The Missing Road by Elizabeth Lopez
On August 18, 2000, two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, Elizabeth Lopez danced at a punk rock show on Long Island, hugged her friends goodbye, and crossed the road toward her mother’s waiting car. Moments later, a drunk driver struck her. She woke weeks later from a coma with a traumatic brain injury and shattered bones.
The Missing Road is Lopez’s account of the quarter century that followed. Drawing on her mother’s recollections, the journals friends kept at her hospital bedside, and her own hard-won memories, she reconstructs the night of the crash, the weeks in intensive care, and the grueling rehabilitation at St. Charles Hospital, where she moved from wheelchair to crutches and slowly found her words again. She faces the courtroom, reading her own letter at the sentencing of the driver, whom she names only as “Mr. D.” Then she leaves her Long Island home and complicated family to start over in Boston, where the punk rock girl she once was becomes “the girl who got hit by the car.”
Structured around psychiatrist Judith Herman’s three stages of trauma recovery (safety and stabilization, remembrance and mourning, reconnection and integration), the memoir follows Lopez through PTSD, grief, and shame toward therapy, education and love. Today she is a licensed mental health clinician, a wife and a mother. Woven with music, poetry and the devotion of a mother who never left her side, the book is both a survivor’s story and a sobering reminder of what drunk driving costs.
The Missing Road is a memoir that turns a family’s worst night into a testament to resilience and the slow, nonlinear work of healing. Lopez writes with the clarity of a clinician and the heart of a survivor, and readers will come away moved, informed and hopeful.
About Elizabeth Lopez:
