A musician Brandy he is thinking about a fatal car accident in 2006 that killed a 38-year-old woman Awatef Aboudihaj in his recently released memoir, Sections.
“It was just a trip, one day on the pale concrete veins of the 405. How many times have I ridden this strange freeway?” Brandy, 47, wrote in the book, published on Tuesday, March 31. “But all familiarity vanished on a cold day in December 2006. There was no warning. No shiver down the spine. No twinkle in the sky to indicate what was about to happen.”
Brady wrote that his “mind was clear” and he was “focused” just before the devastating crash.
“However, I did not see the accident in time.
Brandy remembers letting out a “paralyzing noise” before hearing a “deafening, impossible silence.”
At first, Brandy thought the accident was her “fault,” but an onlooker told her otherwise. He also remembered that Aboudihaj was taken out of one of the cars.
Brandy wrote: “She was rushed to the hospital and sirens went off in the distance.
“The guilt grabbed me by the throat, I was so depressed that breathing became a conscious effort,” he continued. “It was an accident – a tragic combination of circumstance and human error. But the woman had lost her life. And I was alive.”
Brandy wrote that because of survivor’s guilt, she hid from the world after the accident.
“I no longer had the feeling that I had the right to continue living my life, or even to find fleeting happiness,” he wrote. “The woman who died would never again feel the sun on her face or hold her children close. Who was I to smile? To sing? To exist in a world where she would no longer be able to?”
The victim’s family sued Brandy for $50 million after the accident, which was eventually settled out of court.
“The investigation finally concluded that this arrangement of circumstances was not the result of my negligence,” he wrote. “The claims were settled. No charges were brought against me. But at that time, the charge had settled in my soul, and it solidified into something permanent and immovable.”
It took a long time for Brandy to say that she couldn’t forgive herself. However, after several conversations with her therapist, she was finally able to give herself grace.
He wrote: “The grief did not end, but it subsided. “It opened up a place. I stopped asking it to go away.”
Sections it’s out now.
