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Teresa understands how Roz feels. She was driving her six children home after a family vacation when she fell asleep at the wheel. Her car veered from the road, crashing through a guardrail and plummeting into a ravine. Three of Teresa's children—Katie, Jonathan and Jacob—lost their lives. "I can remember looking up at where my car had come from and saying, 'I've killed my children,'" she says.
Since the 1991 crash, Teresa has had three more children, but she still thinks about Katie, Jonathan and Jacob all the time. Like Julie and Smith, Teresa says her husband did not blame her for what happened. "I can remember finally having to say to him, 'It's all fine and good for you to say that, but I have to be able to feel it in my heart,'" she says.
While she tried to be happy, Teresa says she had to release some of her emotions in order to come to terms with what happened. "There were times that I would go be by myself, where no one could hear me, and I would scream and talk to my children and apologize to them and ask their forgiveness, and that helped so much to be able to get those feelings outside of me," she says.
Teresa has also learned an important lesson from her loss. "Part of why we're here in this life is to learn and grow, to have experiences, and some are very, very painful, but we all make mistakes," she says. "Part of what I came to realize was that it wasn't so much forgiving myself as it was accepting myself, accepting that I am human and that that is okay."
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