It was a few days before Christmas. The roads were particularly icy that trip, and my mom, who had come to pick me up from college for winter break, was especially volatile. She was late, which frustrated me; I still wonder what that trip would have been like if I had kept my annoyance to myself.
I didn’t, though, and my mom quickly became agitated. “Ashley’s being a little bitch,” she told my aunt on the phone when we stopped for breakfast. We drove in silence for a while after that — until, suddenly, she swerved off the road, nearly spinning into a ditch. She blamed the near-accident on the condition of the tires, assuring me she could safely manage the rest of the trip. But I didn’t believe her. My mom had an autoimmune disease, so I assumed her instability was a side effect of one of her many medications.
For the next 30 miles, I did what I could to talk her through her manic episode while pleading for her to pull over, but my pleas only seemed to make her drive faster and yell louder. When she finally, miraculously stopped at a rest stop off Exit 69, she sped off as soon as I got out of the car. I vowed in that moment that my future children would never feel as unsafe.
[For more on this story by Ashley Abramson, go to https://www.thecut.com/2017/09...ms-opioid-death.html]
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images
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