Open letter to drivers
My journey of true “self discovery” didn’t start until February 28th, 2004, when one person’s decision to drive changed my life and the lives of my family and friends forever.
On that day, our 22-month-old son Jet died. Our oldest son Bailey, who was seven years old, suffered horrific injuries which included the severing of his spinal cord. Bailey is now a paraplegic and confined for life in a wheelchair. I suffered severe internal and orthopaedic injuries and spent nearly two months in hospital.
It has been said that the grief a parent experiences with the loss of their child is the most intense grief known.
Nothing I have ever experienced even comes close to what I felt and I would never wish that pain on any other human being.
Yet the road toll keeps climbing with more and more people dying in tragic circumstances unnecessarily.
Every time you hear that someone has died, there is a grieving family experiencing the worst grief known and about to embark on a painful journey they didn’t ask to go on.
The journey of grief you see doesn’t really end, it will continue for the rest of your life.
The person I was before the crash is gone forever and to be honest I miss “her”. I miss being carefree, relaxed and innocent to such personal heartache and devastation.
As a police officer I had experienced death and destruction but it was always someone else’s family, someone I didn’t know and would never know, not my own and therefore I could separate the tragedy from my own family.
