-Frozen Ground

Dad handed moms funeral arrangements completely to Clarke and Betty Lou in the days after the crash, and didn’t really get involved.  He asked me in the hospital if I wanted to go to the funeral, to say goodbye to mom, as he put it.  I must have said yes because a short time later I was fitted into a new suit jacket and shirt.  The pants of my little outfit had to be cut up the seam so they would fit over my bulky cast.  I thought that I looked pathetic and helpless. 

Then I was placed in a wheelchair and trundled out of the hospital to a limousine and we drove through the dead and frozen countryside to the Trinity Chapel.

Two solemn young men in suits whom I didn’t know lifted the wheelchair up the stairs at the front of the church then one of them maneuvered me up the isle toward my family, gathered in the pews near the front.  As I passed by, people stared at me with sad looks and stony faces.  It made me feel quite self conscious.

In one row, I saw my friend Greg Miller.  He smiled meekly at me and waved slightly, but then looked away as if he knew that by doing so he was being bad for not exhibiting the proper sorrow.  I smiled back at him.  It felt good to see him. 

Nobody else smiled.  Many were crying.  Mournful organ music flowed through the chapel.  I was wheeled to the front and stopped, sitting near the wall on the outside of the pew.  I felt exposed, and vulnerable.  I felt ridiculous and stupid looking in the bandage that covered my head like some kind of grotesque helmet.

Just in front of the wide steps leading to the pulpit was a drape covered cart.  On the cart was a closed casket.  It was light oak and very beautiful, for a casket.  It was the first time I had seen one, and it wasn’t at all what I had thought they were supposed to look like.  I had pictured, when my aunt had explained to me what it would be like at the funeral, that it would be one of the elongated hexagonal coffin looking ones like from the old western movies or Halloween parties.  This one looked like a nice piece of furniture, with elegant lines and understated accents – like mom. 

Inside and well concealed, she lay in a blue dress that Betty Lou had picked for her.  It was one that my mom had told her once that she thought had made her look pretty.  I wished then that I could have seen her once more, before they put her forever in the ground.  I am glad now that I didn’t, of course.

Clark surveyed the crowd that had amassed in the church.  The pews were full and the space behind them was packed with people standing with no place to sit.  The knot of people extended beyond the door and out into the parking lot where they stood straining to hear.  People wept and dabbed at their eyes intermittently.  In the tower, the bell tolled out slowly.  The tragedy of my mom had really brought out the community.  It was good to see how many people she touched in life.  I have heard others say that your funeral is the true mark of the life that we lived.  If this was true, my mom had a very rich life indeed. 

The organ bellowed out hymns while every one settled, then gradually merged into the signature ending chords of ‘ahhhhhh-meeeeen!!” and fell silent. 

For a few seconds the only sounds were intermittent sniffles and the occasional cough.  Clarke bowed for a moment to compose himself, and then lifted his head to the crowd that was bathed in the tinted sunlight that spilled through the stained glass windows of the little church.  He began to speak.

Clark spoke of our sorry mortal state and the need to accept god as a way to immortal life.  Bruce and Ken both sang songs proclaiming God’s greatness.  I don’t know if I bought any of it or not.  I don’t think I did.  I only stared at mom’s coffin.  Its image would return again and again to haunt my dreams as the symbol of her for many years.  It never has really left me. 

When the sermon was over they wheeled her out and placed her in a white hearse.  I was taken back to the limousine with my dad and we followed the hearse out of the lot and towards town.  They took her to a cemetery on the outskirts of Lincoln, and Clark spoke a little more at the gravesite service.  It was still cold, but the sun shined brightly.  Clark stood back as mom’s casket was lowered into a grave which had been excavated from the frozen soil.  Her final resting place, as it were.  The attendance was among the largest he had ever seen at a funeral.  People had surrounded the grave ceremony in a large tight crowd, and he had to speak loudly for all to hear his words.  He didn’t mind. 

Clark stood dutifully by as the last few people sauntered slowly away, some approaching him first to shake his hand and congratulate his sermon.  He felt good about it.  He had done his duty and helped a family and friend in need.  After awhile he was all alone standing beside the grave. 

Presently, workmen arrived and began to disassemble the grave service and fold up plastic chairs.   Clarke looked at the coffin.  He thought of mom, and what she had been like.  He thought about the pity of her death, and her kids, and dad. 

Then his thoughts turned toward his own kids and his own wife and his family.  He was acutely aware in that moment that he loved them all very much.

Nearby, a large statue of Jesus stood.  His head was bowed with an expression of solitude on his face.  His crucified hands down and held with palms facing out to show the wounds to his mortal flesh caused by his Roman tormentors.  He held them exposed - a gesture of comfort to those who would suffer their own wounds in this life.  Clark walked over to him and read the inscription on the statue’s base.  It was a familiar passage from John 3:16. 

It said:  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."  

