I was barely 14 years old when one of my older sisters, Janice, was killed in a car accident in early November of 1969. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, much like it was here today in Kansas, and she was headed home after being gone for the afternoon. With her little baby nestled inside a car seat right next to her in the front, Janice started out on the route she had driven many times before. She stopped at a stop sign on Highway 50, only 3 miles south of her home in the Sand Hills of Harvey County, and then headed out across the road. The "Navajo" semi-driver that hit her car broadside told the Kansas Highway Patrol officer that she looked up at him and came across just as he was entering the intersection. Because he was going faster than he should have been and pulling "doubles" behind him, it was impossible to do anything but hit her. Apparently the glare of the November sun at 3:00 p.m. prohibited her from seeing him coming. Janice was killed instantly and her little baby, my 9-month old niece, Kimberly was critically injured and life as we knew it to be was never again to be the same.
For a day we didn't even plan my sister's funeral. With the condition of my niece, the doctors weren't sure but what Kimberly wouldn't succumb rather quickly to her own injuries as well. If something would happen and Kimberly wasn't going to survive, then my parents wanted to make sure that they could be buried together. There just wasn't much hope~Kimberly had two chances, the notorious "slim and none". But the first 24 hours passed, then 48 more hours and miraculously she lived. She would never be the same again, always bed fast without the ability to walk or sit up on her own, some very severe brain damage, and the saddest thing of all, she would be blind. My parents took it in stride and made the decision early on that they would be her caregivers for the rest of her life and thus she came to live with us in our house. They were grieving the death of their own daughter and rejoicing in the fact that their granddaughter was still alive. I cannot imagine how they would have really felt inside.
Faithfully my parents kept their pledge to take care of her for as long as they could. With deep regret, at age 13 Kimberly had grown so much in size that it was no longer a possibility for my parents to care for her. She lived her last 10 years of "being" here on earth at the Winfield State Hospital. Her life and death made a huge impact upon my own life and it was by knowing and loving her that I was able to become the teacher that I am today.
So fast forward now, 43 years later in the year 2012. A lot of life has passed by and now I find myself alive and well, having lived nearly to an age 30 years longer than my sister was given. I regretfully admit that I can barely remember what my sister was like and that's a sad thought for me. I try to remember Janice's face, the sound of her voice, or the way she walked but my memories of her have all but left me. I have no pictures of her any longer but in my mind I remember that she had blonde hair, green eyes and was built just like me. Of little Kimberly the memories find themselves pretty deeply engrained in my heart and mind. While she lived with us, Kimberly became more like our little baby sister rather than our niece. Every trial and tribulation she went through in her life here, we all went through with her. It was a privilege to help our parents be her caregiver and even in the sadness and grief of losing my sister and my niece 23 years later, we still felt blessed beyond measure. Guess you would have just had to been there to understand that.
My sister and my niece both came to my mind at school this past week as I was teaching a group of 4th graders during one of the reading rotations of the day. I had chosen a non-fiction book, the biography of Louis Braille, the man who thought up the Braille system that enabled people who are blind to read and write. As I handed the books to the kids at my table, I could tell by the looks on their faces that they weren't too thrilled with the thought of learning about a guy named Louis. In fact, one of them downright told me so. You know, I was a kid once too and I understood their dismay. I'm not sure I would have been any more thrilled than they were. But then an inspiration hit me and really I'm pretty sure that "inspiration" was God giving me yet one more "whack upside the head". A voice inside of me told me that I should share Kimberly's story with them and maybe it would make a difference in the way they looked at the book. And you know, the "voice" was right.
I've told the story of the accident and Kimberly's 23 year struggle with her injuries to many students over the course of the last 35 years of being a teacher. I've always been honest with them and have given them the facts as they happened. My students would learn that her mother (my sister) didn't live and that Kimberly was just like a baby for the rest of her 23 years of life. They know that she wore diapers, even as a teen and adult and that she got most of her liquid refreshment from baby bottles. They laugh when I tell them that her favorite drink was Mountain Dew and that if she wanted to get our attention, all she had to do was give that bottle a toss out of her bed and we'd all come running. And I tell them what it was like for her to be blind.
I always use the explanation of how Kimberly's sense of smell enabled her to figure out who we all were. Because our family had a restaurant and service station in our hometown of Haven, Ks. Kimberly got used to the smells we had on us when we got home from work each day. If one of us entered her room and put our hands inside of her crib to greet her, she would take our hand and put it up against her nose to "smell" us. If we smelled like hamburgers and french fries, then she knew it was either me, my mom or one of my sisters. If we had the distinct odor of gasoline or oil, then she made the connection that it was my dad or one of my brothers. It was amazing what she could figure out even without her sight.
As I told the kids her story last week, I could tell just by the looks on their faces that they were interested and all of a sudden this book about a guy named Louis Braille had an appeal to them. They even started to open up themselves about people in their family who were blind and how it affected them. After 5 minutes of discussion they were more than ready to begin the book and I told them how happy my sister and niece would be to know that their story had not been forgotten. Amazing how the lives of two people, now gone for so very many years, would have an impact upon a group of 3 ten-year olds in Hutchinson, Ks. And it made me very happy.
Next week Friday, come the 26th of October, if all goes well I shall turn another year older. I'll be 57 at precisely 10:32 in the a.m. I will have received the gift of life 30 years longer than my sister who left this place at the age of 27. She was so young and I guess I never really thought about it as such until I started getting much older myself. Since I've received the "gift" of this lengthy of a life, I have to stop and wonder to myself..."Is this where I figured that I would be?" "Have I done what I set out to?" "And when I am gone, will people left behind be able to use any of my story to teach others the lessons of life?" I can only hope and pray it to be so.
It's time for a reshuffling of the 10 items on the Miller Bucket List and I'm going to be using the days that lie between now and Friday to figure out just which ones are the most important to me to accomplish. I'm giving myself the "gift" of taking one of my personal days off from school in order to celebrate "one more journey around the sun". And when I celebrate the fact that I'm going to be only 3 years away from the age of 60, I shall do it for every person on earth, just like Janice and Kimberly, who never got the chance to do so. What a gift, what a blessing!
Have a great evening friends out there! Take care of yourselves and take care of one another.
Good Night :)
The only picture I have left of Kimberly before she got hurt in the accident. She was 8 months old here and her little blue eyes could see. Even in sadness, God is still so good to us all.
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