Several months ago the writer Alice Gregory posted on this site her interest in talking with CADIs. Many of you responded by generously sharing your stories and insights. Her article on the experience of accidental killing and the lack of resources to support CADI’s (my acronym for those who have “caused accidental death or injury”) has been published in this week’s New Yorker magazine:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and-the-shame-of-the-accidental-killer.
I think the article shows great compassion and insight, and I hope it will make a difference by raising awareness and motivating some psychotherapists, trauma specialists, or others to focus on this neglected group. It is already helping individuals (and their friends and family members) struggling with the experience of accidental killing. For instance, the article has dramatically increased traffic to this website. If you see more comments than usual showing up on the site, that is why.
The vast majority of comments I’ve received about this article, and other published work on CADIs, have been appreciative and supportive. A number of people have written to me about urban planning, public policy, engineering, and other programs and interventions intended to prevent car vs. pedestrian, car. vs. bicycle or car vs. car collisions. I will be looking into these programs more and will post about some of the more promising efforts. If you know about this, please write to me and share your experience or recommendations. I’m also interested in efforts to prevent other kinds of accidents, including workplace accidents, gun accidents, boating accidents, and the like.
Of course I strongly believe that CADI’s are deserving of compassion and support. With that comes an acceptance of responsibility and accountability. As awareness and understanding increase in our society, I believe that people will be more willing to invest in whatever steps are needed to reduce the number of accidents — better roads, bike lanes, improved lighting, new technologies, and so forth. This will make our world safer and, over time, the number of CADIs will decline.
I read the article in the New Yorker and found it fascinating. At that point contemplating what it would be like to be responsible for an accidental death was as an abstraction. How ironic that not a month later I became a CADI. A week prior I was in San Francisco with my girlfriend for surgery on her pituitary to cure Cushing’s disease. She flew home a week later and within a couple days ended up in ICU for 5 days to treat a critical sodium deficiency, SIADH. On a Friday evening she was released and, after a week of… Read more »
Let me begin by saying my accident happened about 30 years ago. It was an accidental shooting. And it damaged me for life. Til this day I have guilt, shame and still visit a very dark place from time to time. And with that I shut down, or lash out with anger and make very poor decisions. Now let me get to what actually took place. It was spring break and one of my best friends was home from college. We decided to meet up and catch up. After meeting up and enjoying each other’s company, we decided to visit… Read more »
I recently read the article, The Sorrow and Shame of the Accidental Killer, in the New Yorker (Sept 18 issue) about your experience and those of others . The article closely reflected my experience as a restorative practitioner working with cases of accidental death or other cases where serious harm was caused. In the majority of these cases, if the parties agree to a restorative process , the result is healing and often transformative. I wrote a letter to the magazine in response to the article but whether they publish it or not I’m not sure. If you’d like to… Read more »
In 1950 in Golf Manor a neighborhood of Cincinnati where our author had her accident, my brother Bobby was hit and killed as he walked in front of a city bus which was being used as a school bus. There was no law against this at the time. My parents never had ill feelings about the man who hit Bobby. My sibs and I have rarely talked about how the man must have felt, how it affected his life. Thank you to Ms. Gray and the New Yorker who, on the week of Yom Kippur has published a sensitive and… Read more »