Not Everyone Survived

Lori Yeghiayan Friedman weighs the lasting trauma of a 1988 car accident that took the lives her her high school classmates.

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Lori Yeghiayan Friedman performing the Estelle monologue days before the 1988 crash that would end her friends’ lives.

Some part of each of us remains frozen in 1988. At the time, the word “trauma” may have been used to describe head injuries or the experiences of war veterans, but not the emotional wounds of a bunch of teenagers whose friends perished in a fiery crash one Friday night, and who were expected to go on as usual Monday morning.  

Take my high school classmate Sarah Marbury* and her Facebook post on the 30th anniversary of the accident: “Fuck you for all eternity, Elliott Klein,” she wrote, sounding like a teenager even though she’s almost fifty. 

I don’t blame her for her rage, still hot thirty years later. She lost her best friend that day: red-headed, freckled Amy Jaworski, whom I didn’t know very well. I have an image of her, though, a still image that never changes of her frosted lipstick, denim cut-offs and a tie-dye Guns & Roses t-shirt, her smile just like Axl Rose’s “sweet child.”

At the time, the word “trauma” may have been used to describe head injuries or the experiences of war veterans, but not the emotional wounds of a bunch of teenagers whose friends perished in a fiery crash one Friday night, and who were expected to go on as usual Monday morning.