Flight to Heaven Page 4

  “You’ve been in an accident, Dale,” the doctor explained. “A plane crash. You just rest. We’ll take good care of you. You’ve had some serious injuries, but you’re going to be OK. You may have trouble remembering things . . . you’ve had a severe head injury . . . just rest now.”

  I felt as if I knew this man. But how? How could that be? And yet . . . his demeanor . . . his hair . . . his hands . . . his voice. I had seen him before, heard him before. I didn’t know how I knew him, but I did. I felt it deeply and with great conviction.

  I watched the doctor scribble notes on my chart. As he did, I felt such tenderness toward him. It seemed as if our roles had been reversed. I was looking at him with feelings a doctor would normally have for his patient. It was weird, something I had never experienced before. How do you explain love for someone you’ve never met? Not sympathy. Not only compassion. But love. A deep and inexplicable love.

  It was beyond me, I knew that.

  It was beyond human, I knew that too.

  I couldn’t remember the crash Dr. Graham had mentioned. I couldn’t remember anything. It was as if my mind had been taken away and a heart put in its place. A new heart. A real heart. A working heart. The way hearts were meant to work.

  I no longer saw the uniform a person wore, let alone desired the uniform for myself, the position for myself, the prestige for myself, the pay for myself. Somehow—don’t ask me how—I saw the person’s heart and felt enormous love and compassion. I wanted to know each person who crossed my path, from the doctors to the orderlies. I wanted to know their stories, their heartaches. I felt compassion for complete strangers, which was so unlike the person I was before.

  It was strange. No, it was supernatural. I don’t know what happened during those three days in a coma, but something happened that I couldn’t explain. A new way of seeing. Which was leading me to a new way of thinking and feeling. And ultimately to a new way of living.

  Is it the morphine? I wondered. Is it the trauma of the crash that is working its way mysteriously through my psyche?

  I didn’t know. I feared it might go away as my body healed. Only time would tell if the change was real . . . and if it was permanent.

  As the morphine wore off and I began to be weaned from stronger to weaker painkillers, my new sight remained intact, and my new love for people only increased.

  There had been a Copernican shift in my thinking. Before the crash, I was the center of my solar system. Everything orbited around me and for me. Now I was a lesser planet that orbited around something bigger than myself. And that something bigger was the one true God.

  Somehow I had been given His heart for people. Any people. All people. Friends. Family. Co-workers. Complete strangers.

  Maybe the shift wasn’t so much in my thinking as it was in my feeling. Not so much in my head as in my heart. Because it wasn’t an intellectual discussion I was having with myself. Or a theological one. It was personal. Deeply, profoundly, and unalterably personal.

  No, it wasn’t the morphine.

  The feelings were real, and they were permanent.

  With the decrease in drugs, there was an increase in pain. I felt like a burnt marshmallow, all puffy and hot. The chemicals in the fuel had burned my skin, and it was reddening, swelling, and peeling off.

  I tried moving, but it was terribly uncomfortable and painful. I was in so many casts and bandages I felt like a mummy. Hooked up to so many tubes and wires, I felt tied to my bed. It was claustrophobic. I had no idea what I looked like. If I looked anything like I felt, I was in deep trouble. The staff was very professional. The doctors never flinched when they examined me. The nurses didn’t wail like peasant women at the funeral of a child when they changed my bandages. And none of the orderlies gawked as if I were a sideshow at a circus.

  Then my brother Darrell came to visit.

  He took one look at me, rushed to the bathroom, and threw up. The retching. The heaving. The flushing. I’ll never forget it.

  And I’ll never forget thinking, Do I look that bad?

  Dr. Graham checked on me several times a day and he never threw up. He did, however, wonder how I had made it this far, looking at me as I lay there—a miracle of modern medicine and at the same time a mess.

  He tested my sight by putting a pen in front of my unbandaged eye and having me track it. He touched a bare patch of skin to see if I had feeling, asking what I may have remembered.

