• It was a typical spring day in Connecticut, dreary, rainy, and not the most pleasant driving conditions. We lived out in a marginally rural area, so we had to drive a ways to get home. My mother never minded though. She loved her job, but she also loved the scenery you get in a less developed area. I remember the next part clearly. It was about 7:45 pm and we were on one of the long, winding country roads that separated us from home. Mom was eager to get home and I was dozing off in the seat after such a long, eventful day. Neither of us saw the deer until it was right on top of us.

    I mean it was literally ON TOP of us. We had come around a corner just as a deer had bounded down the side of a bank. The unfortunate animal never hit the ground. It landed instead on the hood of our small ’87 Honda. In seconds it had passed through the windshield and into the front seat of the car. My mom got the worst of it. The deer had landed on the drivers section of the hood, but the deer’s hind legs still ended up catching me on the side of the head.

    The next part I know not from memory but from what others have told me. After the stupid animal landed on our unfortunate car we went careening off the side of the hill. There were guide rails on the road but we were going downhill and my mom’s foot ended up jammed down on the accelerator. We hit the guide rails at over 75 mph. Our car ended up stopping a short way down the hillside, propped against a tree. When I woke up I was out of the car in the back of an ambulance, so I never got to see the scene myself, a fact for which I am still to this day incredibly grateful. They say my mother died instantly and that it was a blessing for she was horribly mangled, though fortunately they didn’t go into detail. I did see pictures of that car afterwards, and I’m amazed that I survived.

    I escaped in no great condition myself, but I was alive. I had a severe concussion (you ever smash a deer limb into your head at 75mph? Hurts like hell from what I can remember.) along with several fractured ribs, a broken arm, dislocated knee and a punctured lung. The kept me in the hospital for over 6 months, though I don’t remember much due to the painkillers and the fact that I was so young. When they finally released me, one of the first things I got to do was go to my mother’s funeral. I had been told before hand that my mother had died but I guess at the time I didn’t believe it. I kept asking for my mommy over and over, and each time they would get me to understand that she was gone, she hadn’t made it through the accident.

    My aunt was the one who had to pick me up at the hospital and I would be staying with her for a while until my dad came and picked me up. She was a nice lady, but she didn’t talk much. Her and my mother had been very close, both as girls and adults, and I think seeing her sister’s mangled body and knowing she was gone kinda broke her. She’s never been the same since. She was the one they got to ID the body so they knew that it was in fact my mother who was with me, despite me telling them that it was. I only spent a week in that house but it was an incredibly dreary time, especially for a shaken 6yr old. I’ve never been back since, but we talk from time to time and she says she’s doing ok.

    The funeral was perhaps one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to go through. It was a closed casket funeral; no one wanted to see my mother’s mangle corpse. I tried to get them to open it, to get them to realize that she wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. They refused to let me see of course, they didn’t want to traumatize me anymore than I already had been. But I was a stubborn, determined child and after the eulogy I went up and managed to get the top of the lid open before anyone could stop me. I’ll never forget the sight I was unfortunate enough to behold that day. There lay my mother, eyes closed. I didn’t notice her mangled, bloody limbs. I didn’t notice the odd angles her arms and legs and ribs, even neck, stuck out at. All I noticed was the look of sheer terror that they hadn’t been able to remove from her cold, stiff face. To this day I still have nightmares about that. That look, utterly devoid of happiness, should not have been the last memory I had of my mother. It was that that made me spiral into a seemingly unending depression. One glance and I knew that my mother had not died peacefully as they had led me to believe; one glance that will haunt me forever.