family

The night life changed Out of grief and guilt grows one mother’s crusade

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n the early-evening hours of Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003, Carolyn Roy-Bornstein stood in her living room on Chain Bridge Drive in Newburyport and watched her son’s girlfriend prepare to walk home after a study date.

By Katie Lovett • Photos by Bryan Eaton & Jim Vaiknoras

Sixteen-year-old Trista Zinck, who was becoming more of a fixture at the Bornstein house, put on her boots and jacket and readied to go out into the light snow. Roy-Bornstein remembers being puzzled to see her 17-year-old son, Neil, watching Trista from the couch. Neil always accompanied Trista on her 15-minute walks home to Laurel Road. “What are you doing? How come you’re not walking her home?” Roy-Bornstein says she told her son. The young couple admitted they were scheming. They hoped that if Trista, a sophomore at Newburyport High School, arrived home alone, before curfew, her mother, Mary Zinck, would be more amenable to having Neil pay a visit later that night. Roy-Bornstein’s reply will haunt her for the rest of her life. “I said to him, ‘No, Neil, you should walk her home and be the chivalrous gentleman delivering the young lady safely to her doorstep, then Mary will have to let you stay,” Roy-Bornstein says. Minutes later, as they were walking down Ferry Road, Neil and Trista were struck by a 19-year-old drunken driver behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Blazer. The rescue workers responding found them both lying in the road. Trista died the next day at Boston Medical Center. Her passing consumed her relatives and friends with intense grief. Neil, who was preparing to graduate high school that spring and go off to college in New York, suffered serious brain and leg injuries. The

tragedy catapulted him and his family onto a devastating path they still continue to negotiate almost a decade later. Meanwhile, William White, also of Newburyport, fled the scene after hitting the couple. His Blazer struck another vehicle not far from the accident site and rolled over. Police found 32 empty beer cans and two marijuana pipes in his SUV. White was found guilty of aggravated assault and battery and served his 21/2-year sentence in prison before being released on probation. In 2008, he was sent back to jail with an additional five- to seven-year sentence after he was caught drinking in a Seabrook bar in violation of the terms of his release order. For the Bornstein family, the past nine years have been full of overwhelming sorrow, painful healing and, slowly, acceptance of a new sense of normal. But Roy-Bornstein, a pediatrician based in Haverhill, says the accident and her son’s recovery have also provided her with an unwavering mission in life — to spread awareness about brain injuries, underage drinking and drunken driving. “I said to Neil once, ‘If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have been there,’” she recalls.

A haze of confusion

at my “ownLooking reaction to it,

my own experience, examining things like why didn’t I know that his depression was organic, and how we’ve all dealt with it as a family and grown together as a family.

”

Carolyn RoyBornstein, mother of Neil Bornstein, boyfriend of the late Trista

Zinck

Neil and Trista met on the school bus and started dating in the spring of 2002. Roy-Bornstein remembers her son’s girlfriend as a special girl who was very smart and had a sly sense of humor. “I loved when Trista came to our house. There was a natural levity and ease when she was there. Neil could be a typical monosyllabic teenager, Spring 2012

