Singer Brandy is reflecting on the fatal 2006 car crash l that killed 38-year-old woman Awatef Aboudihaj in her newly released memoir, Phases.
“It was just a drive, another day traveling the pale concrete veins of the 405. How many times had I coasted along this mundane stretch of freeway?” Brandy, 47, wrote in the book, published on Tuesday, March 31. “But all familiarity was shattered on a chilly December morning in 2006. There had been no warning. No shiver down the spine. No flicker in the atmosphere hinting at what was to come.”
Brady wrote that her “mind was clear” and she was “focused” just before the devastating accident.
“Still, I couldn’t see the danger in time. I didn’t see the car ahead of me strike the vehicle in front, didn’t register the sudden chain reaction until my world was being split into two halves: before and after,” she wrote, adding that her memory of the accident “exists in fragments.”
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Brandy recalled emitting a “paralyzing scream” before experiencing “deafening, impossible silence.”
Initially, Brandy thought the accident was her “fault,” but a bystander told her otherwise. She also recalled Aboudihaj being pulled out of one of the other cars.
“She was rushed to the hospital with sirens wailing into the distance. She passed away the next day,” Brandy wrote, explaining that she felt “unimaginable grief” in the wake of Aboudihaj’s death.
“Guilt gripped my throat, squeezed harder and harder until breathing became a conscious effort,” she continued. “It was an accident — a tragic convergence of circumstance and human error. But a woman had lost her life. And I had lived.”
Brandy wrote that as a result of her survivor’s guilt, she hid from the world after the accident.
“I no longer felt I had the right to continue living my life, or even to experience fleeting glimmers of joy,” she wrote. “The woman who had died would never again feel sunshine on her face or hold her children close. Who was I to smile? To sing? To exist in a world where she no longer could?”
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The victim’s family filed a $50 million lawsuit against Brandy in the wake of the accident, which was ultimately settled outside of court.
“An investigation eventually concluded that this tragic alignment of circumstances wasn’t the result of my negligence,” she wrote. “Claims were settled. No charges were filed against me. But by then, the guilt had already calcified in my soul, hardening into something permanent and unmovable.”
For a long time, Brandy said she couldn’t forgive herself. However, after several talks with her therapist, she was eventually able to give herself some grace.
“The grief never left. But it softened,” she wrote. “It made room. I stopped asking it to go away.”
Phases is out now.
