Nearly 20 years ago, his life was over. Hers will never be the same.
Nearly 20 years ago, the night of her brother’s wedding anniversary, “Janet” offered to stop by and pick up his three children for the night so he and his wife could celebrate.
They piled into her truck with Janet’s two youngest and took off for her house, everyone in great spirits. Her nephew talked excitedly about SpongeBob and his pineapple under the sea.
A little more than a mile from her brother’s house, on a dark rural road in western Maine, she turned off the high beams on her Ford F-150 so she didn’t blind the truck coming at her in the opposite lane.
The instant the truck passed, as she crested a hill, Janet flicked her high beams back on.
A man who had been standing in the middle of the road was already on her hood.
She’d find out he was in his 80s, with Alzheimer’s, and that he’d wandered away from home. His life was over — and hers would never be the same.
Janet blamed — still blames — herself, even though police didn’t. Authorities ruled it an accident, indicating there was nothing she could have done.
“It’s not easy to move on,” she said. “A piece of (me) died in the accident, too.”
Janet doesn’t share the story much. And she probably still wouldn’t, if it weren’t for the crash that killed a middle school student on Main Street in Lewiston a month ago.
She was stunned to discover the driver’s name. Improbably, they’d gone to school together, best friends who lost touch over the years. That crash remains under investigation, according to police; the driver may still face charges.
Janet can’t speak to guilt or innocence, only how she felt when she read the recent, tragic news and reflected on how her own life changed irrevocably on that dark western Maine road.
“As soon as you make that decision to take responsibility, your whole life is suddenly changed,” Janet said. “I just sat down and I cried for her.”
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 119 pedestrians were struck and killed in Maine between 2006 and 2015.
Most occurred between dusk and dawn, according to state figures. Twice as many happened in December as any other month.
Janet has lived both sides of a fatal crash. One of the 19 pedestrians killed by Maine drivers last year was her boyfriend’s granddaughter.
“She was hit by somebody that just drove off and didn’t have the balls to deal with this,” she said.
‘Call Daddy and call 911’
At the time of her crash, Janet was 39. A single mom with five children, she worked in construction and raised animals in a very countrified life.
One year, when her daughter was given a saddle and bridle even though she didn’t have a horse, Janet fit both on her friendliest cow and escorted the pair up the road. A tourist from Idaho pulled over and asked to take a picture, marveling at how she’d put the saddle on such a large horse. The Jersey had horns and there was little room to confuse it for anything other than a cow. In telling that story recently, it was the one time Janet smiled easily and burst out in laughter.
More often, she said, bad memories creep up and random situations trigger a fresh wave of tears.
Recently, Janet was tapped to sit on a grand jury. In a room filled with strangers, the district attorney announced they’d be considering charges on a fatal hit-and-run incident.
“Once they started, I couldn’t get up and leave,” she said. “I just sat there and cried the whole time listening, (trying not to cry too hard) so they didn’t call an ambulance.
“That was an exceptionally hard day,” she said.
She marvels bitterly at any person who could keep on driving or insist they’d hit an animal.
On that night nearly 20 years ago, she had no doubts that she’d just hit someone.
As soon as the man standing in the road went under her truck, Janet said she slammed on the brakes and ushered the five children out, the oldest barely a teenager. The crash happened in front of a co-worker’s house, and she quickly wrangled the kids inside.
“I told my niece, ‘Call Daddy and call 911,'” Janet said. “As soon as they were in the house, I went back to try to resuscitate him.”
Janet couldn’t find a pulse. She didn’t hear the ambulance or police arrive.
“Somebody came up behind me and put their arms around me and said, ‘You can’t do anything for him. He’s gone,'” Janet said.
Her memory is spotty for the next 10 days. She remembers being driven to the hospital after the accident, unsure why. She wasn’t hurt.
“I was really pissed because the people in the ambulance were joking,” Janet said. She remembers thinking, “How could they?”
“When I got to the hospital, I remember a state police officer coming in and he said, ‘We need to take a blood sample,'” Janet said. “I said, ‘Take it all. I don’t need nothing.'”
Her sister stayed with her for days to take care of the kids while she remained numb. Friends pitched in to take care of her animals.
Her mother, she remembers, had the harshest words of anyone.
“(She said) she didn’t know what to say to someone who’d killed somebody,” Janet said. “For those that kept saying ‘It’s just an accident,’ I couldn’t swallow that pill.”
