A year ago, I hit a man with my car. It was early in the morning, still dark in my two-house cul-de-sac deep in the woods. I was backing down my steep driveway, watching my side-view mirror. As long as I stayed about a foot from the edge, I’d miss our mailbox, the pond of mud in front of it, and the gully behind me. On impact, I thought I’d hit one of the many tree branches that often fell and rolled into our road. I pulled forward and my car lurched, nearly jerking the steering wheel out of my hands. What the hell, I thought, getting out to look. It took a minute to make sense of what I saw: at the edge of the gully was a trench coat the color of fog. Then I heard moaning, and I realized with unfolding horror that it was my elderly neighbor, Stan. I screamed until my husband, who was in the back of the house with the windows closed, heard me and came running.

Miraculously, Stan was able to get up with our help. I pulled out my cell phone to call an ambulance, but he said he would not go to the hospital. His wife, Rosalyn, was at home. She had a brain tumor, was bedridden, and rarely conscious. Should Stan be admitted to the hospital, Rosalyn would have to go into respite care, where, he said, she would not eat, and would die.

We drove Stan the half-mile back to his house, and sat with him for nearly an hour. As the shock of the accident began to wear off, a sizzling pain in his left leg set in. He reluctantly agreed to go for X-rays, which revealed a crushed muscle in his thigh, and was admitted for treatment. Rosalyn went into respite care, stopped eating, and died six days later.

In the aftermath of the accident, a haze settled around me. I could still see the hard outlines of my life—I took care of my dogs, I went to the store, I cooked and wrote and slept. But where there had been color and clarity, gratitude and gladness tinged with small, tinny worries, there was now just the blurry smear of life inching forward. Accidentistan I called it, this place I had come to where I no longer woke without the dull tug of guilt, no longer went about my days as if they were a given, no longer backed down my driveway without the sharp prick of apprehension. Was there something there I could not see?

When I was in my twenties, I hit a deer. While I often saw deer along the rural, two-lane road between my house and the highway, by the time I saw this one it was too late to stop. She leapt in front of me and I smashed into her, the sickening blow of impact followed by the clanging of bones and axles tangling and snapping. I slammed on my brakes and looked in the rear-view mirror just as my truck spit out her broken body. It bounced, limbs akimbo, into the middle of the road, then came to rest in a heap. A man who had seen the accident from his den window sauntered out with a crowbar and boredly pulled my front fender off of my tire, as if this was something he did daily, and, frankly, it was getting old. A woman driving by pulled over and, after examining the deer, asked if I planned to take it home and eat it.

No, I said, and she popped her trunk and wrestled the mangled animal into it.

Over the years, these people would be given their rightful cameos in my recounting of “the sad deer incident.” But after I hit Stan, the deer and her quirky sideshow slid into my brain’s archive of regrettable events: an unfortunate butchery that turned out to be just a gateway, a run-up to the real calamity.

My husband and I visited Stan every day in the hospital. Over the many hours at his bedside, we learned a lot about him. We discovered that he, like me, was Jewish, and that he, like me, had worked in community mental health. We learned that he and Rosalyn had been married forty years, had three children, and had never slept apart, and that he promised her, when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, that he would never put her in a nursing home, even if she became incapacitated. On several of our visits, lying in the hushed chill of his hospital room, Stan brought up the question of a “grand plan.”

“I keep thinking God put me in the path of your car to teach me something,” he would say, and so we brought him books we thought might have some answers: The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard; When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner. One afternoon I brought him Chinese food from his favorite restaurant, and when he opened his fortune cookie there were two fortunes—one for each of us, he suggested—both of which said the same thing: “If you wait until you are ready, opportunity will pass you by.”

“I wonder what that means for me,” he mused aloud. Separated from Rosalyn, unable to deliver on his promise to her, he wanted his accident to count for something.

One night when I was unable to sleep, I Googled “when you injure someone accidentally” and learned that approximately 30,000 people accidentally kill other people every year just in the US, and although it’s impossible to know how many people accidentally injure other people, it’s likely much higher than that. There is even an organization devoted to supporting and helping people through the trauma of harming others. It’s called the Hyacinth Fellowship, and it was started in 2013 by a man named Chris Yaw who accidentally killed his gardener.

Turns out, it’s an astonishingly simple thing to almost kill a man. One minute you are just going about your business, and the next minute there lies in your rearview mirror the mangled body of your blameless life, when all you’d done up until that point was hit a fickle, injudicious deer. But that was before opportunity—the supposed guarantor of good fate—put a man dressed in fog beneath the horizon of your vision, and you, in your blindness, rushed to meet him.

In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Kushner writes that pain and suffering are an inevitable fact of every life; our task is not to attempt to imbue meaning to the randomness, but to go forward in a meaningful way. It is what I believe also. But if I did think, as Stan said many times, that there was a lesson to be learned, it would be this: There are times when pain is visited upon us; there are times when we visit pain upon others; and there are times we trade pain back and forth, like a stone that is too heavy, too unwieldy, to carry alone for long. On that cool November morning that Stan took a right out of his driveway and made his way to the bottom of mine, I happened to be backing out. He thought I could see him; he thought he could get across in time. Instead, in the clash of car and body, we fashioned from our shared sorrow the stone we would pass back and forth. For how long, I can’t yet know.

A year has passed, and Stan walks the neighborhood almost every day. Sometimes he takes a left out of his driveway and heads up the steep, freshly paved hill to the overlook where the river cuts a path through the canyon. Other days, like today, he takes a right and walks to the end of my cul-de-sac, maneuvering carefully across the persistently broken asphalt and skittering gravel and acorns. His steps are slow and plodding, just as they were before the accident. I stop and roll down my window. His face brightens.

“Looking good!” I say.

He laughs self-consciously. “I’m doing pretty well,” he says, “All things considered.” He looks at me with impossible tenderness. “Are you ok?”
“I’m ok,” I say. A heaviness passes between us.

Stan nods and pats my arm. I lay my hand on his. Then I roll up my window, and in my rearview mirror, watch as he resumes his walk.

END