Beyond Addiction

On a summer Sunday afternoon, a 36-year-old mother coming home from a weekend camping trip drives while drunk and under the influence of marijuana. In her minivan are her own children and three nieces. For miles, the car speeds the wrong way on a major highway before crashing into an oncoming vehicle.

She dies. So do her daughter and her three nieces, as well as three men in the other vehicle.

No drunken driving accident in recent times has garnered the nation's collective abhorrence and dismay like this one. Perhaps it is because the driver, Diane Schuler, was known as a committed mother, a doting aunt and a successful corporate accountant and apparently never had been in trouble before with the law or with the alcohol and marijuana that killed her and the others.

"Because we have never known Diane to be anything but a responsible and caring mother and aunt, this ... raises more questions than it provides answers for our family," said her brother, Warren Hance, whose three girls were among the dead. "Amidst all the uncertainty and speculation as to how and why this accident occurred, this is the absolute last thing that we ever would have expected."

People are asking: How could a mother do this? Were there any warning signs that she had a problem? Did other adult family members know she was intoxicated? If so, why didn't they stop her from getting behind the wheel or at least make an effort to prevent the kids from going along?

Whatever the answers, there is a fundamental truth that needs no further explanation. The crash is a stark reminder of the power of alcohol and other drugs on the human mind and body. Such substances cause good people to do bad things and loving people to cause tremendous harm to themselves and others they care for or don't know at all.

Nobody is immune to the ravages of the legal drug alcohol or the illegal drug marijuana.

Sadly, before too long, the public's fascination and frenzied disbelief over this crash will dissipate, just as it always does when somebody dies because of a drunken driver. As I noted in my column last week, almost 13,000 people die each year in alcohol-related traffic accidents. That's one person every 40 minutes. It seems we have come to accept alcohol-induced violence on our roadways, as we do the guns used by criminals to kill their victims, provided it doesn't happen to us.

When it does, only the families of the driver and her victims will remember day after day that terrible day their lives were altered forever. And that begs this question, which I received in an e-mail from my friend Jean D., who is from Buffalo, N.Y.: "How will they ever find forgiveness?"

It is easy to hate and convenient to harbor anger-forged resentments toward others. No doubt that right now, such emotions are mixed up in the sheer grief of the loss these families face. Once that grief fades — and it will, no matter the depths of their loss for their loved ones — their challenge will be to fill the void with forgiveness.

Seeing as our society seems unwilling to use crashes like this one as rallying cries to change public attitudes and public policies around the use and abuse of alcohol, perhaps the ultimate legacy of this tragedy is in how the survivors teach us about forgiveness. All of us have more to learn.

William C. Moyers is the vice president of external affairs for the Hazelden Foundation and the author of "Broken," his best-selling memoirs. Please send your questions to William Moyers at William@WilliamMoyers.com. To find out more about William Moyers and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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