I knew I could never make it right

Life Changing

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.6 • 735 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In August of 2006, Teresa Clark was driving five of her friends back home after a day at a music festival. Several hours into the journey she fell asleep at the wheel of their people carrier and crashed. Three passengers were killed, two others were injured as well as Teresa herself.

She was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and spent time in prison. The guilt and shame of carrying that loss of life almost destroyed her. But in the 17 years since it happened Teresa has rebuilt; she now works in the mental health and wellbeing sector trying to keep the vow she made to live her life for her friends, and do some good in their memory.

Details of support with mental health issues and bereavement are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Greg Jenner. I'm the host of Your Dead to Me, where the best names in comedy and history
0:05.5	join me to learn about and laugh at the past. You are a traitor. And in the new series, we'll meet
0:11.2	Aristotle. I think he might have been a time traveller. Someone who's like almost a glitch.
0:15.3	We'll dive into the causes of the British Civil Wars in the 1600s. In England at this period,
0:19.8	there's people can't get on the housing ladder.
0:21.5	This sounds familiar. And we'll discover the arts and crafts movement. I love the clothes. I love
0:26.5	the vibe. Yes, we're a comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it. You're dead to me.
0:31.3	Listen first on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:38.0	Hello and welcome to the series that hears from people who've lived through transformative
0:42.7	experiences, those moments that shift life on its axis and change it forever.
0:49.0	Today, that moment involves an incident that seriously impacted the lives of multiple people. We're going to
0:56.0	focus on just one of them, a woman at the centre of that event who was found responsible for the
1:01.0	deaths of three of her friends. While we're not hearing from the families of those who died today,
1:07.0	they do know about this interview and are aware of this broadcast. And so to today's guest.
1:13.9	In August of 2006, Theresa Clark was driving five of her mates back home to Kent after a festival.
1:21.4	Before they'd left, she'd taken ecstasy. Several hours into the journey, she fell asleep at the wheel of their people carrier and crashed. The front seat passenger and two in the back were killed. Two others were injured, as well as Teresa herself. The guilt and shame of carrying that loss of life almost destroyed her. But it didn't. When I met her, I asked her first to take us back to what
1:45.8	life was like before the accident. Well, actually, 27-year-old Teresa wasn't that happy, really,
1:53.4	when I looked back at where I was in my life. I'd finished university in the year before or two
1:58.8	years before that, and I got a degree in fashion for textiles
2:02.2	and life kind of after that wasn't as easy as I thought so I went back to my parents didn't
2:07.8	really know what I was going to do and also at the same time I was really struggling with my sexuality
2:12.8	I kind of started to develop some feelings for a female friend and was really struggling with it and I hadn't spoken to anybody about it.
	...

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