Two words to end drunk driving: Just stop

Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

The bedrooms are what I continue to see: Teddy bears on a child’s bed. A young woman’s calendar red-marked with celebrations planned. Back to school shoes still in their box. Running shorts tossed in a corner. Books on a night table, one with a bookmark midway. Different bedrooms full of different things, all stark and empty without the lives that gave them life.

And then there are the words, parents’ words, siblings’ words, the words of a man whose new bride was killed as she sat in her car in the breakdown lane. “If she just hadn’t stopped,” he said. Others said, “If I hadn’t been working that night.” “She was almost home.” “All she was doing was crossing the street.” “He was in a bike race.” “He was our life.” “She was my world.”

For years I wrote about these people drunk drivers kill and about people they almost kill — boys and girls, men and women in comas and in traction and in wheelchairs and on vents, people who are not part of the “killed by” toll because they’re badly injured, not dead. The dead are the numbers that get our attention, never mind the never-ending physical and emotional pain of the families drunk drivers destroy.

I stopped writing about the victims of a problem we could solve in a nanosecond — and we could because driving drunk is not neuroblastoma, it’s not cystic fibrosis, it’s not San Filippo syndrome, diseases over which we have no control. It is a choice people make every day. I stopped writing about these victims of drunk drivers because one night after spending the afternoon with a woman whose 19-year-old college student daughter was killed in the middle of the day while crossing a street in Boston, I was with friends and could not stop thinking of this mother who was alone in her grief, and sadder than anyone should be. “I think it’s my tears that are keeping me afloat,” she said that day as I hugged her goodbye.

And there I was, the page turned, on to the next thing.

But it wasn’t on to the next thing for her. And it would never be. And I thought then, as I think now: THIS DID NOT HAVE TO HAPPEN. But it keeps happening. And all the words and all the tears change nothing.

Now, decades later, in addition to drunk drivers, we have stoned drivers and distracted drivers and aggressive drivers and arrogant drivers. It is the Wild West out there, drivers on their phones, eating their breakfast or lunch, playing with the radio, with their navigation system, weaving in and out of traffic, tailgating, ignoring the speed limit, knowing that the police are not eager to pull over someone and risk their lives to issue a speeding ticket that stands a good chance of being thrown out in court.

I drive from Canton to Boston and from Canton to Rhode Island regularly. From Canton to Boston, on the Southeast Expressway, it’s all about tailgating and weaving in and out. And cutting off whoever is in the way. Unless it’s night. Then there are speeders, too. On Route 95 going south, the aggression is different. It’s all about speed. If you’re not going 80, you will be passed.

I have been driving since the day I turned 16 and I have never been frightened. Driving frightens me now.

A few weeks ago, I read “Finding the Words,” a book about grief written by Colin Campbell whose two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver in California in 2019. Campbell was driving. His wife was in the passenger seat.

“The drunk driver T-boned us, hitting the rear passenger door,” he wrote. “At impact, my car was spun five hundred and forty degrees around … She never even touched the brakes. She slammed into us at full speed. Ninety miles an hour. Too drunk and stoned to even slow down.” He and his wife survived the crash. His children, Ruby, 17, and Hart, 14, did not.

We get what we tolerate. And we tolerate this.