Imagine being in your car, peacefully driving, when suddenly something rock-hard shatters your windshield, hits you and breaks nearly every bone in your face. It turns out that the "weapon" was a frozen turkey, hurled from the rear window of a speeding car by a teenage college student out for a joyride with friends.

That's what happened last November to Victoria Ruvolo, a 44-year-old office manager, on a road in the far eastern town of Riverhead on Long Island. She could have been killed, and she could have had brain damage. Surgeons had to rebuild her face, using metal plates and screws. But remarkably, she recovered and within a few months was back on her own and working again.

But that's not the real story. It's what happened the following August in court that makes this a tale to remember. The boy who threw the turkey, 19-year-old Ryan Cushing, who suffers from impaired vision, was indicted on a first-degree assault charge and could have faced up to 25 years in prison. And then Ruvolo stepped in.

She saw Cushing for the first time coming out of the courtroom. He stopped, choking and crying as he tried to apologize to her.

"For an intensely emotional few minutes, Ruvolo alternately embraced him tightly, stroked his face and patted his back as he sobbed uncontrollably," wrote a New York Times reporter. As the young man kept saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it," the woman he could have killed repeated, "It's OK. It's OK. I just want you to make your life the best it can be."

Then, at Ruvolo's insistence, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain for Cushing, giving him six months in jail and five years' probation instead of 25 years in prison.

One man later said that in his 30 years as a prosecutor "he had not seen such a forgiving victim."

Much has been written about forgiveness. I, too, have devoted time and words to sharing the process I had to go through to be able to forgive the murderer of my son and his wife. I would be asked: Is forgiveness possible when crime shatters a family? It took time, but the day came when I could honestly say yes.

In that time I learned much about what makes forgiveness so difficult. In a word: anger.

I soon saw the light and the truth of what anger could do to me, and that underscored the need to forgive. I was giving up freedom and the ability to get on with good work for that phony, but popular, belief that we are justified in wanting to "get even."

And so I learned that forgiveness begins with letting go of the anger. When this is done, freedom returns. We can go to the next stage of forgiveness, which is to pray for the one who has hurt us and remember that this person is also a child of God.

I think this is what Ruvolo also believed.

The New York Times actually wrote an editorial about Ruvolo, titling it "A Moment of Grace." Their words were touching:

"Given the opportunity for retribution, Ms. Ruvolo gave and got something better: the dissipation of anger and the restoration of hope, in a gesture as cleansing as the tears washing down her damaged face, and the face of the foolish, miserable boy whose life she single-handedly restored."

What a gift she gave! God bless her!

Antoinette Bosco is a columnist with Catholic News Service.