  Next to nothing.

  I did, however, remember my parents. I especially remember the day they came to the hospital dressed in their Sunday clothes. My dad brought me the Bible they had given me when I graduated from high school. I had hardly opened it since then. Now I couldn’t wait to read it. It surprised me how eager I was. I held it in my hand like a newfound treasure. After thumbing through it for a while, I put it down, eager to talk about something else that was on my heart.

  “How’s Chuck?” I asked.

  Neither said a word.

  “What about Chuck?”

  My dad walked to the window, looked outside, and pointed. “He’s buried out there. We just got back from the funeral.”

  “They were both killed,” my mom said.

  I kept that knowledge outside me, letting only a little in. It was too much. I couldn’t bear it. And I couldn’t bear breaking down in front of my parents. They told me Chuck had died in the ambulance. I was so stunned I couldn’t speak.

  “And if you could have seen the remains of the plane, you’d understand what a wonder it is you are alive.” Dad’s eyes welled up as he spoke. “God clearly spared your life.”

  How can it be? I thought. Why did I survive? The kid who just got his pilot’s license the month before. The kid with all the visitors, the cards, the gifts, the flowers. The kid basking in all the attention.

  I was the wonder kid, written about in the morning papers, marveled at on the nightly news, creating a stir at the hospital and sympathy in my friends. Chuck and Gene? They were dead.

  I don’t remember anything my parents said after that. I didn’t want to face the pain of it all, the guilt. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I knew that was all people wanted to talk about. The crash. And what a miracle it was that I survived.

  To me, it felt nothing like a miracle. It felt like a mistake.

  I had survived. Not Gene, the pilot that was better than me. Not Chuck, the pilot that was better than both of us.

  My remorse for Chuck was more than I could handle. For the first time since I met him, I worried about his eternal destiny. All the time I had spent with him, and I never told him about God’s only Son, Jesus. All the destinations we talked about traveling to someday, and I never talked to him about the one destination that mattered. The pain of that was unbearable. The drugs, the visitors, and the distraction of having my bandages changed gave me a brief reprieve But when I was alone, those thoughts came rushing back. And it was everything I could do to keep my head above those incriminating waters.

  Why was I having those feelings about Chuck? About the doctor. And the nurse.

  What was happening to me?

  5

  UNDER HIS WINGS

  When Dr. Graham came to visit again, I was more lucid. And more curious.

  “What happened to Chuck?”

  Dr. Graham was like a machine. He showed no emotion, no reaction at all. “He died in the OR. We tried for twenty minutes to resuscitate him.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “Blunt trauma,” Dr. Graham said matter-of-factly.

  “Was he the one in the emergency room . . . behind the curtains?”

  Dr. Graham nodded.

  So he didn’t died in the ambulance as my parents thought.

  “The other man was pronounced dead at the scene. He died on impact.”

  I closed my eye. I felt the breath leave my lungs, the very life in me escaping. That was the end of his visit, the end of my day, a dark and lonely end.

  On another visit, on another
day, my parents were with the doctor. He was going to give me my prognosis and wanted them there for support.

  “When are you going to let me out of here, Doc?”

  He looked at my parents, then back to me. “Dale, it looks to us at this time that you’ll be hospitalized for at least eight months. You have some pretty severe injuries. You’re going to require extensive specialized rehabilitation. And we want to keep a close eye on you for head and other internal injuries.”

  Whether it was faith, youthful enthusiasm, or some genetically ingrained stubbornness, I can’t say, but I felt emboldened and blurted out: “I’ll be flying over that monument as pilot in command one year from the day of the crash!”

  No one smiled. No one encouraged me. They just stared at me in silence. And then, saying their polite good-byes, they left.

  Later, a copy of the LA Times from the day after the crash found its way onto my bed. The front-page headlines read: “PLANE CRASHES INTO AIR MEMORIAL. TWO MEN DIE, ONE CRITICAL.”

