Gosh Moorna, I'm so sorry to hear that. If you ever need to talk :-x
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Thanks Meep, I may just take you up on the offer sometime :-x
That accident was years ago but I still sometimes try to run the whole thing through my mind again to try and work out if there's was any way I could have avoided hitting that car, thereby avoiding the needless deaths of two young people, but I know it just wasn't humanly possible in the cold light of day.
The inquest decided somehow that the car driver fell to sleep at the wheel or some such, but I don't know how they work those sorts of things out.
I can tell you that my confidence as a previously clean record lifetime truck driver was totally shattered for a long time afterward.
I spoke to a train driver a couple or so years back who'd been the driver of a goods train when a lady was killed in her car on a level crossing as his train appraoched it.
He did commit suicide shortly after I met him because he just couldn't get past the fact that he was invovled in her death and felt so much guilt over it all, even though he was proved to be totally free of blame.
I came to the conclusion then that the mind is a strange bit of gear where what may seem right aand proper for one person just doesn't corrulate for another one, especially when feelings of guilt get mixed in.
Although I served in the military as a far younger man I never went into a war zone, but I can well understand why so many poor sods who have done go through such horror times afterward, even to the point of suiciding years afterward.
One of the strangest suicides I ever got to know about after the fact was that of a school headmaster who unbeknowingly to others suffered manic depression.
The thing that finally tipped him over the edge you'd have thought would have been a good reason to stop him, a simple apologetic approach from another bloke for having parked his car in the schoolyard gateway overnight.
The school teacher seemed pretty good about it at the time, but laid his neck on a traintrack two nights later after leaving a note telling of his own guilty feelings about him having gone so nuts at the car parking offender, then not being able to handle the friendly appology and handshake.
I doubt anyone could have talked any of them out of it though because trying to live with certain horrors playing around in the old brain matter can be the hardest thing to do for some of us.
