How to save a life

Excerpted from a piece I wrote which was published in HuffPost April 2024

In my first life, I made sense of thousands of stories on global warming and lip gloss and sports bras and organized closets and candidates. Normal people do things like that, plus wake up, brush teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, get kids to school, keep clients happy and clean dryer lint.

Then I was hit by a drunk with a truck and acquired brain damage, which meant a new life no one would choose, complete with a brain no one would want. It felt like I had been thrown from a plane. And then?  It kept feeling that way. Three years post-truck, the Social Security Disability Administration ruled my injuries were “permanent and incurable.”

Meanwhile, I was intalled in Brain Trauma Group. We included a former physician, a former professor of psycholinguistics, a former custodian, a former owner of a kebab café, and me — a former freelance writer/ghost. Some of us were old, some of us were somewhat young, all of us broke our heads, and most of us also broke bones in our back. There were more than a few broken hearts, too.

*In 2021, the latest year for which there are numbers, the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHSTA) reported 401,520 Americans were killed or injured due to someone driving while drunk.

*2 out of 3 Americans will be impacted by drunk driving in their lifetime.

*Each statistic is a person. Each death is preventable.