Chapter 11

They put us in one room of the pediatric ICU ward at Lincoln General hospital.  Kim, Rick, and I lay perfectly still, still deeply asleep in the beds, IV tubes dripping ringers lactate into our arms.  Chris went home the day after we got to the hospital after having his hand stitched up and having a cast placed on his broken arm.  He had a both bone fracture of his forearm.  He had also been given a bed of his own for a few hours to catch up on his rest.  What he needed most of all was sleep. 

He left with some of the multitude of relatives that had begun migrating to our house after learning of the tragedy.  It must have been a strange scene for Chris.  On one side my dad’s sister Mary Lou and her family were staunchly entrenched to protect my dad from the heated emotions coming from my mom’s side.  There was a definite unspoken rift among them, and Chris found himself caught up between it. 

He didn’t care, and just stayed out of it.  He constantly thought of mom in that field.  He wanted to forget, but every time he closed his eyes, he was back there and staring at her.  In some of his dreams, the little blanket that had covered her was gone, and she stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. 

He wanted her back.

             

         Dad took refuge in the hospital.  He had practically taken up residence there.  It served two purposes.  He wanted to be near us, but he also couldn’t deal with the family tensions.  He didn’t want to see their accusing stares, especially from grandma.  He found himself alive but people wanted answers as to why mom wasn’t.  But he had none to give.  So for awhile he just stayed away.

           Bruce took time from his rounds at the hospital every day to check up and keep an eye on his friend.  Dad was wrecked.  Bruce could see that while he was trying hard to be stoic about the whole thing, in reality the entire impact of the accident just hadn’t hit him yet.  Dad was trying hard to keep up his humor and be his old self, but Bruce had known him for too long.  Behind dad’s eyes was a pain the likes of which he did not like to see.  It was painful for Bruce just to watch.

          Bruce passed by our room and looked in.  Aunt Sandy, mom’s youngest sister, was sitting with the us.  Bruce shook his head a little.  He had done the best job he could putting us back together, as did the other docs.  Larry Ruth, one of the best plastic surgeons around, had worked on our head wounds, and with any luck we wouldn’t look like monster children with the scars that would form later on.  We’d all have to have plastic surgery to tone them down at some point, but that was a long way off.  The wounds he saw were awful and he thought again for the umpteenth time about how lucky all of us were to be alive at all.

           Still, he had seen head injuries like that before, and had also known the consequences.  Of course we were children and that was a major advantage for us.  The neurosurgeon, Lou Gollela, had told dad that our relative youth would probably mean we would recover, as the injuries didn’t kill us outright.  Lou was a stand up guy and wouldn’t lie to dad, but Bruce still understood that the regenerative power of youth aside, there was a chance that we all could be severely disabled mentally and require life long care just to get by.  He knew dad was strong, but he had real concerns whether he was strong enough to handle that.  Bruce didn’t know if ever he was put in the same situation if he could, either.

            Life can really be a bear, he thought.  He turned away and went back to his rounds.

           

Uncle Ken was trying to stay out of the fray at our home as well.  He and Betty, Jeff and Darren, and grandma had come to Lincoln first thing the next morning after the crash, and had moved into our house to help make the arrangements for the funeral and care for Chris.  Aunt Sandy and her husband, Jim had come out from San Diego, too.  Betty and Sandy were rotating between meetings with Clarke to plan the funeral, and sitting shifts in the hospital with Rick, Kim and me.  Dad’s sister Mary Lou and her family had come too as had my dad’s parents and were keeping things up at our house. 

Uncle Jim also seemed quite aware of the tension floating in the air between dad and mom’s families.  Everybody was just overcome by the whole thing.  Tragedy will do that, Ken thought. 

It was a morbidly strange reprieve when a few days later Uncle Jim suggested they go down to Hebron and see the crash site for themselves.  Ken jumped at the opportunity, if only to get out of the tense scene for a few hours.

         They loaded Jeff and Darren up into the car and they all drove out of Lincoln east down I-80 to Highway 81.  Just outside of Hebron, they turned up the dirt road where, unbeknownst to them, my dad had walked to the highway.  Soon they came to the pond we had flown over and the trees we had crashed through and guided the car over the dike and onto the field.

            The corpse of our wrecked airplane still lay there, like he scene of a crime.  People climbed around it, cutting out instruments and making measurements.  Ken found out by talking to one of them that they were from the NTSB and were conducting their standard investigation.  Ken and Jim walked off in different directions, surveying the scene.  It was beyond description and like nothing either had ever seen.  Dad had told him roughly where mom had been, and Ken walked in that direction. 

A small piece of waded up cloth near the nose of the plane caught his eye and he went over to it.  It was the small blanket that dad had covered her with.  Ken squatted down next to it and picked it up to examine it, realizing only then that it was stained with her blood.  He gently put it down.

            He stood and walked toward the wreckage, taking it all in.  Suddenly his eye was drawn to a small object, laying in between clods of tilled up soil.  It didn’t appear to be a piece of the plane.  He bent down and picked it up.  It was small, about the size of a silver dollar, with crimson and light colored strands, like corn silk.  He considered it for a moment and turned it over to look at it some more, when with sudden horror he realized what it was he held in his hands.  It was a piece of mom’s skull. 

The realization made the blood drain from his face.  He felt light headed and dizzy, like he should sit down, but his eyes would not move from the chunk of bone sitting there in his trembling hand.  He looked around and was suddenly horribly conflicted at what he should do.  Before he could think about it too much, he gently set the piece back on the ground where he had fond it and for a moment just stared at it. 

Under his breath he said a prayer for my mom, and then he turned around and walked away.  He didn’t tell me about that for 30 years, but when I heard I was glad that that he left it there.  That part of her was still there in the place where she died.   

To me, it just seemed fitting.