Heartbreaking toll of Easter road deaths revealed as state grapples with spate of crashes
“Is Daddy going to be OK?” The little girl was playing on the hospital corridor floor with her dolls. But I had no words.
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The Easter long weekend is here, with hordes of South Australians hitting the road to fill booked out holiday homes and caravan parks and make the most of four days away from the workplace.
And bringing with it what seems like the inevitable road death. Or worse – deaths.
There was a time when the long weekend would come around and you’d hope and pray you’d get to the end of it to see a police officer fronting a press conference praising South Australians for playing their part in helping the state get through it without a road fatality.
Given the horror run we’ve seen so far this year with 42 lives already lost, you can’t help but feel that’s a fool’s wish.
Forty-two lives lost. 42! And countless others impacted forever. Families and friends who have had a loved one ripped from them. Other road users who happened to come across the crash site, or worse – through no fault of their own become involved in it.
And the emergency service workers racing against the clock to stop that terrible number from climbing higher, or managing the public at the scene when they either lose that race or never get a chance to run it in the first place.
The piece below is not a new one. I wrote it in April 2011 just a few months after starting as a fresh-faced cadet journalist.
The fact that it’s still relevant 12 years on is heartbreaking.
As proud as I am of this piece, I never wanted to see the day it seemed necessary to re-run it.
Please read it, and think before you hit the road this long weekend.
The heartbreaking question that still haunts me
“Is Daddy going to be OK?”
It’s amazing how a simple sentence can bring you to your knees.
Before becoming a journalist, I worked for almost five years as an orderly at one of this state’s biggest hospitals.
Spending most of that time in emergency and general theatre, I thought I’d seen it all and wasn’t fazed by anything. Yet sitting on the corridor floor with a four-year-old girl as she played with her dolls, the enormity of her situation hit home.
At the hospital I prepared and presented the bodies of many deceased patients for viewing by their relatives and friends. Often these were old, sick patients whose death came as something of a relief to family and friends.
In this situation, however, as with many of them, the patient was a young person whose life had been suddenly and tragically cut short in a car crash.
A man who never got to say goodbye to his family and would never get to see his daughter do all the things a father is meant to. And here she was, incapable of understanding that she would never see her father again.
So there I sat, quietly talking with this child while her mother spent a moment alone with her husband’s body.
It was my job to prepare his body.
Many times I would collect the body from the mortuary, where the recently deceased lay in blue bags on metal gurneys where the smell of disinfectant hung thick in the thin air, and wheeled them into a small viewing room down the corridor.
The bodies were cold and I always dreaded unzipping the bag, not out of fear but because somewhere in the back of my mind I hoped that if I didn’t open that bag, then the crash that brought them here never happened.
The preparation room was no more than 4m wide by about 3m long. Working in there in silence, alone with the body, it always felt a lot smaller. It joined a room that was comfortably furnished and warmly decorated.
From this room, relatives and friends would look through a window to view the patient.
The patient’s head was propped up on a folded towel to make it easier to clean and to give the body a more natural presentation. Any blood was soaked up and any other bodily fluids were wiped away.
You would clean them up, cover the body in a sheet leaving just the shoulders and face exposed, dim the lights and close the door. That was the easier part.
To a certain extent, you can divorce yourself from the fact that you’re doing anything out of the ordinary.
I’ve seen victims arrive from crash sites and been unable to tell if they were male or female.
You become desensitised to the sight of trauma but you never become desensitised to the sound and emotion of it. That’s the tough part.
It’s always tough dealing with the families of a crash victim. I’ve been there while family and friends are being told their loved one has died. I’ve watched the blood drain from their faces, the tears flow uncontrollably from their eyes and I’ve seen people fall to their knees, crippled with grief.
I’ve seen fights break out between families and friends, simply because people can’t deal with emotions so raw.
I’ve held people in my arms as they cried over the loss of a loved one and some of them I cried with.
Sometimes simply offering a shoulder to cry on can say more than words ever could.
At times a shoulder is literally all you can offer because when a little girl asks you “is Daddy going to be OK?”, words simply fail you.
For most of us, Easter is about enjoying the company of family.
The grim reality is that, based on previous Easter periods, for some South Australian families, this Easter will be ripped apart by tragedy.
I’ve seen the effects of speed first-hand and the damaging effect it can have on lives.
Please, if you’re on the road this weekend, be responsible and safe.
It only takes a fraction of a second to change a life forever.
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