The day I realized I was not immortal

Thirty years ago, I almost died.

I was 17, newly graduated from high school and back in the Midwest for a wedding. It was the beginning of July and oh so very hot. Friends from high school — my first high school — wanted to cool off a bit so we hopped inside an old Ford Bronco and drove to the city to attend the Taste of Chicago.

If you’ve never been, the Taste is a massive food and music festival held right on Lake Michigan. For three days, vendors sell all sorts of delicious treats, from grilled burgers and polish sausage to funnel cakes and ice cream, while a wide variety of musical acts rock out from numerous stages. Although it’s often very crowded, the breeze off the lake provides a cooling respite. Once darkness falls, the city puts on a huge fireworks display. I’ve been many times and I can still hear the sound of the pyrotechnic booms echoing between the buildings. The noise rings in your ears even as the vibration shudders inside your chest.

My friends and I spent several hours at the Taste, eating and making merry. As the sun started to set, however, we decided to skip the fireworks and head home, thus avoiding the sprawling lines of traffic that transformed the process of leaving the city into an hours-long process.

It was on the way back to the suburbs that the accident occurred. Even now, decades later, I can still remember everything as if it happened in slow motion. Climbing into the front passenger seat of an older model Ford Bronco, one friend in the driver’s seat and three others crammed in the back. Listening to them rib me for being a Girl Scout because I always donned a seatbelt when none of them did. Loud music playing on the radio as we cruised on home. The sky turning from blue to orange to red before fading to black.

Suddenly, a small car in front of us hit the brakes, its rear lights glaring at us, demanding that we, too, stop. There wasn’t enough room to do so and my friend instinctively reacted by swerving into the right lane. Unfortunately, at that very moment, another car was pulling out of forest preserve parking lot and into traffic. Its grill crunched against my door and sprained my right thumb. My friend couldn’t see the car that plowed into us but he felt the impact and immediately responded by turning the steering wheel back to the left, only this time he overcompensated, crossing two lanes of road at 45 mph and into oncoming traffic.

The headlights of an older model car, one of those solidly built boats from the 1970s, blinded us seconds before impact. That driver was going 50 mph when she smashed into us, head on. The physics of two fast-moving objects crashing into each other at high rates of speed soon became evident.

We hit that car so hard, the long front end crumpled all the way to the windshield and crushed the driver’s foot. My friend who was driving crushed the steering wheel with his chest, bending the strong metal like it was aluminum foil. The two friends who sat behind us slammed into our seats but the one who was perched in the middle flew forward into the front and into windshield. Then he fell, half-conscious, in my lap.

Thanks to the seatbelt, I was fine.

First responders soon arrived and removed our driver from the wreckage. As they began treating him, I managed to climb out and give my statement to the police. In the end, I was the only person in the three cars who was coherent enough to explain what had happened.

Everyone was then separated into different ambulances, based on the severity of injuries, and sent to area hospitals. I ended up watching the fireworks through the window of the ambulance with the friend who had broken the windshield with his head.

The emergency room doctors treated my friend for a concussion. I received some meds and ointment for the 2nd degree seatbelt burn across my chest. While the admins finished processing my paperwork, I heard the doctors tell my parents that the seatbelt had saved my life. If I hadn’t been wearing it, they said, I would’ve surely gone through the windshield and died.

The physical pains from the accident were rough but tolerable, particularly in light of the alternative. I did suffer some mental distress afterwards when my mother insisted on driving past the scene of the accident. I also nearly had a panic attack a year later when the film “Patriot Games” came out. There’s a scene in it where a woman and her child are being chased by bad guys and they crash into a highway divider. The accident was filmed from within their car and it was so well done that I instantly experienced a flashback to my own crash.

Two weeks after I returned home to Florida, in that limbo time between leaving high school and entering college, I spent an evening hanging out at my friend Steve’s house. Another pal stopped by and asked us if we’d heard about a classmate’s car accident. She was a real sweet girl with wild hair and a wide smile. I asked how she was doing, assuming that like me, she was banged up but fine.

“Her funeral was tonight,” he said.

I was, of course, horrified. But it was only in that moment that I truly realized I was not immortal. None of us are. Death could come at any time and its arrival is rarely fair or understandable.