The Accident

19 of 40

Hello! I’m Walther, this is Peregrino, and you’re about to read essay #19 of “40 Before 40,” a memoir I intend to finish before I enter midlife.

In other essays, I mentioned my sister being in an accident a while ago; well, today is the day you get to read that story. This was a difficult one to write.

I try to alternate between lighter and denser stories. I promise to keep it light for the next one.

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Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In the summer of 2007, my parents and my younger sister, Lily, drove to Puerto Vallarta for a week-long vacation. Tania, my middle sister, and her friend Monica had gone earlier via bus and linked up with my parents there. I stayed home since I was broke and had to work.

On the afternoon of July 15th, Tania and Monica took the bus heading home to Monterrey. Forty minutes past midnight, the bus crashed, leaving eight people dead, one of them Monica. Tania was in the group of fourteen people taken to several different hospitals in San Luis Potosi, where the accident happened.

Tania’s boyfriend would pick both girls up from the bus terminal. When the bus didn’t arrive, he called Tania’s cell phone, and someone in the hospital answered. “She has been in an accident and is admitted to the Beneficencia Española hospital. She’s in critical condition.” He got in his car and drove five hours to the hospital. He let my parents know on his way there.

I went to Monica’s funeral in representation of my parents. It was weird, as a 23-year-old, going to the funeral of a 20-year-old. Especially when Monica’s parents were still in shock and angry at my parents. Tania had invited Monica to this trip. I don’t know if they have healed from this tragic event, but I hope they did. My parents don’t talk much about them; neither does Tania.

My parents got a room in the hotel closest to the hospital in San Luis. They mostly used the space to shower and occasionally nap. They spent as much time as possible in the intensive care unit waiting room. Tania was 19 and had multiple bone fractures; her left ankle was gone, and her femur was broken in various places, just like her wrist. She was in a stable but critical state for a while. At some point, she caught a blood infection at the hospital, on top of everything else. Every day she survived was a win.

Our family rallied around us, and one of our aunts and uncles picked up Lily, who was 16 then, and took her back to Monterrey. For a while, it was just Lily and me in the house. I would go to work, and she would hang out with some of our cousins or spend time at their place. I would pick her up on Friday and spend the weekend at home.

Eventually, I made it down to San Luis. My parents looked frazzled and tired. My dad was very skinny; it was the first I saw grey hairs in his thick mustache. I went to see Tania in the hospital, and the intensive care room looked like from a movie. There were tubes, wires, and machines with blinking lights, monitors, needles, respirators, and more medical equipment unknown to me, sustaining my sister’s life. Seeing someone so full of life as my sister in that state was shocking. I know it was her, but it wasn’t her at the same time. She was fighting.

My mom told me at the hospital that the paramedics wouldn’t take Tania in the ambulance because they thought she wouldn’t make it to the hospital, but a police officer forced them to take her. I don’t know how factual this story is, but it fits the chain of miracles, big and small, that took place along Tania’s road to recovery.

The technology available at the Beneficencia Española wasn’t the most modern, which complicated things a bit, but eventually, Tania was stable enough to be transferred to a hospital in Monterrey. Still, the transfer was never racking. A lot of things could go wrong on the road. Fortunately, she made it safe to her new home, Hospital OCA, in downtown Monterrey.

When I visited her, she was conscious and looked more like her, unlike the last time. We exchanged I love yous when I saw her. It was as if she had been gone on a journey and had just returned. She was bored out of her mind since she was confined to a hospital bed, waiting for her wounds to heal.

Back home, my dad and I would chat in the kitchen after dinner; tears of frustration would roll down his eyes. I had front-row seats to the suffering of a man trying to understand what was happening. In a way, this tragedy made our family stronger by bonding over common trauma. Dad once apologized for ignoring Lily and me for the best part of a year. That broke me. I understood they were giving their undivided attention to the kid who needed it most. Still, I also realized that there was some burden on me as the oldest, which he recognized, which is a big deal, especially in a family like mine where we barely talk about anything remotely uncomfortable, you know, like our feelings.

For a few years, the cycle was surgery, recovery, healing, rinse and repeat. I don’t know the exact number of surgeries Tania has had, but I’d be willing to bet it’s north of 30 at least. Her left ankle is fused in the shape of an L, and her re-constructed heel has had to be touched up several times, probably the most significant source of grief. She has scars on her left leg, where the skin was taken between the hip and the knee to patch other places where she needed skin. Tattoos cover those scars now.

I talked about miracles earlier, and all of these have to do with the power of prayer. My parents have walked alongside several couples for close to two decades. Even though we're not related by blood, those men and women, who I call aunts and uncles, raised all of us in prayer and showed up when my parents needed someone to lean on.

About a year after the accident, Tania was able to come home. My dad and I moved a hospital bed to my sisters' room. My mom retired a few years before she had planned so she could take care of Tania full-time. Dad and I would move Tania between the ground level and the second floor, where her bedroom was, by carrying her in a chair. Being homebound brought different difficulties that we all had to adapt to.

Some days I would get home late at night, and Tania would be journaling. We would chat before I went into my room to sleep. She went through several notebooks. I don’t know the contents of her writing, but I believe it helped her cope.

Eventually, Tania went back to school and became an Industrial Designer. She got a job with a multinational, started teaching at a private college in Monterrey, and even lived in Chile for a couple of years while earning her master’s degree. She continues to travel the world and live her best life.

It’s been sixteen years since the accident, and we hardly ever discuss it; we just live with it. Sometimes I even forget it happened. Sometimes I still see glimpses of the stubborn little girl that used to claim all my toys as hers.

One of my uncles once told me, “If that [the accident] would’ve happened to me, I would probably be like a little kid crying in the corner.” Seeing my parents weather that storm made me proud of them. I had to step up my game as a young adult and help out with my younger sister. We had to deal with a period of uncertainty and then a period of recovery. And we kept going as best as we could.

My family is by no means perfect, but we have scars to show for our battles.

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Before you go

I have some questions for you

1. Has tragedy struck your family?

2. Should everyone go to therapy?

3. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is light, and 10 is heavy, how heavy is this essay?