By Geralyn Ritter
Like many survivors of traumatic experiences, my life is divided into “before” and “after.” Passage between the two lands is a one-way ticket, and a successful journey requires not just strength, but other resilience muscles like patience, creativity, learning, experimentation and faith.
Surviving an accident is one thing. Navigating the next steps of the journey is another entirely.
On May 12, 2015, I was a passenger in the first car of Amtrak 188, coming home from an ordinary business trip around 9 o’clock at night. Shortly after pulling out of the station in Philadelphia, the conductor sped up. The train was going 106 mph when it hit the sharpest curve in the Northeast Corridor. That curve was designed for a maximum speed of 50 mph.
It had been a long day, and I had just texted my husband to say that I had made the train and would be home in New Jersey in an hour or so. He responded with an excited message about our 8-year-old son’s baseball game that evening. The text made me smile.
I stood up into the aisle to get my iPad out of my bag. As I tried to reach into my bag in the rack above my head, I lost my balance. I grew annoyed as the train started rocking back and forth. I held on to the luggage rack with both hands as we started to tilt. I screamed as I realized the train was crashing and remember nothing else.
My husband, Jonathan, was still looking at his phone when a CNN news alert popped up: Amtrak 188 had derailed. He had no idea of the number of my train. He called me and got sent to voicemail.
She probably has her phone on silent, he thought. He called again and texted, “please call me back.” He stared intently at his phone. Then he remembered the Find My iPhone app. A map appeared showing a train track, along with an iPhone icon 20 feet away from the rails just outside Philadelphia.
When the author's husband couldn’t reach her on the night of the crash, he used the Find My iPhone app to figure out her phone's location. This screenshot, showing it off the track at the accident site, confirmed his fears. COURTESY OF GERALYN RITTER