I am still somewhat stunned by this accident. It occurred on Friday morning merely two exits away from ours, on a route that Jeff and I both travel constantly. It's a fairly dangerous stretch of I-95 because there are only two lanes and there's a merge on the right and an on-ramp to I-395 a few hundred feet ahead on the left. I've often felt a bit claustrophobic and defensive driving through there because the drivers behind me usually fly up at 80 m.p.h. as the people in front of me slam on their brakes to let other drivers in or to allow people to move over to the on-ramp. On more than one occasion I have braced myself for an impending collision because I have nowhere else to go when the car behind me doesn't look like it's going to stop. Just weeks ago I happened to glance in my rearview mirror and literally saw the grill of a Mack truck and nothing else. I felt trapped.

These tractor trailers and tanker trucks seriously need to slow down. I've been passed on the right, and I've seen trucks playing games with each other as it appears these two were on Friday morning. Most likely, 90% of the time their erratic behavior will only result in annoyance and a few choice hand gestures from other cars on the road. However, these speeding/passing games take a toll when all of a sudden the driver can no longer handle his own vehicle. If I had been on the road at the time of that accident, I probably would have succumbed to an anxiety attack and crashed my own car even if I wasn't directly involved. Car accidents have been a great fear of mine for as long as I can remember. I can't imagine anything worse than seeing a horrific situation and not having enough time to manuever around it. The fact that two innocent people lost their lives due to someone else's carelessness and recklessness really affects me. Now someone is without his wife...another couple is without their son. This could have been avoided. The tanker was carrying home heating oil, and no one was going to be any worse off if they received their delivery 10 minutes later.

All I could think of when I heard that three people had died was "What if it's someone I know?" Luckily I had heard the news from Jeff and his mom so I knew it wasn't them, but still. It could have been them. It could have been me. I had just traveled that route the night before to go to the Crystal Mall after work. You just never know when these random events might happen. As it is, I worry enough about something terrible happening to Jeff. When you love someone that much and don't want to imagine your life without them, it's only natural. I still worry about my parents' safety, as well as my brother's down in North Carolina. But there are only so many aspects of your environment that you can control, and the rest is left up to chance. I am a careful driver. Not slow or extremely cautious, but definitely aware of my surroundings at all times. I attribute this to my absolute fear of car accidents and to the fact that I never want to be involved in one. However, if I had been driving on that patch of 95 for whatever reason that morning, it wouldn't matter that I was careful. It wouldn't matter that I was driving the speed limit or that I wasn't tailgating anyone. The tanker truck came through the median into oncoming traffic and I'll bet the people who died literally didn't even know what hit them.

Since I don't have the control or power to stop accidents from happening, I can only hope that this story and its tragic outcome will cause truck drivers (and all other erratic drivers) to think twice about their actions. There are other people on the road. People with families and lives and goals...and you don't have the right to take all of that away from them.