  I scanned it with my good eye: “Seconds after taking off from Hollywood-Burbank Airport, a twin-engine plane crashed into a cemetery’s memorial to aviators Friday morning, killing two men and critically injuring a third. Dead were the pilot, Charles Burns, 27, of Lakewood, and copilot, Eugene Bain, 38, of Fresno. A passenger, Dale Black, 19, of Los Alamitos was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Burbank in critical condition.”

  Beside the article was a photograph of the monument we had hit. The ornate cubical structure with the dome on top was built as a memorial to fallen pioneers of aviation history. And there, at the base of that memorial, was what was left of our plane. Our Piper’s mangled wings were lying on the ground, folded one over the other.

  Other newspapers found their way into my room, describing the monument and giving details of the crash. The cement and marble memorial was seventy-five feet high and fifty feet by fifty wide. The plane impacted the dome just below the top, at the seventy-foot mark. Judging by the gouge left and the damage to the aircraft, the FAA estimated the speed at impact to be 135 mph. The word used in one of the articles to describe the condition of the aircraft after the crash was disintegrated.

  On the wall above the wings of our plane was the inscription and name of the monument: PORTAL OF THE FOLDED WINGS.

  Aerial photograph taken within hours of the crash just visible are shorn-off treas and the impact site on the Portal of the Folded Wings’ dome.

  Photo taken and used with permission by Harold Morby.

  A closer view of the crash, showing a fire truck, amergency persinnel, and the Piper Navajo dabris. Photo taken and used with permission by Harold Morby.

  The plane that had been so vibrant with power, humming life, promise of adventure, was now on the ground like a featherless baby bird fallen from its nest. Frail. Broken. Irretrievably broken.

  As I was sifting through the emotional wreckage, picking up the pieces, trying to make some sense of it all, trying to find some peace, two visitors came and tossed what I had gathered to the ground.

  The men were pilots, employees of the company that owned the Navajo. They came, ostensibly, to check on me, to see how I was doing. I had trouble remembering them, but they clearly knew me. The conversation quickly turned to a small newspaper that had apparently blamed me for the crash. The reporter, they told me, said that since I was in the temporary seat behind the other two pilots, I was sitting next to the fuel selector valves. And since the plane had lost power after takeoff, they told me my feet probably moved against the valves, closing them, and causing the engines to lose power. The logical blame pointed to me, they said.

  I was so taken aback by the accusation that I couldn’t respond. I pretended not to understand, pretended to be drowsy from the medication, and they left without my making a rebuttal. In my mind, none of it seemed logical. But my mind wasn’t working all that well. What if it was true? What if I had been to blame?

  No one could have said anything more devastating. I could live without playing sports. I could live without walking. I could live without flying. But this? I couldn’t live with this.

  At the time, I was living with a tremendous amount of physical pain. I could feel the gash across my eyes, feel the stitches in my eyelid, feel the pull of stitches with the slightest movement in my face. My head felt as if it were going to explode. My whole body ached. My back hurt with every breath. My left shoulder throbbed. My left ankle shot skewers of pain up my leg. And I would be that way for the next eight months? The worst was the thought that I was somehow responsible.

  If God spared me, was it for this reason? To be summoned before a jury of my peers? Brought before them not to be celebrated but shamed?

  A bystander took this photo of his son next to the mangled cockpit. Two years later Dale met the boy and was given the photo.

  However severe the physical pain, the emotional pain was worse. Overwhelmed by both, I lay motionless, staring at the ceiling, my mind wandering in a daze amid the wreckage not only of shattered dreams but a shattered faith.

  My father’s words came back to haunt me: God clearly spared you.

  From what? Death with dignity?

  A war raged between my mind and heart. Had God spared me or sentenced me? Was I sentenced to life without parole, imprisoned by guilt, shame, humiliation, and accusation?

  No. A merciful God had not spared me.

  A merciful God would have let me die. Wouldn’t He?

