A Parent’s Nightmare: Better Not to Remember

The haunting memory of being tragedy’s accomplice lies dormant in a parent’s psyche until sleep is again tortured by that scene. A child is lying ‘neath the car tire. Dead? Maimed? “My God! You ran over him.“

Selective memory is a human trait that exists in all of us. We sometimes hear or see what we want to hear and see even though it may be contrary to reality. Our personal reality usually conforms to pre-existing biases and creates our own world. (Unless we listen, think, unlearn, and learn.)

Early childhood traumatic memories may vanish never to be retrieved or lie dormant in the world of the subconscious. My first recall of early childhood was when I was 27 months old, when my sister was born. However, I have no memory of a life threatening accident when I was at 22 months, and maybe that’s good. I do know that mom and dad never forgot it.

Braidwood in the 1940s

My family was no different than most other families in Braidwood during the 1940’s.  Although I was oblivious to our social status, I neither thought we were near the poverty level nor in the middle-class category.  We just didn’t think about it except for the occasions when mom might hint that there were “really rich people” who owned their own homes instead of renting as we did.

In my part of Braidwood, it was common to have “outdoor toilets” and hand-pumped water just like us. Almost all my relatives, as well as friends, had coal-fed stoves to cook and to heat their houses.  On the other hand, childhood pictures would indicate that we were well-groomed and dressed.  Piano and trumpet lessons, Catholic school tuition, and the availability of books in our house were priorities that were ranked higher than indoor plumbing. 

I am sure that health and safety issues in the 1940’s were vastly improved over the previous decade when the Depression and extreme poverty dominated the American scene. But in small country towns like Braidwood, we were largely without any semblance of advanced medical and technological that our kids and grandkids now take for granted.  

Take, for example, a trip to the hospital for an emergency in 1941.

A Pleasant Ride Turns Tragic

The only reason that I now know the many details is that mom wrote in her journal. She was 24 years old, four months pregnant with my sister, and had never driven a car. (She learned immediately in order to visit me in the hospital in Joliet.)

“On Friday evening…we went for a ride to Wilmington. On the way home, we met Clarence and Zelma Abbott and their baby. They asked us to go with them, so we did to see the big strip mine shovel.”

Notes from Adele Kennedy

A parent’s nightmare is to see your helpless child being seriously harmed in any way. If the parents are involved in a mishap, that nightmare is magnified a thousand times. I cannot imagine the horror that mom and dad went through when their first-born fell under the rear wheel of the car in which we were riding. I was 22 months old.   

Being on the cusp of the “terrible twos,” I probably was eager to steer the car or shift gears from my seat, so dad, the front seat passenger, placed me to his right, between him and the door. As the driver, Red Abbott, navigated the curve to the left on the Strip Mine gravel road, the door swung open, I rolled out, and he stopped the car as quickly as possible.  Dad jumped out and saw the rear right tire was atop my right leg. He pushed the car off the leg, picked me up, and the five of us were off to St. Joseph Hospital in Joliet, a mere 20 miles away.

“My God. You ran over him. I thought I would die!”

Notes from Adele Kennedy

My leg had been fractured.

I cannot imagine the horror that went through the minds of the four adults, especially my parents, during that 45-minute ride on the old Route #66. No ambulance, no cell phones, no seat belts.  Just 5 hysterical people.

The doctor at the hospital estimated my stay would be between 4-6 weeks.  My leg was placed on a pulley with a 10-pound weight hanging on the other end and I stayed in that position for one day short of 3 weeks. At that point, they put a cast on the leg from the toes to the waist.  I then was taken home and after two weeks and two days, my dad called the doctor to see if the cast could be removed. That was on Monday, August 31^st. On September 10^th, I started to walk again, with a limp.

You might say that my luck was extremely bad that day but let me point to the positive.  In order for my right leg to be broken by the wheel, my head must have been under the car.  With the weight of the car on almost any other part of my 30 pound body, the consequences would have either been more serious or critical.  Instead, the damage was between my knee and groin, which made me extremely lucky. 

The trauma that mom and dad endured throughout the years was somewhat put to rest when they watched me play college basketball some 17 years later. Until that time, they must have replayed that scene on Strip Mine Road thousands of times while I was perfectly happy having no memory of the incident at all. Only 4 months after the accident, I would capture my first memory seeing mom, dad, and a baby returning as I sat in the car in the St. Joseph Hospital parking area.

Handling Grief

Dad never talked to me about it but surely he held himself responsible and guilty for nearly crippling or killing his namesake. But then again, he never talked about his mother dying during childbirth in the old farmhouse when he was ten years old.

Mom, as women might be more prone to do, likely handled the trauma differently than dad. She documented the accident from the evening it happened (July 24, 1942) until September 10th when I started to walk again. Her next written entry was on my 2nd birthday on October 8.

I will never fully know the pain and remorse my parents endured for the rest of their lives. It is my hope that my basketball days served as a tonic for a horrible memory.

The Hospital Bill

It might be interesting to review the hospital bill in 1942. I am sure that my parents had difficulty paying it, but in today’s (2020) equivalent dollars, that would be $462.39. I was in the hospital for 20 (twenty) days.