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but with Trista around, he was more want to go to physical therapy, not animated and bright.” caring if he walked again. While Neil doesn’t remember the Six days after the accident, on accident, he often talks about his the day of Trista’s funeral, Neil was final conversation with Trista on that discharged from the hospital. He fateful walk. At the time, he was makspent the next month working on ing plans to head to Skidmore Colhis recovery before he returned to lege in New York in the fall. Despite Newburyport High. the distance it would create between His progress was slow, but steady. them, Neil and Trista had made the He learned how to use his walker decision to stay together. and maneuver a crutch to go up and “He said to her, ‘Have you noticed down stairs. Later, he used a walkwe’ve started saying when we’re ing stick to help with balance and together, not if?’” Roy-Bornstein overall confidence. says of her son’s final words to his In addition to the problems with girlfriend. his leg, Neil struggled to overcome “She said, ‘Should I be scared?’ the lingering effects of his brain and he said, ‘No.’ He said that’s the injury. He worried about having a last thing he remembers talking to seizure. He grappled with suicidal her about.” thoughts and would spend the The next thing Neil knew, he was next five years in therapy and on at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in antidepressants. Boston with a right-sided fracture A stellar student who had of the tibia and fibula in his lower achieved a perfect 800 on the math right leg. Doctors had to open his portion of his SAT in high school, leg and realign the bones, holding Neil also began struggling acathem together with titanium plates demically. He was forced to drop After spending years keeping a journal and writing essays, and screws. an advanced-placement class. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein is sharing her family’s experience with Much of his time in the hospital But despite the challenges, he sucthe 2003 accident that severely injured her son and killed his was spent in a confused haze. cessfully graduated from high school girlfriend in her first book. “Crash” is due out in October. “He was very agitated. He thought that spring of 2003 as planned. And he was in a gym. He tried to climb out of The next morning, he asked for more of upon receiving his diploma, he was eager bed. He knew he had a broken leg, but an explanation. to escape his hometown. he never asked, ‘How did I get a broken His father, Saul; his older brother, Dan; “He couldn’t wait to get out of leg?’” his mother says. and his mother gathered around him and Newburyport,” his mother says. “When On the fourth day, he asked for Trista. broke the devastating news. he would come back from college, comWhen he was told she had been in the “He just kind of checked out,” Roying over the Merrimack, he would start to accident with him, he asked his parents Bornstein says. He didn’t want to eat. He get anxious ... all the memories that are to keep him updated. didn’t want to get out of bed. He didn’t associated with Newburyport.”

IN HER OWN WORDS The following are excerpts from essays Carolyn Roy-Bornstein has written about the accident and its aftermath: I came home to find Neil sitting at the dining room table, my journal opened in front of him. My heart skipped a beat. What had I written there? I racked my brain. Neil pulling off his hospital gown. Neil lashing out at the hospital staff. Neil needing to be restrained. But before I could decide whether to ask him to stop reading my private entries or let him continue, he looked up at me, his face pale and blank as 34

Spring 2012

a plate. “I’m sorry I yelled at you in the hospital, Mom.” My heart cracked. Here was my boy apologizing for something totally beyond his control: disinhibited rants caused by temporal lobe agitation. He didn’t know he had yelled at me. He didn’t know anything. He was totally amnesic for his entire stay in the ICU. I squeezed his shoulders and pressed my lips to the top of his head. I knew at that moment that he needed to recover information about those lost days. My journal was filling in the memory gaps for him. He was learning things from the page that I could not bring myself to express out loud: the

breadth and depth of my love for him, my deep sorrow at not being able to take away his pain, my guilt at being the mother of the one who survived this terrible accident, my guilt at feeling guilty. “It’s OK, Neil. Read what you want. I’ll be here if you have any questions.” ... I continued to write about our experiences — his experiences as a brain-injury survivor and my experiences as both his mother and a doctor. But I understood that I wasn’t writing just for myself. I wasn’t writing simply because this was the way I made sense of the world. I was also writing for my son.” — “Writing for Two,” Literary Mama, January 2011

 
 


  



Following Trista Zinck’s death in 2003, several of her Newburyport High classmates created a giant heart in the school courtyard, and left other tributes around the campus in her memory. The high school staff told Trista’s boyfriend, Neil Bornstein, about the memorials as he prepared to return to class after a month of recovery from injuries he sustained in the crash.

A mom with a new mission

Roy-Bornstein, who rearranged her work schedule to care for her son, found solace in putting her thoughts about the accident down on paper. “I find writing helps me learn about myself,” the 55-year-old Roy-Bornstein says. “I write a lot about my relationship with my patients and my relationship with my colleagues. I just find that it deepens

IN HER OWN WORDS Even in those panic-stricken early hours, I felt the weight of the other mother in that room, the presence of Mary Zinck. I wanted to cover Neil’s cold and shivering body with my own to warm him. I thought of Mary. Wouldn’t she rather feel Trista cold and shivering than just plain cold? It was so unlike Neil to yell, to demand. It was hard to listen to. I wanted to take that collar off his neck, to make him comfortable. I kept thinking of Mary and how she would give anything to hear Trista’s voice again, even if she was complaining. My grief felt constricted next to Mary’s. How dare I grieve at all? How fraudulent it felt, like I was hijacking the very word from someone who knew true loss. But I have losses, too. Neil recovered. He left the hospital after two surgeries. He had physical therapy. He walked with a cane for months. But he has changed. ... I need a yardstick, too. It may be different from Mary’s. With tinier notches, perhaps. Or at least more widely spaced apart. But I have things to measure,

