Speech for Catherine

Three years ago I sat where you are today and ignored everything someone tried to tell me about driving safely. I knew it all, and that stuff always happened to somebody else.

Today’s your lucky day. It did happen to somebody else. Me.

When I was almost seventeen, I was in a car my friend wrapped around a tree. The first people on the scene found a broken bone in my leg sticking out of my groin; it severed my femoral artery as it tore out of my body. The blood loss alone should have killed me. My brainstem ripped from the base of my skull and I was deprived of oxygen when my nose cavity collapsed.

They also discovered my three friends dead in their seats.

I woke up six weeks later, covered in tubes, unable to move my legs. I’ll never walk again.

The biggest problem I have isn’t living in this wheelchair, it’s living with everything I know now. Everyday I have to live knowing that not one of us in that car asked the driver to slow down or concentrate. She was our friend and we trusted her, but that counts for nothing in a crash. The power of our friendship didn’t stand between us and that tree, but it could have, and it should have, if only one of us had spoken up.

Let’s face it- no one wants to do that. But if you don’t, then who will? You’ve already placed your life in the hands of an idiot driver, can you really trust the other passengers to keep you alive? Will they speak up? Who in that car will save you all? It’s hard, but trust me, it’s only the second hardest thing you’ll do.

Look at the person next to you.

There’s every chance you’ve driven with them. That’s not a problem. The problem is everything else in the car: the doof-doof, the yakking, the mobile phones, the driver who wants to join in and the passengers who encourage it. Suddenly everyone’s distracted and then one tonne of metal is careering along with no one concentrating. That’s how people die.
If our driver had been safer, if we weren’t carrying on so much, then today I’d have a completely different life than being a survivor with a lot of dead friends. Trust me; your worst nightmare isn’t dying in a crash. Your worst nightmare is your friends dying and you surviving.

Each of you needs to value your life and your friends’ lives more than you value friendship. If it’s friendship that stops you from concentrating on the road, from speaking up or getting out of the car, then you need new friends.

People will remember you, but your legacy will fade. Those roadside memorials? Lovely- but you’ll never see them. Your friends might get together to celebrate your milestones, but you won’t be there to see it. You’ll become a special school assembly, a plaque at your seat, a photo montage at graduation and a minute silence at reunions.

I am not cool and accepting. We survivors are not a happy bunch. But there is something we all agree on- it’s taken the death of someone we love for us to finally get the message.
Look again at your friends around you.

Who are you going to lose before you get the message?

Which friend or parent, brother or sister has to die in a careless car accident before you slow down, concentrate or speak up?

The decisions you make in a car affect the rest of your life. Unfortunately my best driving lesson came the day my three friends died, so my message to you is simple: don’t be an idiot in a car and don’t get into a car with an idiot.