A Crossroads

A few weeks before Ben’s third year at UVA, Andre was killed by a drunk driver while crossing a highway. He was 17. Ben was 20.

“That almost derailed me,” Ben said in a low voice. “I did not know how to deal with that. I had been able to suppress and compartmentalize my feelings and my emotions up to that point. Abuse. Anything.

“I just experienced so much trauma in my life,” he said. “I was just like, ‘God, why did you take him? You should have taken me. I’m not worth this. He is. What more do you want me to shoulder?’”

Ben was numb. He felt responsible for Andre’s death.

“I blamed myself for not putting us in a situation to be successful and to take care of him. But I was more upset with not being able to say goodbye,” he said with a choke in his voice, “because I literally had just seen him a couple of days before.”

And then, Williams had a vision.

“There was a moment – I can explain it – many people won’t believe it, but I believe it and I know it happened,” he recalled. In a conversation with God, “I said, ‘Man – at minimum – if I have a place in heaven, let him take my place because he deserved that.’

“I saw Andre ascend and he told me, ‘Everything is OK. You’re going to be fine. I am going to be looking down on you. This is goodbye.’”

And in that moment, Ben said he stopped crying and knew he needed to ask for help. His cousin lived with a local psychiatrist who had become a family friend. Ben asked if he would meet with him. “And Doc said, ‘Yes, we can meet at 7 o’clock on Sunday mornings,’” he said. They met for several weeks.

“Doc just sat me down. He was just talking to me about all if it – about trauma – about how my experiences led up to that moment. I was blaming myself, but it was just a culmination of everything I had gone through and how it finally came out. I’d been suppressing it for so long.