She wasn't driving the car my mother died in. But she helped me forgive the boy who was.

In the park I visit most days there is a plaque for two teens killed in a car crash. I like reading it, not only because I remember writing about the crash for the local newspaper, but because I lost a loved one in a crash. Seeing the touching words written to those kids gives me comfort. 

One day I saw a young woman watering the trees planted near the memorial.
"Did you know the kids who died?" I asked, my reporter's hat on my head. "Are you a family member?"

She barely hesitated before saying, "I caused the accident."
Her honesty knocked my reporter's hat off and I was suddenly 15 again, muttering about how my mother died in a car with a teenager behind the wheel. 

But when the woman began explaining that she was waiting to hear back from medical schools because her recovery from the crash made her want to be a doctor, I put my reporter hat back on and asked if I could write about her life since that day. And she agreed.

That was cool.

Erica said she doesn't remember turning left in front of that pick-up truck, only waking up to a horrible scene inside her car and a man's face looking through her crumpled windshield. Next she remembers a woman standing over her hospital bed, calmly promising, "As long as you're here with me, I'll be here with you."

Now Erica is in medical school, studying to be an osteopath like that woman who held her hand while they waited for Erica's mother to drive to the hospital from hours away. But first she had to work through the guilt and blame, which came mostly from herself. 

"One thing that I heard over and over from everyone was that it wasn't my fault, but it literally, literally was. There were crash analysts who surveyed the scene. There were witnesses who saw it happen. Saying to my face that it wasn't my fault was a lie and we all knew it."

Having Erica be so honest about how she blamed herself for the crash, even when others wouldn't, and struggled to live with the guilt, shame and regret, I realized how much I had wanted to hear those words from the 17-year-old who killed my mother by driving into the path of a semi-truck.

I knew nothing of that boy until I saw him in the hospital, covered in bandages and attached to beeping machines. He was severely injured but still alive, and I remember closing my eyes at the window outside his room and imagining those beeps were keeping my mother alive instead. Since the grill of the truck had stopped in her lap, had she survived she never would have walked again. But she could still talk, and I could talk to her.

Weeks later I saw the boy again at his house, my father and I sitting in his living room while his mother hovered around nervously. I don't remember what was said, only the questions in my head that were never asked: "Why was my mother in your car? Did you guys find the bird you were looking for? Did she see the truck before it hit you? Did she know she was going to die? Did she scream?"

Then I never saw or heard from him again, this boy who changed my life forever. And I never really thought about him, either. Until I met Erica. Because writing about her struggles to heal helped me heal a wound I never knew I had.

I don't remember ever feeling angry at the boy or wishing bad things would happen to him. But I know now that I want him to feel bad. I want to know that he has also struggled to forgive himself for the part he played in the crash (in his report, the crash investigator noted that the boy's actions could be considered "vehicular homicide") and that he has hoped over the years for our forgiveness, too. And that while he could never give my mother back her life, never give my father back his wife, and never give my sister and me back our mother, he can certainly vow to help others the way Erica has vowed to.

So now when I think of him, I try not to think of him breathing through all those beeping machines while my mother lies on her silent slab. I try to imagine him coming up to another patient and helping them heal as Erica wants to do.

And I thank her for that, because she already helped me heal. I may never hear the words I want from that driver, but I heard them from Erica. And that is enough.