My Family’s Story

The first time I saw a picture of my grandmother, I was 18 years old. She and my grandfather grew up Jewish in the late 1940s. In the wake of the genocide of their people, relatives, and friends, my grandparents suffered relentless discrimination even here in the U.S. After meeting at a ballroom dancing class at 12, they bonded over their shared struggles and quickly became best friends. They fell in love and got married shortly after high school. Together, they opened a toy store, bought a home, and raised my father and aunt. Theirs was the perfect love story. Then one day in 1995, while my grandparents were driving in the car together, they were struck by a distracted driver who ran a red light. My grandmother Michele bled out in her husband’s arms. She was only 48 years old and left behind my aunt, who was 11, my father, who nearly dropped out of college from his grief, and of course, the love of her life, my grandfather, who is to this day not the same.

Though I never met my grandma, the wake of her loss has rippled through generations. A complete and beautiful life ended in mere seconds. A warm laugh never again rings the halls of her family home, a hug I will never get to know. My aunt, now a motherless mother, cried last week as she introduced me to her newborn baby and showed me my grandmother’s photo albums. My new cousin and I share Michele as a middle name, and both of us are the eldest daughters born to parents who suffered great pains from losing their mother to a tragic and sudden car accident.

People who haven’t witnessed this kind of loss firsthand do not know how dangerous reckless driving can be. When people think of severe car accidents, they are often suffocated with images of expensive repair bills or constant warnings of “don’t drink and drive.” But what we don’t talk about is that sometimes car accidents happen to sober drivers, ordinary people who are distracted by the vibrations and dings of their mobile devices. In a world that demands constant connection, the need to respond to messages, to be available at a moment’s notice, supersedes our instinct for safety. Countless times I have watched a grandparent or friend pick up their phone to respond to a message; the car swerving slightly and my heart skips a beat. In my home state, the fine for a texting and driving infraction is only $50, but aren’t our lives worth more than that?

According to the University of Utah studies, people are just as impaired when they drive and talk on a cell phone as when they operate under the influence. Additionally, cell phone users are 5.36 times more likely to get into an accident than the typical driver. Even though the average person knows that texting and driving are wrong, science has shown that people do it anyway, and the repercussions of their reckless actions are beyond what we could imagine.

This January, my dad picked me up from work crying to tell me my little sister had been run over by a car. Walking across the street from her school, she was struck by a texting driver, flipped over their vehicle, and landed on the sidewalk. My dad and I sat in silence for five minutes, a time in which I thought I had lost my sister and best friend. We were lucky, though, as the accident happened on the one day this year, our gloomy gray city saw some actual snow, and the sidewalk my 15-year-old sister had landed on was covered in shoveled-up powder. She sustained bruising to the left side of her body, dislocated her shoulder and wrist, and was severely concussed. That night, I slept in her room, worried that she might be experiencing internal bleeding that she couldn’t feel from the shock and adrenaline of the evening’s events. I woke up every thirty minutes to check if she was still breathing, only to hear her cussing at me in her sleep; “I’m fine, Hailey, stop waking me up.”

While my younger sister was lucky to survive with only minor injuries, we lose thousands of people each day to driving accidents alone. Schools, and society as a whole, should educate young drivers about the dangers of being on a cellular device while driving or driving under the influence, or even simply the dangers of driving in bad weather. New drivers should not just be educated with statistics or daunting numbers but with personal stories of families like my own that have been hurt by dangerous driving. It is not enough to acknowledge that an action is wrong. We must work together to understand how a split-second decision could end another person’s life. Then, we must put effort and passion behind that responsibility.