Authors: Dale Black

Tags: #Afterlife, #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail

Flight to Heaven (5 page)

BOOK: Flight to Heaven

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The words
if he survives
resounded in my parents’ thoughts over the days ahead, echoing in the empty moments when they were alone. Walking the hallways of every waking hour. Haunting the stillness at night. Staring at them in the morning.

If he survives . . .

NEW EYES FOR A NEW DIMENSION

For three days I was in a coma
. I was watched around the clock, nurses shuffling in and out at all times of the day and night to check my vitals, change my bandages, see if the stitches were holding, if the swelling was under control.

My parents were at the hospital much of the time. My grandparents came, my brothers, my aunts and uncles. Friends from school. Co-workers at the company. They prayed, they cried, they worried, and they wondered.
Would I survive? Would I be paralyzed? Would I be brain damaged? Would I walk again? Talk again? Play sports again?

After three very difficult days, of which I had no memory, I regained consciousness. It was early morning of the fourth day, Monday, July 21.

I awoke slowly, groggily, with a strange sensation in my head. It was the sound of glorious music dying away, as if I had just heard the last note of a crescendo that was resonating in the air after it had been played. Now other sounds pushed themselves into the foreground—the sound of rubber-soled shoes scurrying dutifully about in the hallway, of people’s voices muffled outside my door, of wheels rolling over linoleum.

I tried to remember where I was. I had a dim memory that it was a hospital, but no memory of what had put me there. Pain smoldered throughout my body, although the drugs kept it from flaring up and raging out of control. It also kept me from thinking straight.
What happened? How did I get here?

A nurse in a pair of those rubber-soled shoes, with one of those muffled voices, quietly stepped onto the linoleum that led to my bed, careful not to disturb me. She smiled while she checked the IVs. I tried to speak, but my voice was garbled. And when I did speak, I felt this tearing sensation as if my face were being ripped open.

The nurse looked at me, studying the reactions in my good eye. “Hello, Dale,” she said. “How do you feel? Can you hear me?”

This is hard to explain, but I felt an immediate and overwhelming love for this woman. It wasn’t romantic. Nothing like that. It was deeper than that, purer. I wanted to talk with her, to thank her for helping me, but I couldn’t. Most of all, I wanted to encourage her by telling her just how much God loved her.

Much of my face and all of my head were covered in bandages. I had stitches in my right eye, and the lid itself had been stitched shut. I could see clearly out of my left eye, but something was different.

The first words I remember saying were “What happened to my eyes?” I wasn’t referring to the stitches or the bandages. Even though only one eye was working, it seemed as if I was looking out of both of them. I was seeing with what seemed to be two perfectly healthy eyes. But they were not only healthy, they were strengthened somehow. Nothing looked the same.

It felt as if I were seeing a new dimension, like 4-D, another level of reality. It was as if I had seen the world through a filter all my life, like a film had been over my eyes all these years and now that film was removed. In a very real sense, I was seeing with new and strengthened eyes.

That’s how I was seeing this nurse. I had never met her, didn’t even know her name. It was not a human love, I was sure of that. It was God’s love. I felt as if I were a vessel through which His love was flowing.
Does she know Jesus?
was the first thought that came to my mind. I had met a lot of women in college, and I wondered a lot of things about them. I thought the same things any nineteen-year-old boy would think. Thoughts about appearance. Thoughts about personality. Thoughts about sense of humor. But thoughts about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and whether they knew Him? It wasn’t even on my radar screen.

The next thoughts were
What if she has an accident and dies? What then? Will she go to heaven?

I couldn’t remember ever having thoughts like this about people. It was strange. Again, it was like seeing in a new dimension. Like watching a 3-D movie with unaided eyes, then suddenly putting on the 3-D glasses. Something indeed had happened to my eyes. And it was infinitely deeper than the gash. If anything, the gash I experienced was severing the veil that separated the physical dimension from the spiritual.

When she left the room, I reflected on the encounter.
What is happening to me? Why am I . . .
But before I could think anything else, the drugs lulled me back to sleep.

I woke to a doctor standing beside my bed. “Good morning, Dale. I’m Dr. Graham. How are you doing today?”

The same feeling came over me. I felt enormous love for this stranger standing beside me.
Why?
I wondered. I had never met him before. Didn’t know anything about him, except what he just told me.

“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?

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.

BOOK: Flight to Heaven