Fate From the Rear

Sometimes fate comes out of nowhere to remind us of its power and presence. And sometimes a fellow motorist is following the car in front of his too closely and looks away for just a second and CRASH!

I was traveling west on State Road 580 in Dunedin, Florida when traffic stopped for a red light at the intersection of S.R. 580 and Overchash Drive. I had applied my brake and had just come to a full stop when I felt a strong jolt that made my brain feel like it was sloshing around inside my skull and sent my sunglasses flying off my head and into the backseat. My seat belt held me in place and prevented me from sustaining serious injury, but I did have whiplash and a minor seat belt bruise.

For a second, I thought that I had hit the car in front of mine. Then I looked in my rear view mirror and saw that the car behind mine had a shattered windshield and that its airbags had deployed. I grabbed my phone and got out of my car to check on the driver to see if he’d been hurt. He was stunned, but not seriously injured.

The woman driving the car in front of mine got out of her car and walked back to ask both of us if we were okay. Then she said that she had been slightly bumped, but not badly enough to cause any damage to her car (apparently, the jolt caused my foot to slip off my brake pedal, causing my car to roll into hers). She really just wanted to go home, but when she called the police, they told her that she was involved and therefore legally obliged to stay and give her statement to the police.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Deputy arrived on the scene and the matter was handled officiously, license, registration and insurance information was collected and run through the criminal databases for warrants and such, statements were taken, tow trucks were dispatched and the driver who was responsible was cited for careless driving. All in all, it was a pretty mundane event.

I wasn’t even going to blog about this because it seemed so silly and trivial at the time, nobody was badly injured and there was no controversy (everyone was sober and the gentleman who ran into the back of me did not even own a cell phone and asked to borrow mine to call his wife), but this was the first traffic accident I had ever been involved in that was not my fault and that has had some unexpected ramifications.

You’d think it would be easier to deal with the psychological trauma of such an accident if it was not your fault, but I am finding that this is not the case for me because this accident was completely out of my control. There was nothing that I could have done to prevent it. Even if I had seen the car coming at me, I could not have steered into another lane without hitting another car.

When I had accidents that were my fault (the only time I ever injured anyone — knock wood — it was only me in a one-car, one-tree incident) I had to deal with the guilt that came from the knowledge that I had been careless and negligent, but at least I was in control of the situation and could take future preventative action by being more attentive and careful while driving.

The pain in my neck and shoulder is gone, but I still feel anxious every time I stop at a red light. I keep having to resist the urge to look in my rear view mirror because when I do I am afraid that every car behind mine is not going to stop. It is most unsettling to contemplate that the usually unseen presence of fate can, at any time, come out of hiding to remind me that I am not as in control of my own destiny as I often like to think I am.