I read on Twitter this morning that ten year old Adam Lyons died - barely had I digested that sad news but I learned about another cyclist killed in the same twenty four hours along with a driver. Three lives lost on our roads, so many more lives scattered asunder in an instant that can never be undone.
The moment that you are told is the moment that your life changes, it is so seismic that it defies words. A road death transports us to an unknown land of a grief like no other in my experience. Not that there is a hierarchy in grief obviously, but it is different. It brings challenges few can imagine quite aside from the horrendous shock and devastating loss itself.
Was it her fault? Was she not wearing a helmet? Bikes are far too dangerous. You take your life in your hands cycling. Why didn’t she drive her car or get the train? Far too many bikes on the roads now. These comments, made to me by those I knew in the couple of days after the crash, were nothing like the rants and assumptions that were been tweeted even before I knew Donna had been knocked down and had died. The trolls are the trolls but they also are road users like us all so these damning groundless attitudes do worry me.
Then you have the Gardaí the emergency services and in some cases the gasps of hope soon dashed in hospital corridors or the back of ambulances. “Donna is in the city’s morgue.” Aaron and John the two Gardaí who broke the news to me explained, so we didn’t have any hope to be dashed. In Donna’s case you also had the media, who hand on heart nearly four years on have always been supportive. Perhaps not everyone’s experience though. Nothing prepares you to see your sisters photo on the newspaper stands under those tragic headlines, or on the way to buy clothes for her funeral to hear her death discussed on national radio shows. Now it is not something I blink an eye about as I have used it as a platform since to campaign for greater safety measures for cycling and to involve myself in road safety promotion in whatever way I can. But back in that September week, it was all a haze, all a new world. It was surreal.
These type of deaths effect everyone, it touches people who you have never met or known, most are wonderful when they get in touch but some are crazies. Being easily accessible online as I was I had some interesting encounters let’s just say. In a way those things are a distraction from the real life horror though and I look back and smile at the nonsense now.
Donna was coming up to her 31st birthday, very young in my eyes still, our mother Catherine had died at 51 five years earlier which was young in my book too. There was so much potential, that torturous mourning for what might have been. No matter how much we know it’s pointless; it is near impossible not to languish in such thinking, in those early days in particular.
I think of those families this week. I wonder how they are in the maze that they’ve been thrown into. I think of those who witnessed the crashes too, the first responders. Each death on the road touches deep into the fabric of so many peoples psyche. I’m blessed to know well in these last years, Amanda the woman who tried to save Donna’s life, relentlessly doing CPR having jumped out of her car. In our mutual sharing and unusual but tight bond, I have found that not only those whose loved ones are lost have their lives altered but others too. People like Amanda who only met Donna in those last moments of her life, seconds maybe. A man on his motorbike Paul will forever remember shouting and screaming in hope of getting the lorry driver’s attention. Just two of those impacted.
Each fatal crash has differences so I only can speak of my own experience. There were two people involved in the crash that took my sisters life, Donna and Henry (not his real name but more human than saying the “driver”). There were two immediate families left shaken to the core. Two families who in this case didn’t know one another, had no connection other than those few seconds if even that, which reshaped a part of us. I didn’t meet them until in a coroners court eighteen months later. Each collision is different, but all involve people, real people, someone’s sister someone’s son. I genuinely feel for Henry even though it’s a very different process he has been through, but probably outside of those closest to Donna, he is the only other person who understands the gravity of that Tuesday morning in 2016.
For me I found direction and healing these last years in campaigning and working with RSA and others in highlighting the seriousness we must give road safety. I went from been a guarded person to wearing my heart on my sleeve and sharing my personal journey, it’s not for everyone, but each of us find our way. Working for safer roads, new legislation and radical increases in funds for cycling infrastructure saved me from the abyss. I messed up many times in my personal life as trauma and grief complicate everything if you don’t get the supports you need or reach out for the wrong ones. But I am proud too, proud to try to do good in memory of my sister and all those who are far more than a news story. Proud of the incredible people I know now who have helped me find a new way in the world. But of course never as proud of anything as to say that girl on the bike was my sister.
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