having to deal with with her child: drugs, rebellion, suicidal thoughts, losing control… the nightmare road we all pray to never have to travel.

And troubled by the almost treasonous nature of these empathetic feelings, my emotions fled back yet again to Mama Bear anger, sometimes bordering on blind rage: these are my BABIES in this house–do NOT cause harm to my babies, you stupid mother fucker teenage asshole. 

You………Child.

Sigh.  

So I’m still not quite where I want to be with all of this yet.  We’ve done our best to see the obvious bright side: only material things were damaged; things that can be repaired quickly (hopefully) and painlessly.  Nobody was hurt.  Nobody was killed.  And hey, we were planning to thin out the landscaping on that side of the house this year anyway…  okay, maybe not quite ready for the levity yet. 

I took this picture the morning after it happened.  The juxtaposition of the items pretty much encapsulates the title of the blog.  And no, I didn’t stage it–it just was what it was.  The whole ordeal happened on  January 6th,  The Epiphany in the church calendar.  The day the Christmas Season officially ends.  And boy did Christmas come to a screeching halt for us.