OPINION - The real road toll: Hearts broken by tragedy sometimes never heal

Take it easy on the roads these Easter holidays.

I'm not sure if it was a public holiday. But in some ways it's irrelevant.

That night, someone had to make a phone call that they dreaded.

At the other end, there were screams, and shouting. Sadness, and anger,

A car screamed down our metal driveway, heading into town, toward a baby sister killed in a head-on crash.

The car she was in had hit a bridge on a highway in the middle of the night.

She was a teenage girl in the prime of her life, finding independence as an adult after leaving her quiet rural township.

She wanted to be a teacher, and was at training college in the big smoke.
It must have been the holidays.

She had been a passenger in the car. The driver, well, he probably shouldn't have been.
They were less than 30km from home, in the last 20 minutes of a two-hour-plus journey.

He showed up at the family home a day or so later, wracked with grief. It felt like the right thing to do.

He wasn't welcome. His life had been wrecked, but he still had his life.

The night his passenger died, her brother had wanted to kill him. That fire was an easy one to stoke. The driver left.

It was the second young life snatched from the family. A few years earlier, a son never returned from a job on the farm, after a tractor rolled.

He too was young, fit as a buck, with his life ahead of him.

For years, driving past the highway bridge evoked tears from her family.

"That was the bridge that she was killed on."

It's a sombre observation that has been passed on to new generations.

A young man, the same age as she was, drove past that bridge recently.

He heard the story. And hopefully, there was a lesson there, and her death wasn't wasted.

Time heals many things, but hearts broken by tragedy take longer.

Sometimes, they never heal.

Please drive safely this Easter.