By Victoria Huggins Peurifoy, September 18, 2018
She looked so beautiful, laying her final resting place, but that was not the way I wanted to remember her or the circumstance of how she came to her demise, or how we too almost lost.
They were at the basketball game, at the arena in Philadelphia, on University City’s campus the Palestra. My mother was with my great-aunt Nancy, cousins Joyce, John, and Tommy along with thousands of other people who were there to see my cousin Oriole represent his school. They all were from Alexandria Virginia. We were living in Eastwick at the time. My sister and brother and I were being watched by our aunt Virginia. I was about 6 years old. The events that occurred that night led to another incident I will never forget.
The next morning, when we came downstairs, there was a different feeling in the air. A feeling of deep sadness. I thought the world had ended the way everyone was looking. But then again, I was a child… what did I know? My oldest cousin Niecy came and sat next to me. She said,
“I have something I need to tell you,” then she continued, “Last night when everybody went to see your cousin play ball, your Aunt Nancy got very ill in the stadium. She was removed from the stadium and taken care of by doctors that were on duty. She had a massive stroke.”
I didn’t know what a stroke was. But I figured it must have been really bad and then my cousin said, “Aunt Nancy died last night, she never even saw your cousin play.”
This was a lot for a six-year-old to absorb, I really didn’t know how to respond to what she was saying to me, I just knew it wasn’t a good thing. This was my first encounter with death.
Along with me and my siblings, the very next day, my mother and my cousins caravanned down to Alexandria, Virginia. Traveling over many bridges to get to our destination initially was no problem for me. This particular aunt that died, was the sister of my maternal grandmother. The weather had turned cold as we were traveling otherwise, everything was fine. The roads were clear. Unfortunately, things change very quickly as we were coming out of the Harbor Tunnel. On the other side of the Harbor Tunnel was a snowstorm.
My mother’s car hit a patch of ice and spun out of control and hit the guard rails, on the right side of the road. Below that guard rail was another street, another town, and another city. I remember my mom saying that the police told her that we were fortunate that we hit that rail and didn’t go over the rail! As a result, of that incident, I was traumatized for about for many years, I was paranoid about traveling over bridges and didn’t like guard rails.
I would cringe just at the thought. I would close my eyes tightly so that I couldn’t see the bridge or what was on the other side of the guardrail. Though that incident happened when I was six, I can never forget that night of the accident. In addition, I was separated from my mother because we were all taken to different hospitals to make sure everybody was okay. My mom’s car had some damage but not enough to keep her from driving the car so we were able to continue on to Alexandria. I am constantly reminded that we almost didn’t make it as we had to travel over those bridges and pass by guard rail to my Aunt Nancy’s final resting place.