When you have a bad feeling that something is going to happen...

Most of the time, when you have a feeling that something bad is going to happen, it is caused by one of three things:

1. There is something that you know is going on that has the potential of resulting in something bad happening; or else is a matter of increasingly defying the odds of having something bad happen.

Just as we often pick up "subtle vibes" from meeting new people, we often pick up (without ever realizing it) similar subtle vibes about ourselves and any number of situations. My most memorable example is that when I was expecting one of my babies I "just felt like" the baby would be born early. There was no outward reason to think that, and the doctor didn't take me seriously when I told him I "just had a feeling" the baby would arrive too early. Once I reached five months along I had dreams about having a tiny, tiny, baby. (In one dream, the tiny baby was sitting happily in a crib, so they weren't horrible dreams.) On the first evening of the childbirth class the instructor asked who thought they may not go the whole six weeks. My hand just seemed to go up without my really having any reason to raise it. The class was to meet for a second time the following week. I was not there. Instead, I was delivering my baby at 34 weeks.

The baby was born breech, and it was discovered that he had been in an odd position. I had always known that my "baby bump" was kind of off to the side; and I had been far more uncomfortable than anyone should be so early in the pregnancy. The point is I was probably getting those "vibes" that something was "off" with the pregnancy, even though all seemed generally normal. With the next pregnancy I recognized the absence of feeling "off".

There are any number of those kind of "vibes" we can pick up on when there's a situation that is "sending them". The "carefree" person who knows he has several fire hazards in his home may not really pay much attention to the risk, but somewhere in the back of his mind he may know he's living a little dangerously. Some who feels his life is out of control may pick up on "vibes" that tell him something bad is going to happen.

2. You may be particularly stressed out and anxious (and possibly suffering from depression, as well).

With regard to stress and anxiety, when we're under stress or anxiety we start to live "under the influence" of "stress chemicals" and the changes in our bodies that occur when we're living under stress. We aren't are "usual calm selves", so that, alone, makes us feel more generally nervous (needless to say). Depending on the number of causes of stress, and the severeity of stress/distress, we get can to a point where we don't just feel uncertain or ungrounded, we can start to get into the "what's-going-to-happen-next" kind of thinking.

Going through recent (or fairly recent) grief or serious loss; or going through too much grief or serious loss in too short a period of time; can contribute to that kind of thinking. Even when we think grief or loss occurred "a while ago" there are times when we underestimate how long it takes to fully bounce back from such things.

A friend once described the way life's troubles come like this: She said troubles can be like frosting on a cake. Some people can have a thin layer spread over the whole cake (as when many, many, smaller troubles keep occurring over a long period of time); or they can have "one, giant, lump dumped in one spot on the cake" (as when some extremely devastating loss occurs). In both types of situations a person can develop that sense that life will come at him from out of the blue and "kick him in the head" once again. We learn from our experiences, and sometimes we learn that bad things come at us "out of the blue". Sometimes, too, we over-learn that hard lesson and can have a difficult time finding our way back to a more appropriate, realistic, sense of well-being.

3. Some people, for whom everything in life is generally good, develop a worry that the odds of having something bad happen will inevitably turn against them. Depending on the person and his experiences, this worry can be either relatively minor or, instead, an actual fear.

In general, this kind of thought is something that doesn't bother most people much, even if it has occurred to them and they've had to tuck it in the back of their minds. Some people, however, are plagued by more disturbing degrees of this kind of thinking. This kind of thinking, though, is usually more "open" than that feeling people sometimes get that something bad is going to happen, even though they don't quite know what it may be.


Needless to say, anyone plagued by too many worrisome thoughts or feelings should consider seeking professional help. Often, however, by being aware of how "spooky" thoughts can occur as a result of that subtle awareness that we (or people close to us) are inviting disaster, or as a result of living with a generally "unsettled" feeling as a result of stress/distress; we can better understand the roots of those "spooky" thoughts and see them for what they truly are.

For me, the most memorable time I had the vague sense that someone bad would happen involved my girlfriend's buying a Volkswagen convertible. The day she called to tell me she'd bought this "adorable" car I got this awful, pit-of-the-stomach, feeling. I thought I was over concerns about what I saw as "death trap" car, but for the whole time she had that car I just had a really vague sense that "something big and bad was looming". It wasn't anything I was really thinking about "on an intellectual level". In fact, the only way I'm aware that it was there was by knowing the difference of how I felt before and after I had that feeling. That's how subtle and "deep" it was.

I think what I must have done was process the conscious concerns "intellectually" and, maybe, "tuck them away in some "deep, mental, file". I think when I'd processed those concerns about the car it wasn't just the size of the car or the fact that the engine was in the rear. I knew my friend wasn't a driver who seemed to react quickly or be able to deal with more than one thing at a time when driving. She was a careful and generally good driver (never a speeder), but if she did something like change radio dial she'd briefly let the steering wheel slip ever-so-slightly until she finished turning the dial and got the car back straight.

