Since I can’t do justice at the moment to a thoughtful article about what I learned through Olivia’s life, suffering, and death, I thought I’d post several photographs of my daughter’s car after her accident Friday night.

My husband called me yesterday, saying, “Sweetie, you really need to go over to the wrecker service and look at her car in daylight. It made my knees go weak.” Since the last thing that made his knees go weak was me, I thought I’d better go have a look. He hadn’t seen the car at all, except on my iPhone photos, and I hadn’t seen it in daylight. The last time I saw her car, I only saw the driver’s side.

Fern and I had gone to the scene of the accident and found the Ford emblem off her front grille. We also noticed that window glass was so deeply imbedded in the telephone pole they ran into that we couldn’t pick it out. The main reason that she and my son didn’t come away with multiple cuts and gashes seemed to be the window tinting film we’d had installed after we bought her car. Funny thing, isn’t it? Something we did to help cool and protect the interior in our sometimes extreme temperatures also contributed to their safety. I didn’t know that having one’s windows tinted could be one more safety feature to consider; but in the future I intend to tint all our kids’ window glass.

Well, here are the photos. I’m flabbergasted as I look at these, wondering where my son’s almost 6-foot-tall frame was on the front passenger side, and wondering too how they walked away from this accident. And I have to wonder how long it will be before I stop having stressed reactions when the telephone rings late at night—such as the night after the accident, when the police department called me at 10:45 p.m. to ask about our insurance coverage. My heart was beating wildly when I looked at the caller ID and saw it was the police department; when the call turned out to be about something mundane, I wanted to yell at the cop who was calling me at 10:45 p.m. on a Saturday night, “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING, YOU NINCOMPOOP?! DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU ALMOST GAVE ME HEART FAILURE, CALLING ME LIKE THIS?!”

And then, yesterday the phone rang and I saw it was my son, Cedar, who left no message. So I called him back and when he picked up, he sounded breathless and I said, “What’s wrong?” and he replied, ” [something something] accident!”

“What?!” I exclaimed, “You’ve had an accident?!”

“No, no, Mom! Wow, bad choice of words! I said, ‘I called you by accident!’”

Wow, just wow.

And then, this afternoon, my heart went to racing again when I heard that same fool son, shouting on the answering machine, “SOMEBODY ANSWER THE PHONE!!!” The lives of two chihuahuas were nearly sacrificed in my mad dash to the telephone.

“WHAT’S WRONG?!” I shouted.

“NOTHING!” he shouted.

“WHY ARE YOU YELLING?” I shouted.

“I JUST WANTED SOMEONE TO PICK UP THE PHONE. WHY ARE YOU YELLING?” he shouted.

“OH MY GOD!” I shouted, “Please drive home safely so I can strangle you when you get here!”

So, needless to say, there’s a bit of trauma going around in our household and I seem to be the one who has the worst case of it.

I’m going to go wrap myself in cotton and go sit in the corner and suck my thumb now.

See you all in a day or two.