Good Samaritans pulled my wife and I out of our car after a horrible accident | Opinion

The drive from San Francisco to our shared family home in the delta is no longer very pleasant. With more traffic, higher speeds, less perceived enforcement and some crazed driver behavior, it is much more intense than in the 1980s — the decade when we were married in the backyard.

Still, we were recently returning around noon to our wonderful island community for a potluck with a party platter of food that no one got a chance to enjoy. My years of defensive driving and constant attention to the road did not prepare me for the sudden and inexplicable u-turn made from the shoulder directly in front of us. The resulting collision sent my wife and I screaming as our car rolled over several times down the 20-foot embankment from Route 160 near the Three Mile Slough Bridge on Saturday, August 5 around 12:30 p.m.

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Repeatedly slammed, the experience was something utterly devoid of every quality except violence and hardness. It was unrelenting, and completely out of our control. We could see nothing of the outside world and had no idea if we would end up in the water or on land. All we could do was endure it, to absorb that violence until we finally came to rest with the driver’s side down, my wife up in the air.

We looked over at each other — a scene that felt like a movie cliché — to see how badly hurt the other was. All was quiet, and we seemed to be alone. But we weren’t.

In a mere matter of moments, a dozen people had made their way down from the road to patiently assist us out of the car and safely lower us to the ground. A human chain escorted us up to the road where dozens more cars had stopped. Others gathered the odds and ends that had flown about our car’s interior as we rolled. People blessed and encouraged us as we were guided to an air-conditioned vehicle to wait for first responders.

We were so fortunate and grateful to have walked away.

A newspaper report of our accident might have stated that we were subsequently evaluated in an emergency room and released, but the truth is that my wife is still in constant pain from a crushed vertebra, I am bent over with spine and rib fractures, have lost much of the hearing in my one good ear near the airbag, likely permanently, and our recovery will take months. But we are blessed to be alive and we will get through this with much loving support.

We are writing to thank all of you who stopped and came to our rescue. Your concern and care held us. Your goodness and compassion overwhelmed us. In that moment, you connected us to everything that is right with our fellow human beings. We felt that goodness and rightness were all that existed in that time and in that place.

In a world in which I am too often anxious about other people and the potential threat they might pose, whether from the rare road rage or just the aggressiveness, carelessness or thoughtlessness of a few on the road, these same human beings were all goodness. I have wondered why this is so, and many ancient spiritual systems including Mussar, the one that I have studied since the pandemic started, teach that prioritizing our awareness of and concern for others is what helps bring out the truly human in us.

Serving the other is the impulse that brings peace and healing to the world. Too often it takes a disaster of some kind for us to make this switch from our normal self-absorption, but the effects of doing so are profound and all too obvious. You reminded us of that.

Thank you all for being there for us. We cannot express what a difference you made in our lives.

Sandy Goldstein and Cathy Rabin live in San Francisco.