I never said anything to her about my conscious concerns, but I'd find excuses to be the one who drove pretty much whenever we went out. Life went on, and I thought I had the worry about the car's size processed; with the matter of my not being comfortable with it being sort of dealt with. Still, I had a "cloud" over what had previous been a sense of feeling carefree, and that cloud was such a vague sense that something was looming (but I didn't know what it was), it seemed completely separate from the conscious concerns about the car's size.

One night when we were planning to go out my friend called and announced firmly, and as if she'd decided to finally take charge of the fact that I'd so often managed to make sure I was the driver, "I'm driving. You always drive." We had never talked about that, and if we had I may have tried to overcome my concerns at least once in awhile. In any case, I suddenly realized it had been bothering her, and I knew she was right that it was only reasonable she expect to be the driver more often than she'd been. So, it wasn't so much her obviously planned "firmness" that made me just agree she drive that night. It was my sudden awareness that she had been bothered my usually being the driver, and my sense of fairness. That night I wished she knew that, because I wished she'd known if she'd simply talked about it I would have found a way to overcome my concerns and have things more fair in her eyes. I'd always thought, since I had more money than she did, she was happy not to spend on gas.

That whole evening was a bad night. Places we tried to find we couldn't. Places we decided to go instead were closed or crowded - that type of thing. We weren't arguing or anything like that. We agreed that nothing was working out and were trying to think of the next thing to do. Secretly, that vague sense I'd had about something looming seemed to peaking that night, and I just wanted to go home. It was a dark, cold, March, night. The Volkswagen didn't have much of heater. Maybe that contributed to the overall sense of that "cloud looming". I'd been miserable, fed up, cold or tired before, though, and this was like no feeling I'd ever had before (no matter how many things I may have had to have concerns/worries over).

We decided we'd just go get a sandwich (because we hadn't eaten) before heading home. We'd gone out around 8 and decided to get a sandwich by around 10:30.

Once we'd decided to try to stop finding a place to replace the one we had bad directions for, and to "just eat and go home", we were happy to get into the restaurant. Everything seemed normal and fine on a conscious level, but I still had that vague feeling.

It was just before midnight (maybe 20 minutes? I don't really know) that we headed home; so it wasn't as if we were out at 2:00 a.m. or anything like that. Within moments after pulling out of the parking lot, a speeding driver hit us head on, and my girlfriend died close to immediately after being brought to the O.R.

Strange as this is this may be to say; in spite of whatever emotions/processing/negative thoughts (etc.) there were associated with losing my friend and with being injured myself, not long after the accident I realized that "cloud" was completely gone and I was feeling as I had before my friend ever bought the car.

30-plus years after that happened I haven't, since then, had such a "vague cloud" looming, no matter what bad things or worries have occurred over the course of an adult lifetime.

I've known other people who have small cars, and I've ridden in many, many, of them. After the accident, I rode in, and drove, my boyfriend's Volkswagen and later his tiny, 2-seater, Fiat convertible. It wasn't, I don't think, the size of the car that was the main cause for the "cloud".

I'd often been the passenger in my girlfriend's previous car, a tinny, lightweight, and small "Cortina". There had been no cloud.

Where the cloud first hit was during that call when my friend so happily and proudly announced she'd traded in her perfectly good and relatively new Cortina for the older, "more adorable", Volkswagen that was the car she "really wanted and really loved". She talked about how the Cortina was "just something to get around in" but how the Volkswagen was "really her". She'd once been hit in stop-and-go traffic when someone bumped the back of the Cortina, but there had been no damage. She had been accused of stopping short. We'd once gone into in a complete spin when snow had just begun to fall, she was driving downhill; and her car suddenly did a U-turn across four lanes of road and ended up facing uphill and on the farthest right side of the opposite side of the road.

By the time we were 20 I'd been driving since I was 16. My friend had only been driving since she was 18, because she didn't have the money to go to driver's education in order to save on car insurance. Besides (and I'll say what I've never felt really comfortable saying, just because it sounds so arrogant or conceited), I was just a better driver than my friend - more alert, quicker to respond, less oblivious to the stuff that can go on beyond just the car in front and whether or not the brake lights are on.

My friend wasn't generally a "stupid" person, but she often saw me as someone who took some things too seriously or even who "thought old". Sometimes she'd tease me in a good natured way about being "so me", but I knew that, as close as we'd always been, as she had gotten older she'd developed a hint of the kind of thinking teens often have toward parents "who worry about things they don't have to" or "have old fashioned ideas". My friend and I respected the differences in our personalities, but those differences had become more apparent as we'd gone past our teens and begun to deal with "real-life" issues.

