Laura Bush's deadly car crash and my own
As the former first lady opens up about her past tragedy, I know too well that you can never fully forgive yourself
Somewhere in the hard drive that sits on my desk next to a rolling Jesus action figure there are 17 different iterations of the fourth chapter of my memoir. The number of times I rewrote the first paragraph probably scrapes close to 100, but eventually, I settled on plain-speak: "Two days before my father's sixty-second birthday, I killed an old man with my car."
I go on to describe the details of the accident, the whole ugly, sad unfurling of events: how I'd been driving down a main thoroughfare in Quebec City when a human form appeared out of nowhere in front of my windshield. The sound his body made as it ricocheted off the hood of the green GMC Jimmy, a loud, lone pop of a firecracker. My babble as I asked my boyfriend over and over whether I'd hit him. Peter's queerly calm answer that yes, I had.
Laura Bush has a similar story in her memoir, "Spoken From the Heart," which comes out today. It is the most profound revelation in the book and an event she has avoided talking about openly until now.