“That fearful look in her eyes haunted me for a long time.”

The girl that suddenly crossed the road on her bike looked Henk straight in the eyes at the last moment. Then his truck hit her. “That fearful look in her eyes. It haunted me for a long time. That’s why I started searching.” For months, truck driver Henk didn’t know how the 15-year-old girl was doing. He saw how she was taken away in an ambulance helicopter that day in April 2022, but heard nothing afterwards. 

“For a long time I thought I’d done something wrong. But I couldn’t have done anything differently,” he says. “Good thing he’d just unloaded his cargo,” his wife adds. That’s why the girl ended up in front of his wheels, and not underneath them. “The police said I had a very short breaking distance. That I had a very quick reaction.” It started an uncertain period. For months, he kept off of social media. “Because I was afraid I would hear something I didn’t want to hear.” He looked for help with his general practitioner and talked to a mental health worker, who started searching for him, and eventually found Perspectief Herstelbemiddeling. 

The liberating words

Henk himself wasn’t able to talk to mediator Peter Brandwacht at first. His wife talked with him instead. “Peter was our last hope,’ she says. “He was honest, said he couldn’t guarantee anything. But he was human and provided a listening ear,” Henk continues. “Then, I dared to take this step.” The mediator went to inquire about the girl. “Then he returned with the liberating words: ‘She’s alive. And she’s doing well under the circumstances.’ You can’t imagine how relieved we were,” he sighs. 

That was five months after the accident. The family of the girl was prepared to talk with the truck driver. Henk: “I found it really difficult, I didn’t know if I wanted to go. I was afraid that the father would tell me: ‘bastard, what did you do to my girl?’.” He would understand, he said, but it would hurt him. Even though he knew he was not to blame. He discussed all of these thoughts with the mediator. In the meantime, the girl had written a postcard for him, in which she told him that she’s doing well and that she felt really bad for the driver and what he had to go through. Henk: “I read it with tears in my eyes. I was happy that she was doing well and was taking the effort to let me know.”

Meeting

Eventually, Henk met with Daisy and her parents. “I let go of the image of that fearful look in her eyes. It was also nice to hear her parents say: ‘it’s not your fault’,” Henk says. It was strange for him to hear that Daisy’s father had already tried to get in contact with him a week after the accident. The police had held off on that. “It’s strange, right? When two people want to get in contact with each other, but it can’t be arranged. They were also shocked that we didn’t know anything for such a long time, and wanted to know how I was doing.”

Henk is happy that he was able to adjust his mental image of the girl. “It was great for me, as if a switch got flipped.” But his wife was left with a lot of frustration about how the whole thing had gone. “I had hoped to let go of my anger.” It was hard for her to hear that Daisy and her family got so much help. “And we had to do everything on our own.” “We’ve had to figure everything out ourselves,” Henk confirms. That’s why it was so nice for them to finally get the help of the mediator, he says. “He took everything out of our hands.”

For Henk, the matter is closed. His wife has looked for help so she can also move on from it. When the accident happened, they were parents to a five month old baby. The accident really hit them hard. “It left scars,” she says. She’s happy with what the mediator has done for them. “I wish we had known about this sooner.” Henk hopes that people are referred to Perspectief Herstelbemiddeling more often. “It’s crazy that this is not more widely known.”

Text: Monique Bloeme