In any case, I was surprised at what immediately popped into my head when my friend called to tell me about her new car. She was so happy and just seemed so "innocently oblivious" to what I saw as a giant and sobering mistake she'd just made. Still, hearing in my head the words I certainly would never voice to her or anyone else surprised even me: "You stupid, stupid, girl," I thought.

I suppose I thought she was stupid for trading in a perfectly good, Navy blue, recent-year, Cortina because the red Volkswagen convertible was "cooler". I had been secure enough to drive a very un-cool, mid-sized, and tinny sedan; because it was a year old, a good price, and a car that would mean I was no longer driving yet another old car with non-stop repair needs. I figured, I was young. ("Too bad if I drive a cheap, un-cool, car.") I wasn't someone who built my identity on the car I drove. I dealt in reality, practicality, and good sense.

So, when my friend made what I thought was that shallow and stupid move of trading in the perfectly acceptable Cortina for something "cute" and "cool"; while I knew it wasn't my business or my place to judge, I secretly saw her decision as a sign that she wasn't as intelligent or emotionally mature as I'd always thought she was. During that phone call in which she excitedly told me her car news, I had momentarily slipped into a secret, maternal, role and become extremely sobered as I imagined my long-time best-friend being killed in this "death trap" she (in my mind) so naively and innocently saw as "the kind of car she really wanted".

I suppose that someone between first getting that call and the night my friend was killed I'd pushed that initial reaction somewhere far in the back of my mind, believing my concerns were irrational, unfounded, and the thinking of a "worrier". The fact was, I wasn't particularly a worrier in general. In fact, I'd go as far as to say I wasn't consciously worried about the car or my friend. Instead, I had that vague cloud, which I think was nothing more than awareness that my friend hadn't bought the safest car in the world; and that she was someone who couldn't quite turn the radio dials without letting car veer just slightly off-course until she righted it.

That vague sense (the "cloud") that something bad was going to happen didn't set in the day of the phone call. There was nothing vague about about my thoughts that day. It was more as if the seeds of the cloud had been planted, and it grew from somewhere deep within, gradually, and over a period of time.

I suppose that's what can happen when one tucks concerns or worries, over which he has no control, way in the back of the mind and tries not to think about them. I believe that the reason the cloud felt like it was coming down around us, and closing in as well, that night was nothing more than my being uncomfortable spending so much driving time in the tiny, old, car with my friend driving (even though most of the time she did nothing to cause me concern with the way she drove). In any case, in the cold of the poorly heated Volkswagen, and in the dark of the crisp March night, it felt to me as if the cloud no longer loomed but surrounded us. The light and noise in the restaurant lessened the sense of the cloud, but it was as if it waited outside the restaurant for us. (Of course, what was waiting outside the restaurant for us was the damned Volkswagen convertible - deceivingly bright red and looking as if it was waiting for the first beach day, so its top could be down; and it could be fulfill the promise of "cool" that had so drawn in my 20-year-old friend.)

When we left the restaurant the cold night air in the dead, black, night hit us. I wasn't particularly aware of the cloud as we headed for the car and moved away from the light of the restaurant. There was little conversation between us because we were shivering in the cold and making that noise people make in bitter cold. The car felt like a freezer, and the cold metal dashboard and other parts of the interior didn't help.

Since, without much of a heater, my friend didn't see the point in lingering in such a cold car, she put the Volkswagen in gear and made the fateful turn out of the restaurant's parking lot and onto a four-lane road that would, we thought, bring us home. We made a few comments about how glad we were to be headed home, and we continued to shiver uncontrollably. Strangely, I felt like everything would OK for the first time that night. We were happy as we headed home, putt-putting along in the old car that seemed to particularly "putt-putt" with its engine as stone-cold as it was.

We drove for a few minutes. I've never had any idea exactly how far away from the restaurant the accident happened. I know we were far enough way that it wouldn't have been within view if we looked back.

I've also never had any idea how much time passed between the time we first saw the headlights, coming directly at us at such high speed it appear the car to which they were attached was wavering from side to side, and the time I felt as if "some guy" (an EMT) was trying to disturb my sleep when I didn't want to be disturbed. I regained consciousness long just long enough to see that my friend had already been taken out of the car. When I was placed in the ambulance, my head injury didn't allow me to realize that my unconscious friend wasn't "fighting them" (the emergency personnel) as her arms flailed and her head went from side to side seemingly frantically. I continued to drift in and out of consciousness, and at some point I was awake enough to know they were taking my friend out of the ambulance first.

