Thank you, Diane

One early evening in 1985, Diane Krysmalski’s mother, her 13-year-old sister Gloria, 11-year-old brother David and Diane herself, age 9, were walking home from church in their Pittsburgh neighborhood.  Diane’s mother turned into the small grocery store, and the three children settled themselves outside on the shopping cart gate to wait.  They’d done it hundreds of times.  “I remember how incredible the stars were,” Diane says, “and everything seemed so peaceful.  There were two little African-American girls also waiting.  We’d never met them, but the five of us started singing songs from church, and it just seemed like we’d known those girls forever.”  

Suddenly the quiet of the night was shattered.  “Look out!” one of the girls shouted.  A car was flying through the parking lot towards them.  In a panic, Diane looked around.  There seemed to be shopping carts blocking them from running—so to get away, she jumped into a cart.  She intended to use it as a shield, but one of her legs got caught in the seat---and at fifty miles per hour, the drunken driver crashed into the group of children.  The next thing Diane remembers is sitting on the sidewalk, looking at herself and screaming.  Her left leg, below the knee, had been torn away. 

“I saw my sister lying to my right, not moving but making moaning sounds,” Diane says. “My brother was murmuring something.  The two little girls were nowhere in sight.  I wondered if they had been killed because there was nowhere for them to have run.”  People raced out of the store, and Diane’s mother began to scream as she surveyed the scene.  Oddly, an ambulance had pulled up right after the runaway car.  The off-duty driver, they later discovered, had stopped to buy cigarettes, something he rarely did.  But because of his presence, the children all arrived at the hospital within ten minutes, and lived, despite the loss of blood.  Diane’s sister, however, lost her right leg.

“The next morning, I woke up feeling calm and cheerful,” Diane says.  “My parents were at my bedside crying, but I told them not to be sad because I was alive, and that’s what mattered.”  Even when Diane saw that her left leg, she merely shrugged and said, “Well, that’s too bad.” Shock, everyone thought.  The immensity of this event would soon come crashing down on her.  But it didn’t.

Diane was in the hospital for about a year and had frequent operations to repair the damage to her leg.  A priest would give her the last rites whenever she went into surgery. “I didn’t understand that I was in danger of death,” she says.  “I just thought he was being nice to me!” Her upbeat attitude continued even after she went home to a hospital bed in the living room of their small house, and a cast on her other leg.  “My mother wore a hearing aid, and at night she would take it out and sleep on the couch near me,  in case I needed the bed pan or something.”  One night Diane’s mother was awakened by something.  When she looked over at Diane, she saw a black woman standing beside Diane while she slept.  “The woman had her hand on my amputated leg and she was dressed in all white, and she turned and looked at my mother and smiled.  My mother blinked to see if it was real and the woman  disappeared.”

Diane never discovered what became of the two little girls at the accident scene, and neither did anyone else.  “Our family, although we’re white, seem to have black angels from time to time, and we love this,” she says.  Perhaps the girls were trying to protect Diane’s family but for some reason, weren’t able to do so.  There was also a man Diane’s father met at the hospital that terrible night.  “The man, also black, donated his blood to me, stayed with my father in the waiting room, and even showed up at a few court hearings to give my parents moral support,” Diane says.  “Yet no one ever discovered his name.”  

Nor did anyone understand why Diane never seemed depressed about her situation.  “It would take more than the loss of a leg to get me down,” she acknowledges.  “I love life.”  In 1999, Diane even phoned the driver who had hit her, and told him she had forgiven him. “I will never understand what could make a person get that drunk and then drive, but I felt that I needed to do that,” she says.  

Today Diane is married and the happy mother of five children.  “I believe there is a reason God didn’t take me and my brother and sister to His home that night,” she says, “and I’m excited to find out what it is.  Maybe I was meant to encourage others to not give up hope, and to remember that God loves us all.”

It would be easy to question:  Why didn’t God and His angels save Diane from this trauma rather than allowing her to go through it?  We’ll never know.  But Diane made a choice to be happy in her circumstances, and she lights everyone’s path with her attitude and faith.  Thank you, Diane.

(C) 2004  Joan Wester Anderson   www.joanwanderson.com

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