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| Five years down the road By Stacy Trevenon [ stacy@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 10:25 AM PDT When Nancy Elliot pays one of her regular visits to the handsome Mexican rosewood cross on Highway 1 just south of Half Moon Bay, she picks up litter and, if it’s spring, tends the cheerful daffodils she planted there. Sometimes she is joined by Jose Guerrero, who manages the 118-acre ranch she owned with her late husband, Ernie. Guerrero made that cross, carving the name “Ernie Elliot” on the horizontal beam and 1949-2003 on the vertical beam. The rich wood was brought from Cihuatlan, Mexico, and the cross rests on two solid concrete bases. “Jose put it in here to stay,” said Nancy Elliot. Ernie Elliot died on this spot on June 28, 2003, the result of injuries caused by an auto accident. Sometimes Nancy Elliot wonders what became of the then-teenaged illegal immigrant who caused the crash. “I think most people are good people, and people can make horrible mistakes,” she said. “You can’t reverse things. Most people learn from serious mistakes.” But Guerrero is still angry over the incident that took his good friend, countryman and mentor. “I made the cross because it’s a tradition in Mexico. He and I were good friends, and he liked hardwood,” said the soft-spoken Guerrero. “He was Mexican, I was too. I’m angry because Ernie was my good friend, a nice guy and a very good person.” He glances upward. “God knows what happened.” On the night of the accident, Ernie and Nancy Elliot left a party at the home of his brother, Jim Elliot of El Granada, and headed south on Highway 1. The car immediately ahead of them pulled around a car in front of it as if to pass — a maneuver which put it right into the path of a northbound vehicle. Ernie Elliot hit the brakes. “He said, ‘Hang on, there’s going to be an accident. There’s no place for anyone to go,’ and that was the last thing he said,” said Nancy Elliot. The passing car, driven by the 19-year-old, hit the northbound car. That car went out of control and hit Ernie Elliot’s Ford pickup head-on, causing it to roll over multiple times and land upside down. Bruised and cut, Nancy Elliot wriggled out of the Ford after a passing driver broke the passenger window. The driver’s side was crushed. The teen driver in the other car was gone, though he was apprehended later in Pescadero. She was able to reach out to touch her husband. As a veterinarian, she had some medical training, but it could only show her that nothing could be done. She watched as first his breathing, and then his pulse, stopped. There was one thing for which she says she was grateful. “It was so fast, there was no suffering,” she said. “It was just over.” It was not over for her, however. She called friends and Guerrero, and an ambulance took her and another woman, who had suffered a fractured pelvis in the accident, to the hospital. That woman did not speak English and the paramedics did not speak Spanish, so Elliot translated. “That was another surreal moment,” she said. Some might view her reaction to the accident as even more surreal. She assumed the teen driver was trying to flee to Mexico — and she hoped he’d make it. “Nothing could be gained by having that kid in jail,” she said. In the following weeks, Guerrero began work on the cross. Ernie Elliot had been his mentor ever since Guerrero received his green card in 2003. Meanwhile, friends urged Nancy Elliot to stay busy, but “that didn’t feel right.” So she found solace in stress therapy and long hikes, which played a key role in beginning to heal. “If you don’t let yourself move on ... you just get stuck,” she said. “I was able to accept what happened faster.” She learned to notice little things in nature on walks on the ranch. She read books on grief and post-traumatic stress; she read poetry. She embraced Buddhist philosophies of acceptance and living-in-the-moment mindfulness. And images and memories of her husband were never far. “One thing he always said was, I was one of the least helpless people he knew,” she said. “When I felt helpless, I could hear that.” Gradually she gained strength. “By paying attention to what is good, you see past the bad parts,” she explained. Elliot experienced pain and numbness in one arm from herniated discs. Doctors were unsure if she would be able to ride or do the work she loved — acupuncture on horses — but surgery helped her slowly return to both. Even more trying was the year of legal proceedings, when prosecutors classified her a “hostile witness” because she was not interested in seeing the teen in jail. He was eventually sentenced to time served. “That wouldn’t change anything,” she said. “They had a hard time figuring me out.” Today, she assumes he was deported. But she thinks of him. “You think you’re invincible at 19,” she said thoughtfully. “If he went back to Mexico, he could tell people to be careful. You can kill people by not being careful ... Did he learn anything? Did he make changes? “Part of me wonders what his life is like after five years,” she continued. Then she gave a kind of shrug. “But that doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything but ... we’re kind of connected.” She describes her life after the past five years as “not bad, just different.” She has horses and does a little farming on the ranch, and worries about not having a backup to run it. She thinks Highway 1 needs more passing lanes. She is more accepting of things, which is why Buddhism appeals to her. She works on finding complete balance. And she sees her husband Ernie as something of a teacher. “He wasn’t one to dwell on things,” she says now. “(He would say) ‘OK, it’ll be fine, no problem.’ Jose says it too.” |