“I just felt I robbed his family,” Janet said.
She wasn’t sure if she should send a card or attend the man’s funeral. There’s no etiquette after you’ve hit someone.
A counselor suggested she write a letter. They could decide afterward whether to send it.
But she sat down to start it and couldn’t.
“I didn’t know what to say when I started writing,” Janet said. “How many ways can you say you’re sorry?”
‘Some things are just accidents’
She was plagued with “what-ifs.” What if she’d left her brother’s house five minutes earlier or later? What if she’d taken another road home?
She still wonders.
Michael Mitchell, CEO of Crisis & Counseling Centers in Augusta, said that is a common response, as is sometimes-crippling survivor’s guilt.
“There have been millions of people in these situations (who) went away in the darkness and never really healed from it because the attention was on the (person who died), not on them,” Mitchell said. “The experience can be burned into the psyche. It’s hard to say what images, smells, sounds various experiences can trigger. It could be the car, it could be the road, it could be the song that was playing on the radio.
“That’s part of the trap or the prison that person is stuck in,” he said. “If they stay passive to it, then they kind of stay prisoner to their own hell.”
The ability to heal, he said, often depends upon a person’s support system, often along with faith and psychotherapy, to acknowledge that moment as something that happened and won’t ever go away — but it doesn’t have to define one’s life.
And the community struggles, too.
“We oftentimes want a simple explanation for how things happen: somebody is careless; somebody is irresponsible; somebody has done something wrong so therefore there is a tragic outcome,” Mitchell said. “And that’s not the case in (all) these situations. The complexity of it . . . makes it difficult for people to sit with that ambiguity. Everybody has this range of emotions — from anger to rejection to sadness to horror — that is hard to negotiate.”
After the crash, Janet sold her truck as soon as it was released by police. She said she couldn’t sit in it ever again.
She bought a new truck and went back to work, even when she felt like curling up.
“Eventually, I had to suck it up and wear the big-girl panties,” Janet said. “It wasn’t about me. Even though it killed me to get behind the wheel, I had to make a living, I had a family to support.”
She got a call weeks later announcing that the crash had been ruled an accident and there would be no charges.
“If they had found me guilty, I was prepared for it, for the way I felt,” she said.
Janet visited Tri-County Mental Health Services for counseling for seven years, two to three times a week at first.
“The mental health counselor said, ‘You know, some things are just accidents,'” Janet said. She remembers insisting, “I know, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’ve killed somebody.”
She takes a variety of medications now for issues she didn’t have before: post-traumatic stress disorder, vertigo, anxiety and sleeplessness.
“There’s a lot of things in life we cannot control, so all the things I can control, I’m wicked anal about,” Janet said. “How I hang my laundry, how I mow my lawn. Nobody touches my lawn because I have to have it a certain way. It’s the little things we think we can control because there’s so (few).”
She said she gets a lot of support from family, particularly her children, “just hugs and kisses and ‘I love you, Mom,’ especially when I’m not sure why.”
It’s part of being torn up, blaming herself and also considering the future.
“I’ve thought about my grandchildren and what they’re going to say (when they find out about the crash) and I don’t know what I’ll say to them,” she said.
Janet spends a lot of time at home, by choice. She drives, but cautiously. Roads like Center Street in Auburn that are busy and wide, where people don’t always use the crosswalk, easily frazzle her.
Then, and still now, she finds routes around that stretch of road where the crash took place. And on the anniversary of the tragedy, she refuses to drive.
She didn’t find out until months after that awful night, from a police officer, that the woman driving in the opposite lane, the truck she’d dimmed her lights for, had almost struck the man as well.
“As bad as I felt, I was glad — not glad that I hit him — (but) so grateful that she didn’t have to go through what I’m going though, as stupid as that sounds,” Janet said.
With her permission, the Sun Journal ran a check of Janet’s driving record through the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles. It came back without a ticket or accident in at least 10 years.
Janet asked not to use her name and to leave the location and other accident specifics vague out of respect for the elderly man’s family. She doesn’t want to hurt them, she said. “Every Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Years is already hard enough.”
She ultimately never reached out to them. And his family never reached out to her.
After reading about the crash that killed 13-year-old Jayden Cho-Sargent on Main Street in Lewiston, Janet said she sent that driver, her former friend, a letter.
“I sent her two cards,” Janet said. “I said, ‘I know how you feel because I’ve been there.'”
She told her when and if she wanted to talk, she was there.
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