As Was His Custom: Silence

I remember the first time I experienced true silence. I was 11 years old and had just spent a week at my grandparent’s home all by myself. My Grandma Gus and I had attended musicals, gotten my ears pierced, and shopped until we dropped. She’d taken me to tea houses, watched Anne of Green Gables (with Megan Follows- because that version is a part of my DNA!), and rode my Grandpa Gus’ horses at sunset. That week was one of my most beautiful times with my grandparents on my mother’s side.

But in one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, on the way to surprise my Grandpa at work with ice cream, an intoxicated driver t-boned the car my Grandma and I were in. Our vehicle spun, rolling violently eight times into a bean field. When our car came to rest upside down, I was unconscious, pinned between the dashboard and the windshield. My Grandma’s seat belt had snapped, leaving her bleeding out on the ceiling of the car, now on the ground. My parents were over 12 hours away, and even though my Dad left immediately after receiving that awful phone call, I was relatively alone for several hours in that hospital room in Princeton, IL.