I was working the day that Princess Diana died. The Saturday evening was slow, and all I needed to prepare was recorded captioning script for the replay of Larry King Live and network script for the CNNSI shows that night.

Deep in my editing, I heard the CNN Breaking News theme song, and I immediately got out of my chair and took stock. One of the two captioners was in another room, alert and ready to take on an unscheduled session of live captioning; the other came in and asked without words if we should be captioning. All the sets were tuned in, and it looked like it was going to be serious news, so I both nodded and shrugged mutely, ready to call our employers if it ever came down to it.

Then the anchor came on and announced that Princess Diana was in an accident.

We got to working. One captioner typed away, and I researched and fed her spellings of relevant names and places, which she initially spelled out long-hand as she typed and then put into her dictionary during breaks. When she got tired, the other took over.

It was big news, which meant a long hard night. The employers stopped by to check on us, and the work was nonstop. By the end of our shift, I was tired and numb. I was ready to drive home in my automatic pilot mode, and I didn’t snap out of it until I was a couple of roads out of the parking lot, where the street was fairly busy but surrounded by nothing but fields.

What snapped me out of it was a streak of tan on the road, quick and small across my path. I veered to avoid it but the soft thump was unmistakable. I hit a hare.

The shock slowed me down, and the cars behind me honked their horns at me. I pulled over and looked back. I couldn’t see anything, and my eyes started to sting. All I could think was: Oh, my God. I just hit a rabbit. Oh, my God!

It was the first time I ever hit anything, and I felt horrible, as though my childhood had ended, and all the fairy tale dreams I ever had were at an end. I murdered a rabbit! I felt like a bad, bad person with an oily black streak on my soul. I had to make good! I kept trying to find the rabbit, but the cars were simply passing by too fast, and my eyesight at night is bad. I thought, maybe I only grazed it, and I can save it, but with the traffic so steady, I knew deep down that if I hadn’t already killed it, another motorist would have already finished it off.

I couldn’t allow myself to think that, so I drove in haste to get some help. I know what I’ll do. I’ll get HIM to help me. He always knows what to do.

When I got there, he greeted me then saw my fallen face. As I expected, he knew immediately how I felt and wrapped me in his arms, crooning sympathetic sounds to soothe me.

“Aww,” he said gently, rocking me and smoothing his hands along my hair and back. “It’ll be okay, sweetie. I had no idea she meant that much to you. I’m so sorry.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “You have to come back with me,” I told him in tears. “I left it on the road. We have to go see if it’s okay.”

The words made him pause. He looked bewildered. “Are you really that upset about Diana?”

I gaped at him in confusion, and then I realized he was talking about Princess Diana and her car accident. “What? No! I hit a rabbit on the road. You have to come back with me to see if it’s okay. It’s so dark, and there are so many cars on the road, I couldn’t see anything.”

For a full minute, his face was blank. Then his chest started to shake, and his mouth curved into a smile, which turned into a grin and mild laughter. “You hit a rabbit?”

“Yes! And we have to go back!” I was upset that he wasn’t taking me seriously, and I think I might have started crying again in earnest if he hadn’t just wrapped me in his arms then and soothed me some more. This time, his words and expression were different, as though he were really saying, “Aww, poor sweet little baby, it’ll be okay.”

It was actually kind of comforting. It made me realize how silly I was being, almost child-like. He was right; people hit rabbits on the road all the time. The rabbits are too quick in movement and too stupid in sense, and sometimes people get into even bigger accidents simply trying to avoid hitting them. So, no, I wasn’t a bad person.

That didn’t stop me from getting my way, though. We drove over to the scene of the crime, and he looked over the spot in question. I might have only grazed the poor hare, but it was completely flattened by those who came after me.

I was desolate for the rest of the night, and years after the fact, we still refer to that day as the night I hit the rabbit and cried about it. At least, that’s how we refer to it between us.

To everyone else, that was the night Diana died.

Share this post: