Blended Family
A friend of mine, whom I’ll call Jane, has two kids and an ex-husband, and she’s on really good terms with another ex-wife of the same guy.
This ex-wife (let’s say, Sue) also has a daughter, and the three siblings are all pretty close, considering the two families live a thousand miles apart.
Anyway, Sue and her daughter came to visit Jane’s family for a week and planned for the daughter to stay an extra week and fly home solo so Sue could go home early for work.
The morning came when Sue needed to fly out. Because we’re in a rural area, the big airport is an hour and a half away, and I guess Sue’s daughter just wasn’t feeling the three hours in the car to say goodbye to mom.
The mothers insisted that the kids tag along to give Sue a nice sendoff, but inexplicably, Sue’s daughter wasn’t budging.
So, Jane’s two kids said that if their little sister wasn’t going with them, they needed to stay home to watch her. Whatever. Everyone said their goodbyes, and Jane took Sue to the airport.
En route to the airport, out in the farmland the interstate runs through, was a few miles of heavy construction—the kind with prolonged delays and a pilot car weaving through the work, the whole deal.
Jane was heading back and was stopped at the site when she got plowed into by a long haul trucker doing 105 km/h (65 mph), who apparently missed all the signage in the eight kilometers (five miles) leading up to the stop.
It was absolutely horrible. Half the car was obliterated; the truck looked like it was taking a bite out of the trunk.
The impact dominoed through five or six cars before the chaos stopped. Emergency services arrived, but they didn’t immediately extricate Jane because they assumed she was dead. She looked dead.
The other cars had obvious survivors. Someone finally checked for a pulse to officially call her time of death…and they found it.
They managed to get her out even though her breathing stopped each time she moved, and a year later, she’s starting to regain her memory function and is back to independent living.
The scariest part for her, though, was that the kids should have been in the back seat of the car—she and Sue were insisting on it—and all three kids would have been crushed instantly in the collision.
The frame around the front seats was the only part of the car to survive.