A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver by Mark Shriver

Author:Mark Shriver
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2012-06-05T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

CAR CRASH

The next time, there was no heat to blame.

A few months after that game, Mother was in a car crash on Canal Road in Washington, D.C., that left her crushed behind the wheel of her vehicle.

The paramedics extracted her with the Jaws of Life—they literally cut her out of the car to put her on a stretcher so that they could transport her to the emergency room.

I rushed to the hospital and into the back of the ER. There was Mom laid out on a table, machines all around her, and Dad standing beside her. He stared blankly and could barely speak. He was in shock, I think, watching the love of his life and his wife of thirty-seven years lie there at the edge of death.

At my first glimpse of Mom, mangled and heaving on the bed, I’d gasped. But I’d quickly recovered. I’d known it would be bad—Rags had called me and prepared me for the sight. Once I saw her chest moving up and down, I knew she would live. She was as thin as a rail and had suffered broken bones and countless other ailments in the past, but she always bounced back quickly and, it seemed, even stronger than before. She was a force of nature, and a relentless one, too. Her body was beaten up, but I knew that her spirit was strong. She was too young to die, I thought, and she had willed herself through so much in the past. I felt, I just knew, that she would will herself through this one, too.

But I wasn’t ready to behold Dad. Physically, he looked okay—there was no blood, no bruises; he hadn’t been in the car. But he was a ghost of himself, more ghostly than even Mom. She had been in a terrible car crash; he was watching his love and his life crash right in front of him. Dad was always the man who summoned grace under pressure. I had never seen him wobble or quake. His faith had sustained him through hardships and travails worse than I could have even imagined. But here his love was being threatened, and that shook him like nothing I had ever seen.

* * *

My instinct that day in the ER was right. Mom survived and thrived; she was back at the Special Olympics office within a few months. But Dad—in conversations, at meals, during cocktail hour—seemed to be lingering instead of animating those events in his usual manner. I don’t think he ever fully recovered—or at least my view of him was altered by my having seen him in such a vulnerable state for the first time.

In 1992, Mom and Dad hosted an engagement party for Jeanne and me. We had invited about seventy-five people to their house in Maryland for cocktails and hors d’œuvres. It was a beautiful day, and I felt the sort of lightness and joy that I suppose Dad felt most days of his life.

Then Dad clinked his fork against his glass and announced that he wanted to make a toast.

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