those relationships. Writing about the accident, it’s given me perspective, that’s for sure.” In addition, her frustration at missing the medical cause for her son’s depression led her to become an expert on brain injury and concussions, and underage drinking and drunken driving. In 2007, after completing a memoirwriting class at Harvard Extension

too. Neil’s pain from fractured bones, hardware in and hardware out. His slow progress through physical therapy. His struggles with memory loss. His pain from the loss of his girlfriend and having his whole world turned upside down. ... I have come to understand that the whole gamut of human emotion is legit when it comes to coping with loss. Even how we define our loss is personal and valid, different as it may be for each of us. I’m not sure where I stand in this hierarchy of grief. I may not be on the top rung, but I’m not on the bottom either. All I know is that I belong on the ladder. — “Hierarchy of Grief,” first published in “Chicken Soup for the Soul: Grieving and Recovery,” February 2011

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School, Roy-Bornstein took her journal entries and began crafting essays for literary magazines and articles for medical journals. Last year, her essay, “A Hierarchy of Grief,” was published in “Chicken Soup for the Soul: Grieving and Recovery.” Earlier this year, it was reprinted in Kaleidoscope, a national disability magazine. In October, Roy-Bornstein will release her first book, “Crash,” a medical memoir about the accident and its impact on her as both a mother and a doctor. “It’s sort of progressed to looking at it from the other side of the stretcher,” says Roy-Bornstein, who teaches writing for the Newburyport Adult Education program. “Looking at my own reaction to it, my own experience, examining things like why didn’t I know that his depression was organic, and how we’ve all dealt with it as a family and grown together as a family.”

IN HER OWN WORDS When I ask teenagers in my office about alcohol use and designated drivers, what’s more effective? Telling them that 11,773 people died in 2008 in drunken-driving accidents or recounting being asked to pluck 25 hairs from Neil’s head so the crash scene investigator could match them to the ones sprouting from the drunk driver’s cracked windshield? What if one of my teenagers tells me she doesn’t drive drunk, just buzzed? Do I reach her with a discussion of blood-alcohol levels and the minimum legal drinking age? Or do I tell her a story about watching my 17-year-old son say the mourner’s prayer for his dead girlfriend in our synagogue? ... I don’t parade the gory details of my life out for every family in my practice to see. In fact, I don’t talk about the crash much at all. But there are times when I think kids need a jolt, when my usual spiel on drugs and alcohol are making my young patients’ eyes glaze over. Sometimes their parents are in the room with us. I’ll often catch a glimpse of Mom out of the corner of my eye, nodding gratefully. I’m a new adult ally in the war on drugs. Sometimes it’s just the kid and me in the room together, locked in a kind of health care smackdown — them with their in-your-face, what-do-you-know swagger, me with my more quiet, “Let me

Roy-Bornstein became an ambassador for the Brain Injury Association in 2009 and frequently tells Neil’s story to students, civic organizations and medical personnel. She says more than five million adults and children are living with long-term disabilities as a result of brain injuries. “It should be no surprise how many people come up to me after my talks to share their stories, but I am awed and humbled each and every time,” she says. Roy-Bornstein says that despite her son’s progress, she can’t help but always view Neil as vulnerable, and she goes to great lengths to protect him from any harm. “I worry about him in a way I don’t Dan,” she says. “Mostly, this manifests itself in mining our conversations for any hint of depression or anxiety. Or if Saul is the one to talk with him on the phone, my first question is always, ‘How’d he Mother, Page 64

tell you how it is” stance. That’s when I’ll sometimes play the crash card. Reactions vary. The accident happened six years ago. Families who have been seeing me for a long time already know my story. We were in the evening news for months and spawned lively discussions about underage drinking and social host laws in the editorial pages of the local newspaper. Those kids’ gut reactions came in the form of handmade cards and heartfelt hugs. Newer patients don’t know our past. Eyes widen and swaggers dissolve as details of that night unfold. — “Doctors Without Borders,” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, June 2010

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