To this day, more than 30 years later, I've never tried to learn more about her exact injuries or learn whether she could hear my voice as I urged her not to "fight them" and told her it would be OK. Whether she could hear me in the ambulance, or whether the last thing she heard were my words when I calmly said, "He's going to it us," my voice was the last voice the girl with whom I'd been so close since childhood would hear.

When I regained full consciousness the following day I was a different me, and the world was a different world. In spite of all there was to deal with and adjust to, that cloud that had loomed for so long was gone. For the first time in a very long time, I didn't have that feeling that something awful was going to happen. It had happened; and although I felt awfully, awfully, alone; for the first time in a long time I felt as if the sky was clear (cold and harsh, maybe, but clear).

What I realize now is that even after all the thinking out what elements may have contributed to that vague sense of having that overbearing, gray, cloud looming for so long; I still see the accident as a monster, disguised as a huge, dark, cloud, that followed me every minute of every day (sometimes keeping a lower profile than others) and that loomed until it murdered my friend; and then lifted up and away from me, leaving me in the cold, stark, light of an unclouded sky, with that vague sense of impending doom replaced by a much-easier-to-understand sense that a terrible tornado had come through my life and ripped up everything in its path.

What I've realized since then is that the "cloud" that seemed to loom was nothing more than a bad case of gnawing gut instinct; and that the reason it felt like something loomed, both over me and from within, was that I knew there was nothing I was helpless when it came to eliminating the very real cause for concern. My friend thought she was the one who knew better than I when it came to how to live life, and she equated being sensible with being "old" and "uncool". I knew she would not have listened to me if I had begun talking about clouds and gut instincts and bad feelings.

I guess the thing is, when what concerns or worries us is something over which we have a certain amount of control, we can recognize gut instinct and (if we're wise enough) let it be our guide. When the concern is something over which we have no control, and that involves what someone else chooses in his own life, we're not in a position to "properly process" gut instinct, so instead, we somehow kind of mix up the instinct from within and the worries from without, and experience the whole, mixed up, set of emotions and thoughts as that vague, gray, cloud.

The night of the accident, I had briefly awakened to a swirl of flashing lights, the loud engines of emergency vehicles, and voices that that seemed to come from all directions. The last memory I have of the car involved nothing but seeing my swollen hand leaning against the passenger-side door, nothing in front of me but a shattered windshield, and my own blood falling around me like a waterfall.

Some time later, I would receive the pictures taken at the scene of the accident that night. I needed to see them, because I needed to try to figure out how everything happened. Also, I needed to see what the car looked like. After all, I hadn't seen more than what I've described above. There, in the stillness of the photos, the almost unrecognizable and ripped open wreckage sat alone, silent, and still against a backdrop of a quiet-looking night. There were no signs of life, but next to car was my friend's shoe (a clog) lying on his side - a sobering reminder that its partner was missing and that its days of dancing and walking at the beach had ended.

There, in the harsh and unglamorous insurance photos, was my way of connecting my friend and the car and the accident and the death, tying together once was with what now was; and there, as I stared at the pictures, I had some way to whisper, "goodbye".

It's kind of strange, really, how sometimes, stepping back and looking at cold, empty, wreckage from a distance, and through someone else's camera lens, can, in an odd way, be a little reassuring. Not only that, but without the strange cloud or the flashing lights or the driver's seat that had been so strikingly empty when I caught a glimpse of it as I was taken from the wreckage; the stillness of it all made it so clear to me that the cloud no longer had any reason to loom. In a way, I first thought I sensed some kind of peace in the still, steel, wreckage; and in feeling that long-looming cloud had lifted.

The one sign of life there was in those photographs was that lone and ever so familiar shoe. For some time after receiving the photos I'd take them out and stare at the shoe, almost, I guess, believing that if I stared long enough something would happen that would make the shoe somehow seem less inanimate and more connected to the young woman who'd worn it. Needless to say, all the staring in the world didn't make anything in that picture change or "come more alive". And so, I eventually stopped trying to make what was cold and harsh turn a little less cold and harsh; and, instead, face the fact that the reason that cloud had seemed so ominous was that it warned me, with all its grayness, looming, and foreboding; that what may lie ahead was a pile of jagged metal and a fallen shoe that had already forgotten its wearer. Sometimes gut instincts can be a very complex thing.

Note:  In recent years I decided to post an "abbreviated blog" related to drunk driving and speeding, as a way (I guess) of hoping to make some reader somewhere think twice about what speeding and/or driving under the influence can do in other people's lives.

I'm including a link here.  I'm honestly not "pushing" my writing or what amounts to a blog that isn't anything like a blog ought to be.  I am, however, "pushing" the message that, in my heart, I promised my friend I would always try to "push".

So, this is more of the accident story.  (I can't even believe I'm posting it, because, when it comes down to it, it's really not all that interesting a story).

Drunk Driving and Speeding - Lisa Comments