How Love Overcomes Deep Pain

My name is Cassandra Winslow Maggett and on December 14, 1999 my life changed forever. I was driving my husband Terrance and four children Bryce, seven, Breya, four, and eighteen month old twins Tahj and Tayzha to work and to school. While I was driving a lady and her dog were walking and the dog kind of wandered into the road and my husband told me to watch out. I turned the van wheel just slightly and the van spun around and ended up in a “ditch” so I thought, but I found out later that it was a creek. My thoughts at first were that we were all going to be alright I then went to the back of the van and calmed my children down because they all were crying and I remember my husband yelling to the lady to go and get help while he was pushing against the door trying to get the door open.

At the time I could not understand why he could not get the door open until I felt the water coming in from under my feet. I still did not realize the amount of danger my entire family was in until the water continued to come in and my husband finally stop trying to get the the passenger door open and he started to the back of the van and he told me that he was going to get the children and for me to get out and I remember starting to the front of the van when all of a sudden water was above my head and I recall fighting and struggling in the water because I could not swim saying in my mind that I was not ready to die like this and how God said in his word that he would never leave or forsake me. 

I somehow got to the front of the van because the next thing that I remember is that half of my body out of the small crack in the window that my husband had made I still do not know to this day how I got there. I don’t know how long I stayed in that window screaming, crying, and begging God to just give them all some air until help came. Help did finally come but my husband and two older children drowned and the ambulance rushed my twins to the hospital where they were pronounced dead at the hospital. I want you to know that through it all the indescribable pain, numbness, loneliness, and guilt I knew one thing that God was with me and it has almost been eight years and not a day goes by when I don’t think about my family.