MADD’s Closure a Cause for Alarm

The news was more than sad. It was frightening and ironic. On Dec. 31, The Times reported that diminished funding had forced the year-end closure of the primary office of the Los Angeles chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. With the reputation of New Year’s Eve as one of the biggest drinking and driving holidays of the year, it’s tragic that Los Angeles had to ring out 1995 with this kind of loss. And it’s a dark welcome to 1996.

Jan. 5 was the 22nd anniversary of the accident that slammed home to me the catastrophic results of drunk driving. Many factors came into play that night in 1974, but at the center of it all was a young man at the wheel of a car.

According to the police report, he was pulling out of a driveway onto a dimly lit street when my mother and her fiance, who were riding a motorcycle, collided with him.

My mom’s fiance was propelled onto the hood of the car, killing him instantly of a massive head injury. He was not wearing a helmet.

Neither was my mother, but she was luckier. The impact sent her flying off the back of the bike and over the car to crash against a traffic island stop sign.

The impact broke her pelvis and caused other devastating internal injuries. Surgeons who worked through the night didn’t know if she would even survive, much less walk again.

Well, she did survive and she does walk, although with difficulty. Initially she spent nine months in the hospital, and there have been so many follow-up surgeries that I no longer know the count.

But here’s what I do know. I know the wild, cold fear that grips the heart at hearing those terrible words: “There’s been an accident.” And I know that the police report on that accident said the driver of the car that hit my mother and her fiance failed a field sobriety test.

I was 17 when that accident happened. By my 18th birthday, my mother’s life was a struggle for strength against pain and a shattered world. I balanced senior year studies and activities with visits and phone calls to the hospital. Family and friends did their best to help me and my younger sister, but in the end it was just one frightened kid trying to take care of another, not knowing when the nightmare would end.

Today my mother endures chronic pain but keeps a cheerful, determined attitude. She carries a “disabled” placard in her car and cannot work. She lives on Social Security and Medi-Cal and sends MADD a few dollars when she can. I don’t know what became of the young man who hit her and her fiance, but I hope he’s sober. And I hope he remembers what happened.

Why? Because danger lies in forgetting. Someone who denies the results of drunken actions is someone likely to repeat them.

Life in Los Angeles is dangerous enough without making it needlessly more so through loss of an advocate such as MADD.

Drinking and driving put all of us at risk, and too many of us in the hospital--or the morgue.