A little about myself
My name is Teresa Trimm, I am 37 years old and the webmaster of a webring
called People Affected by Drunk Driving. It started, officially, on April
28th and in 5 months has grown to almost 70 pages. What got me started,
is basically, what gets most of us started. My son was killed by a drunk
driver on July 4, 1996. I had been against drinking and driving BEFORE
the wreck, but am even more against it now. I am not only against drunk
driving, but I am against a justice system that allows people who kill
someone while drinking and driving, to get away with it, with nothing
more than a slap on the hand. The man who killed my son, got a year
in jail. Not for vehicular manslaughter or anything like that...he was
charged and convicted with a misdemeanor DUI. The fact that two people,
my son and his uncle, had died was never even mentioned.
They say they died instantly. How do they know? I am sure it took a
little while for someone to get there. That they never knew what hit
them. They would have felt no fear. That is a little consolation...
very little. Can you imagine having to be grateful because your son died
quickly, as opposed to taking days to die?
You will have people tell you not to be sad, you have children that
survived. Like I am supposed to completely forget that I ever had three
children. And how do you answer that question..."How many children do
you have?"...Do you say three and deny that anything every
happened?? Do you say two and pretend that he never was? Another thing
that is always said to you, is that "He is in a better place"...NO, he
isn't...a better place is with his mom and his dad.
For the first year and a half, after Troy was killed, there wasn't much I
could do, except to speak out against drinking and driving locally where
I was at in Italy. I was shipped out 3 weeks after Troy was killed. Now
that I am back in the states, though, I have begun to use my computer and
the internet, to speak out against drinking and driving and try to let
people know what I have gone through. Thanks to www.madd.org I have 'met'
a lot of people who have been through what I have been through. Someone
who knows what my life has become. That is how the webring
www.geocities.com/~teresatrimm/ People Affected by Drunk Driving, got
started.
The webring is about linking together pages that have been dedicated to
loved ones, lost or injured, or to people fighting drunk driving. There
are several sites owned by police officers and even one owned by the US
ARMY.
What we are trying to do is help each other. The pain that a person
feels when they lose a child, no matter how they die, is indescribable.
You cannot prepare for it ever. You know that your child would want you
to go on, but it seems like when you 'forget' yourself and laugh, that
you are saying that you don't love them. That isn't true, but it takes a
long time before you can enjoy yourself and NOT feel guilty.