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 MADD, 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 PADD, 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.