Recently my car was totaled. My husband was driving and someone rear-ended him on the highway as he was signaling to exit. Thankfully, he was fine, not even scraped up, bruised or sore. We were lucky. That’s the most important thing because, at the end of the day, a car is a car.
In this case, her name was Eva, an electric blue Prius prime. She was the first car I bought on my own. I researched for weeks and drove to New York to purchase a used model within my budget. I went into the dealership myself, trying to maintain a vehicle-educated, no-nonsense expression that would communicate I knew all about cars, no on could possibly rip me off and I’d like to see them try. I asked many questions and took notes which I texted to my parents to validate the answers I got.
After signing the paperwork, the car went into the shop for a final inspection and detailing. I had to go back to get her the next day. In the meantime, the salesman offered to drive me to the Long Island Railroad station.
“You’re an oldest sister, right?” he asked me in the car after an afternoon of questioning.
Not the first time a stranger has managed to guess that about me. The trains stopped running that day, so I split a Lyft with a woman named Kim I met on the platform and we talked for over an hour in the traffic back into the city about music, art, love. We’ve kept in touch.
I thought I’d have that car for a long time. I imagined I would drive it until important pieces started rusting and dropping off the bottom. That we’d have our own kids in the back seats someday. But you can’t predict the future.
A few years before that trip to Long Island, my very first car (my dad’s before mine) became too expensive to fix. I knew going into the dealership there was a 90% chance I’d be saying goodbye. I’d cleaned everything out that morning—the emergency corkscrew, maps of New England, scraps of paper I’d written on in high school, log books my dad kept when the car was his, the geocache off the rear window. It was like going through a time capsule.
Before driving to the dealership, I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a goodbye/thank you letter to Salsa.
I learned to drive in that car in high school, it took me back and forth to Ohio for four years of college, carried the one and only live Christmas tree I’ve ever had, and took our cat Zèb on his first road trip. I picked Patrick up from the airport for the first time in Pittsburgh in that car. She had seen a lot of good days and a lot of bad ones. When we spun out on a slick highway once, she managed to come out with all of us unscathed, just shaken. It’s funny to imagine her as a person hearing me singing Shania Twain at the top of my lungs, reclining the driver’s seat and pulling a jacket over my face to sleep in the middle of a road trip, or join in as Patrick prayed out loud while we all spun out.
Objectively I know it is just a mix of plastics and metals. A feat of engineering, but nothing with a pulse or an energy. Manufactured. I also know that we humans are meaning-making machines and even our things mean something to most of us.
When I got the news that day it would be thousands of dollars to fix a car that was just worth a few hundred, I mostly kept it together.
“My wife cries when her car dies too,” the mechanic told me.
I was pretty sure I wouldn’t cry this most recent time. Car number two. I was sad, of course. Especially because of the chapter of my life that I spent with Eva: driving to the grocery store for pick-ups during the depths of COVID, to Patrick’s first soccer league in Pittsburgh, to one of the last occasions I saw my grandmother, to my friend’s kids school for drop offs, to the appointment where I was diagnosed with cancer, to every chemo treatment, and to the one where I found out I was cancer-free.
There wasn’t a mechanic or anyone to see me this time. I cleaned out our items off the side of a back road across from the collision place where they determined the car totaled. Covered in snow, dented and dismantled in the back, I sat in the driver’s seat one more time. Probably less than a minute in the cold. It was unceremonious. Quiet.
It felt like a goodbye. As it should. But it didn’t hurt as much this time. I imagine it will be a little easier the time after this.
What a painful, beautiful blessing this is, I thought in that moment, that we get all of this practice saying goodbye.
That, if we’re very lucky, the world trains us when we have to give away our worn and broken toys when we’re little, our cars when we’re big. That we have to say goodbye to friends at the end of camp and to family at the end of the holidays. Hopefully we get practice with these things before we face the more difficult and complicated endings, but I imagine there are only a very, very few who have that experience if there is anyone at all. So many have to face almost unimaginable loss before we have any practice.
What I do know, is that giving ourselves closure and learning to say goodbye is an ongoing practice. And it’s a gift to get that experience with something like a car.
What I’m loving right now:
Crying in H Mart a memoir by Michelle Zauner (just started!)
- ‘s new children’s book
Slowing getting back to reading and not judging the lull of the past few months
Lavender & Vanilla Organic Jojoba Skin Softening Mist from Phipps
Armoire clothing rental: after donating boxes of clothes, I wanted to try out clothing rental as something more sustainable and it’s been great so far!
Ditto. And beautifully rendered.
Your uncle just traded his very first vehicle that has been in the barn and in pieces for probably over 40 years, so I know he would relate to your 1st car story. If I remember correctly..it was your other uncle who "took it off the road" for him...