The year is circa 1994; I go to my driveway to pick up the Sunday paper to read. On the front page is the story of a serious car accident. One person was killed he was a passenger in one of two cars that were racing; he got decapitated as a cable cut through the windshield of one of the cars. Both cars were driven by adolescent JWs, as you might imagine there were all the dirty legal, ethical and medical issues to contend with since it was on the cover of the paper of America’s tenth largest city. The driver of one of the cars was in critical condition and he was going to have one leg amputated at the knee.
All these people in this real life drama attended my hall; I was an ms there. I was assigned as the assistant to the assistant of the magazine counter. As time wore on I could see the unresolved grief and pain in the mother of the boy that lost his life. She would go to meetings and put on a plastic smile and so would everyone else. This is a typical scenario of social denial of a real imaginary thing that never happened. I could no longer sit back and play this denial game. I talked to the presiding elder and told him I was qualified to help both families to deal with the trauma ( this was pro bono) that was never resolved and I gave him some literature to read. He politely tells me he will read it and talk to the committee of elders that dfed the boy that got his leg amputated.
As one week turns into three weeks of not hearing anything, one day I ask the presiding elder if they had decided anything? He politely tells me they did and they decided against telling either of the families of my proposal. That was the start of the end for me.
A year later the boy amputated calls me through a friend and asks me if I will work with him to remove the trauma of killing his best friend. I agree to under certain conditions, I told him he had to attend a support group of near death survivors I was speaking to at a local hospital, which he did. There he heard me say things that totally mismatched his JW beliefs. I never heard from him again.