  The visit of those two pilots put me in a bad place. But it was only a place I visited; I didn’t dare stay there. In my heart, the deepest part of me, I knew that a loving God had truly spared my life.

  Another part of the reason I didn’t stay there was the wonderfully cheerful hospital staff. I had become something of a celebrity and they seemed to enjoy it. They seemed to enjoy me too, which made a huge difference in my mood, which went up and down on an almost hourly basis, tracking with my pain and whatever news happened to find its way into my room.

  The days that followed brought with them a revolving door of visitors. “You’re worse than a celebrity, Dale,” one of the nurses quipped. “Who are all these people, anyway?”

  People I knew from high school showed up to see the miracle that survived the unsurvivable. People I knew from the college I had been kicked out of came by to see what had become of me. Lots and lots of people came. It was all a blur.

  It seemed that in every conversation I would eventually hear the same words: “You’re so lucky to be alive, Dale.” I recoiled from the words. It was amazing to have survived what the FAA called a non-survivable airplane crash. But was it really luck? It couldn’t be. There was something more to this than luck. God had chosen to spare my life. I knew it was an absolute miracle. Beyond that, I didn’t know.

  Through the many friends and acquaintances that stopped by, I had a virtual mirror held up to me, reflecting just how bad things were inside my brain.

  One day a group from my high school came by, reminiscing about old times. They talked about one of the teachers we’d had. Everyone in the room laughed, bantering back and forth. Everyone but me, that is. I stared at them, bewildered. Who are they talking about? And who are all the other people they speak of so casually, like I should know them?

  I couldn’t even remember most of the people who were visiting. I not only forgot their names, I forgot them. I didn’t know who they were. They were complete strangers.

  And yet to hear them laugh and carry on, you’d think we were best friends. Are we? Could it be that I have forgotten who my friends are?

  Later, others from college dropped by, and the same thing happened. After everyone left, I stared at the walls, wondering who I was. My eyes drifted to the IV tethered to my arm. The steady drip made me feel like it was happening to my brain. All the memories, all the people I knew, my friends, even my close friends, were steadily dripping out of my mind. Will I continue to forget? Am I losing my mind?

  I was aware of my surroundings. I wasn’t crazy. I was coh
erent. I could think. I could follow people’s conversations, engage in conversation. I just had these gaping holes in my memory.

  And by gaping, I mean so big you could drive an 18-wheeler through it.

  Visitors continued to come by. I had survived. Their prayers had been answered. And now they were there to cheer me on to recovery. I tried to concentrate. I tried to remember their faces, their names, what they meant to me. Then I stopped trying to make sense of all the remember-when stories, all the good-natured kidding, all the comments they thought would lead to conversation. But that led nowhere. I did a lot of smiling and nodding, as if I understood. A lot of grimacing too, hoping they would see the pain I was in, politely excuse themselves, and leave.

  My parents sensed my frustration. “Don’t worry, Dale, you’ve had some slight head injuries. It’s probably just temporary,” they said, trying to console me. But I knew my parents always looked on the bright side.

  I knew what was going on. I knew I wasn’t just suffering from slight head injuries. And I was afraid it wasn’t temporary.

  Even though my injuries were serious, no one told me how serious. Their initial assessment was that I had broken a few bones.

  Well, I might have only one good eye, but I could see that it was more than just a few broken bones. What isn’t broken? I wondered. Why isn’t anyone telling me the truth?

  I could take the truth. What I couldn’t take was the fear of not knowing how bad it was.

  My room overlooked the Ventura Freeway, and with my one good eye I watched the cars speed by. I watched and then I wept. I wept for the people inside the cars.

  I couldn’t understand it, but those people mattered to me. Each and every one of them mattered. Even though I didn’t know their names. The type of car they drove didn’t matter. My head wasn’t turned if it was a Porsche. And it wasn’t turned away if it was a Rambler. None of that mattered anymore. It was the person behind the wheel that mattered. Their final destination mattered. Their spiritual destination. And it mattered like nothing else I had ever experienced.