Carol Tomason was visiting D.C. from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in October 2018. Meredith Tomason-Taylor says that her mother was in a crosswalk at 15th and H Streets NW when a truck driver hit her. Tomason-Taylor remembered the day her family rushed to see her mother at George Washington University Hospital in a conversation with WAMU.
She was in the neuro ICU, and that’s when my heart sank. Because, you know, up until that point, I think we were all like, ‘Okay, so she broke a leg or she punctured a lung,’ or — I mean, these are awful things, but there was no thought of the impending doom that was about to come upon us.
She had been in surgery and the surgeon essentially told us that she’s not coming back. The injuries that she sustained are not something that anyone would be able to survive.
When we walked into the room where she was, she was on a ventilator, and her entire head was covered. She had a few small bruises on her face. But aside from that, she looked totally normal. And I think that was the strange thing… when you think about a car crash you think mostly physical, and this was head trauma.
Throughout the rest of the day, it was clear that things were getting worse. Bruises started to appear on her body. Her systems did start to fail. We all stood in the room with her and they turned off the ventilator and took all the tubes out. And we held hands and were just there with her. Everyone else had their eyes closed but I was staring at her and eventually, as the numbers are coming down and the heartbeat is stopping, there was blood coming out of her mouth and it just… it was just another weird moment of like, “Dear God what’s going on in there?” I hope she’s not feeling this. I hope she’s not in pain.
In the initial days [after losing someone] … that is some heavy stuff. And it is painful in a way that is indescribable. Part of you is gone. I believe in the idea that grief is love. It is a sign of love and true admiration. And so to me, I will never stop grieving my mother, because I will never stop loving my mother.
I’m a chef, so cooking is the through-line for me. She was a cook. She was a baker. I learned a lot of my baking from her. I found it strangely painful to cook her recipes at first. The smell of something that she specifically would make… I made it because it reminded me of her. These weird sense memories are powerful. And as painful as it was, I think it was helpful at that time. And it’s still a way that we as a family connect to her, is to make her recipes.
I go over to that intersection every year on the anniversary. There are big signs now about turning left, and I believe that they made an actual left turning lane. But have they done much else? No. Is the crosswalk raised? No.
Just because you think that you’re a great driver or that “this won’t happen to you,” that doesn’t mean that’s the case. You can hurt someone, kill someone. You need to be aware of what’s around you, even to the point where it might seem extra. I find myself fearful a lot of the time when I am making a turn now. And people honk at me because I take my time. Be present. That sounds so silly, but especially in today’s age, we’re always looking at our phones, listening to the radio, doing whatever, but be present in what you’re doing.
My mom was someone who also believed wholeheartedly that good must come from bad, and that you have to make everything that is unexplainable into the best positive experience. So I took that energy, and I was like, I need to do something so that this doesn’t happen again. And so that her death is not something that people are going to forget or that she died in vain. People need to hear about this. They need to know she was a person just like all these other people who this has happened to. If me telling my story is going to help someone cross the street safer or drive their car a little bit better, I will happily do that.