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Chris Fisher, center, with his brother, Nick, left, and their
father, Chris Sr.
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By Chris Fisher
One day after his 60th birthday, my father was
killed in a car accident that he would have walked away from...had he been
wearing a seat belt.
It was Monday, Feb. 12, 2018. I had been off work long enough to eat lunch
and was getting ready for a dental appointment when my mother’s name came up on
my phone’s caller ID.
That was 1:33 p.m.
Initially, there was no voice on the other
end, just the sound of her gasping for air and sobbing.
“Christopher, two state troopers just showed
up to the house, they said your dad got killed in a car accident this morning….
Christopher, your dad is gone.”
In a matter of seconds, I went from dreading the dentist to wondering how life will ever go on without my dad.
It felt like somebody punched me in the gut as
hard as they could, yet I felt no pain.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Fisher,” the
trooper said after he took the phone from my mom. I could still hear her in the background as
he tried to explain what happened. “For some reason, your father veered off the
road, overcorrected and rolled his truck. He was ejected and, unfortunately,
died from his injuries at the hospital around 12:30 this afternoon. Again, I’m
so sorry for your loss.”
My mind was racing a million miles an hour
while my car felt like it was barely crawling as I headed to the farm. Once I
arrived I walked inside the house and saw my mother in the corner of the living
room sitting in a chair nobody ever used, holding her head in her hands, slowly
rocking back and forth...crushed beyond belief.
Right then and there the complete numbness I
felt in the hour drive instantly turned into overwhelming sadness and
grief. I broke down as I started to sit
on the floor by her feet.
Everywhere I looked there were signs that he
was just there, because, of course he was just there. Alive and well just hours before.
His lunch pail sat next to the door leading to
the garage, with a Gatorade and package of crackers sitting inside. His glasses
were sitting on top of the newspaper on the table next to his favorite spot to
read and nap. His jacket rested on the back of one of the chairs at the kitchen
table. The big, beautiful house he worked so hard to build was the emptiest it
has ever felt, knowing that he would never be coming back.
My dad owned his own masonry business, and
that particular day he set out to deliver a load of sand to a job he had been
working on the past several weeks. The crash happened on a route he was very
familiar with, in a truck he had driven for more than 10 years. He was less
than five minutes away from the jobsite.
A day later, my brother and I drove past the
scene of the accident. Signs of the crash were just as the trooper described.
We saw the tire tracks leave the road to the
left, then leave the road to the right and then skid marks, several dents in
the pavement leading up to a large patch of sand and broken glass too thin for
anyone to remove with a broom and dust pan.
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The cab of the truck was beat up, but intact.
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Traffic continued to zip by as if nothing had
happened.
First responders and doctors in the emergency
room worked on my dad for almost two hours before realizing they could do no
more. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the head.
Should he have somehow survived, it wouldn’t
have been a life he would have wanted to live.
His mangled Ford F-550 stuck out like a sore
thumb as we drove up to the salvage yard to collect any of his belongings that
remained inside.
“How’s he doing?” asked a man who emerged from
a back office. He had apparently
overheard my conversation with the woman behind the counter.
“He’s dead,” I answered.
A look of shock and embarrassment came over
his face as the room instantly fell silent.
“He’s dead?” the man quietly repeated.
At the time, I had no idea why he would assume
whoever was riding in that truck made it out alive, but it became painfully
obvious when I got an up-close look at the wreckage for myself.
The cab was beat up, but still completely
intact. Both doors still opened and shut with little effort. Broken glass, loose change, old receipts,
sandwich wrappers, various small tools and several discarded medical wrappers
and supplies discarded by paramedics littered the floorboards.
We also found his cell phone, and the coat he
was wearing at the time of the crash, which was completely drenched in
blood.
While I already knew his lack of a seat belt
was the difference between life and death in this accident, seeing how intact
the cab of that truck was multiplied the pain of losing my father a thousand
times over.
It was a crash he could have survived 100 out
of 100 times had he just been buckled up - I have absolutely no doubt about
this.
He wouldn’t have even had to crawl out the
window. He could have just opened the
door and brushed off the dust.
But, that wasn’t the case.
Instead of returning to work to write news for
WIBW, I had to write my dad’s obituary and help plan his funeral.
For some reason, nothing anyone could say or
do would get this man to wear his seat belt.
My brother and I both survived crashes in our teenage years that could
have easily paralyzed or killed the both of us had we not been safely strapped
in.
I would share with him some of the tragedies
we would cover at the station and how simply a life could have been saved if
and only if that person would have been wearing their seat belt.
We talked about the myths of wearing a seat
belt. How they, in fact, do not cut you in half when you’re in a crash, and
they are much more reliable now than they were back then.
For some reason, none of that resonated.
Clearly, old habits are hard to break. For whatever reason, he just wouldn’t do
it… and here we are.
While I will always respect, admire and miss
my dad, I also will always wonder why he could never see the importance of
wearing a seat belt.
Chris
Fisher is an Anchor/Reporter at WIBW-TV in Topeka.
