Half a Life

When a careless carefree moment results in the death of a child or young adult the emphasis is usually placed upon the grieving parents, relatives, and friends. Here, we get to hear about it from the perspective of the young driver who had a biker swerve in front of his car resulting in that person's death. The fact that he is not held responsible for the incident does not absolve him of the grief and angst he feels over being the agency for another's death. Eighteen years after this tragic event occurred in the life of his eighteen-year-old younger self Darin Strauss writes about what happened to him half a lifetime before.

It's called survivor's guilt. Think of a subway driver entering a platform at forty-miles-per-hour when a mental patient jumps in front of his car. He already has the train's maximum braking power engaged and in any case he has ten carloads of passengers behind him to consider so there is nothing he can do to avoid the splat that hits his windows in a split second. But does the fact there was nothing he could have done to avoid this incident relieve him of the post dramatic stress he feels in the aftermath.

The opening sentence here says it all:

“Half my life ago, I killed a girl.”