When I was a kid, my mom, who is one of eight children in an Irish-Catholic family, used to call all her sisters and her mom every Saturday morning. She'd be on the phone for almost 2 hours at a time, and I'd roll my eyes and wonder what on Earth it was that they could talk about for so long. We called it the Flannery Gossip Chain, and over the years it has become both an inside joke and also a lifeline that has grown to include the "kids" including myself and assorted spouses and partners.
Yesterday afternoon, I got a Flannery Gossip Chain email that one of my mom's cousins was on the way to the airport to see her family in St. Louis, and was hit by a drunk driver who ran a red light and into the side of her car at full speed. The other motorists saved her life, certainly. They directed traffic around the wreckage of her car, which had been pushed into oncoming traffic at a blind turn in the road. The paramedics cut MG out and she was brought to the trauma center of the hospital in the town in which she lives. She has already had several surgeries to stop internal hemorrhaging and is in an induced coma to give her body time to heal for the other lifesaving surgeries that need to happen quickly.
Once again, my family learns that life can change in an instant. MG is the classiest of ladies: fun, irreverent, incredibly engaged in her family and faith, beautiful and the survivor of challenges in life that would've broken a less amazing woman. She used to come to Flanneryfests with her awesome husband and beautiful, kind and really fun children and was such a glamorous figure to me as a teenager and young woman, and definitely a woman to emulate. To hear that she was in this accident made me remember how short life is. Again. It also has made me reflect on human stupidity (as in the drunken driver), forgiveness, and community.
I can't write more than that right now.
Yesterday afternoon, I got a Flannery Gossip Chain email that one of my mom's cousins was on the way to the airport to see her family in St. Louis, and was hit by a drunk driver who ran a red light and into the side of her car at full speed. The other motorists saved her life, certainly. They directed traffic around the wreckage of her car, which had been pushed into oncoming traffic at a blind turn in the road. The paramedics cut MG out and she was brought to the trauma center of the hospital in the town in which she lives. She has already had several surgeries to stop internal hemorrhaging and is in an induced coma to give her body time to heal for the other lifesaving surgeries that need to happen quickly.
Once again, my family learns that life can change in an instant. MG is the classiest of ladies: fun, irreverent, incredibly engaged in her family and faith, beautiful and the survivor of challenges in life that would've broken a less amazing woman. She used to come to Flanneryfests with her awesome husband and beautiful, kind and really fun children and was such a glamorous figure to me as a teenager and young woman, and definitely a woman to emulate. To hear that she was in this accident made me remember how short life is. Again. It also has made me reflect on human stupidity (as in the drunken driver), forgiveness, and community.
I can't write more than that right now.
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