I saw the SUV speed around the corner of the intersection, swerve a few times and then head straight toward my vehicle.
That part now seems so clear; I swear it happened in slow motion.
My life didn’t really flash before my eyes. Instead, my brain panicked and focused on two thoughts: This could hurt and “what the hell?”
A second later, the impact hit hard, and the airbag exploded out of my steering wheel.
I had survived. But among my thoughts in the next hour was this: Worst summer ever.
Have you ever had your house and a recently bought car destroyed within three months of each other? We have, and it’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
While I’ll always remember that vision out my windshield right before the crash, I’ll also remember the surreal scene of water running down our stairs as I opened the front door to our house on June 30. Water was everywhere as we arrived home that summer evening after a long weekend feting my parents-in-law’s 50th wedding anniversary.
My wife and I then spent frantic, long minutes trying to turn the water off under our kitchen sink—where the water was spraying out with high pressure—and at the main valve buried in our front yard. As we later pieced together, our kids’ mischievous hamster escaped, gorged herself on sunflower seeds we stored under the kitchen sink to stock our bird feeder and then searched for the nearest source of water.
That happened to be the hot water supply line for our dishwasher. She gnawed just a pin-sized hole in that line’s mesh covering, but the pressurized hot water inside then spewed halfway across our kitchen for more than 24 hours before we got home. Pearl, the hamster, actually survived. We took her to an all-hours veterinary clinic that same night for treatment, but she succumbed to her injuries two days later.
Believe it or not, I still miss that little rodent, despite the fact the water she unleashed destroyed half the upstairs flooring and then poured into our lower level, extensively damaging the ceiling, floor and walls. The damage to our belongings and the house itself exceeded $110,000.
For the house alone, we’ve spent hours on the phone with our assigned representative at our homeowners’ insurance firm. She’s pleasant enough and patient in answering our many questions, but they’re not fun calls. Then there has been paperwork for the mortgage company, finding a general contractor at a time when most of the good ones are busy in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas and other endless, tedious details.
The car crash has sparked contentious calls with our auto insurer that have ended with me yelling just to get a fair settlement, filling out title transfer forms for our officially totaled minivan and even requesting the police report on the crash.
And this is all on top of our usual hectic lives with three kids and our jobs. Our oldest is in his senior year of high school, so senior photos, the SAT, FAFSA and college applications have occupied our time in recent weeks between insurance matters.
It’s a giant hassle that has upended our regular lives, stretched our bank accounts until the insurance settlements come and required our two youngest kids to once again share a room, something they hadn’t done for four years and the cause of increased bickering. Most of our belongings are locked in storage containers, so our rental house in a crowded, bland subdivision is filled with a mishmash of cheap rental furniture provided by our insurer and a few of our belongings that we’ve moved carload by carload at various points over the past few months. Even so, it beats the three weeks in July when our “home” was two hotel rooms in nearby Everett.
But, in the end, most of what we lost is just stuff. Stuff that can be replaced. In that way, we’ve been lucky.
Because while we’ve dealt with this, a guy I knew when I was a teenager died in his early 40s of incurable cancer, leaving behind a wife and kids. The husband of one of my wife’s friends dropped dead hours after signing the final paperwork to buy a new house, also leaving behind a 10-year-old daughter. A teen boy my oldest son knew a little through Little League baseball committed suicide. All of those tragic, life-altering situations will reverberate much longer with the people left behind than our ordeal.
For now, we’re trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve already replaced our minivan, and the sizable repair job for our house starts next week. Plans are afoot to finally dispose of our furniture and belongings that were too damaged by water to survive. Our closest friends and neighbors have been kind in helping out where they can.
But the things I’ve missed and not had time to ponder deeply during all this chaos hit me in a moment last weekend. We gathered at our flooded house to meet with our contractor so he could measure for new kitchen cabinets while his drywall guy checked out the task that awaits him. In our torn-up kitchen, I glanced out the door at the huge tree that dominates our lower backyard. I love that tree, and with fall in full swing, its leaves had turned flaming red. I missed the transition of those leaves from lush summer green to that color, and I likely will miss seeing those leaves fall to the ground below in the coming weeks.
The tree’s branches are likely to be bare by the time our home is ready to inhabit again. But I look forward to seeing those branches carrying colorful pink buds again next spring. That’s a vision I want to remember, too.
(Photos show the totaled Kia minivan that saved me from serious injury and the downstairs hallway of our flooded house.)