Clark thought about that for awhile and touched the icy cold stone robe of the statue.  He didn’t always understand Gods plan, but he knew it was not his place to ask questions.  He just knew that there was a plan.  There had to be.  He knew mom believed in God and was a good Christian, and therefore had that guarantee of everlasting life, even through her tragic death.  Even so, it had been a long and sad few days.

Suddenly he felt tired. 

Emotion swelled up in him and with a sob, he bowed his head and began to cry at the base of the image of his Lord. 

Nearby, my mother was lowered into the frozen ground.

-God and Me

It had started to rain again as Kim and I drove through the outskirts of Lincoln coming back from our trip to Hebron, rolling over endless rises and drops as the road snaked through the countryside.  We had stopped at our childhood home along the way and looked around a bit before heading on.  Doing so brought back many different kinds of memories, some good; some not so good. 

Eventually we pulled up to a small church called Trinity Chapel situated up on a hill off of a small country road, and surrounded by farmland.  It was the church that my family had dutifully attended for so many years so long ago.  Clark had been our pastor, and the memories of his sermons came flooding back as we slowed to a stop.

Clark had a very ‘70’s new age kind of approach to sermons.  Often times he would play that acoustic guitar to the hymns the congregation sang.  He never spoke of God’s wrath, but only God’s love.  He was a humble man, and a servant of the Lord, and it showed in how he was as a person day to day. 

I was an acolyte there at the church in those days, along with my friend Kevin Anderson.  Our jobs were to walk up the isle on cue from our handler, usually Clare’s wife Sharon, solemnly holding the lit acolyte candles.  These were long brass rods with long wicks that ran through them that could be slowly extended as they burnt down to keep the small flame lit, and a bell shaped cup on the underside to extinguish candle flames.  Our job was to light all of the candles in the candelabras at the front of the church as the intro organ music played and put them out when the sermon was over.

I liked being an acolyte.  It was a fun part of the service.  We both took it very seriously.  We got to wear long purple robes and sat in the front pew during the sermon.  At the end, the organ music would play again, and we would watch Clarke until he nodded slightly to us, signaling us to go.  We would go back up, light the wick again, then extinguish all of the candles like we were suppose to.  Then we would turn and walk to the back of the church and Clarke would follow us.

I don’t recall when my family stopped going to the little church, or why.  It was a few years after the crash, and the memories of it all are a blur to me and I don’t know what they were, only that I left any formal relationship with God there the last time I left.

That day, Kim and I got out of the rental car and walked across the wet gravel that crunched under our feet as we made our way toward the entrance of the church for the first time in almost thirty years.  It had stopped raining long enough for us to not get wet as we walked up to the door.  A man who had been diligently pulling weeds from a small patch of soil on the side of the church observed us as we approached and stood when we got near.  We greeted him and told him who we were and that we had come to see the old church again.  He said his name was Ken McQueen and it turned out he was now the pastor of the church.

            We went inside and I was again transported back to my youth.  Above the pulpit I saw the large wooden cross that had been placed on the wall so many years ago.  It was the memorial to my mom that my dad had commissioned to be made.  It was probably 15 feet high and pointed at the tips.  In it’s center carved symbols of the trinity were placed in circular wooden blocks.  It was truly beautiful.  I told the Ken about it.

            “That was put there for my mom,” I said.  “She was killed in a plane crash back in ’76.  She was very active in this church.”  The pastor looked at me for a second, and then replied knowingly.  Apparently he had heard of me.

            “Yes…” he said.  “Yes it is.”

            Kim and I stared at the old cross for a minute or two in silence, both contemplating the meaning of it as well as the meaning of us being there at that moment.  The hall was musty with age and the rain.  I remembered the smell of it from some distant corner of my brain. 

            We chatted with Ken for a short time and he showed us around the old church.  We really didn’t have a specific reason for coming, but we both wanted to, and I was glad we did.  It was good to see the place again. 

After awhile, we said goodbye to Ken and his wife and left the church walking back to our car.  It began to rain again as we pulled out onto the road and drove away.

I felt as we drove away like there was a part of us still there.  Maybe even part of my mom, left over from her funeral.  And I felt like maybe God was happy to see me again, even if only for a little while.

- Return

Aunt Sandy sat next to me still sleeping in the hospital bed.  It was her watch.  The blinds on the windows were all drawn and the room was dark and quiet.  Every so often a nurse or two would come in to check on us of give medications.  We were all on antibiotics, and Rick was being given other medications for his head injury.  She wasn’t sure what they all were for, but didn’t really care, so log as they helped.

She would have stoked my hair, but a large helmet-like bandage was wrapped tightly around my head, securing the stitches that Bruce used to piece it back together.  On my leg he had put a large cast that extended from my inner thigh to my ankle.  Behind the protection of the dressings there were over 100 sutures, all across my head and down both the inside and the outside of the back of my leg.

            Sandy gazed woefully down at me.  She was heartbroken.  She had lost her big sister, and we had lost our precious mother, and were so badly hurt.  It was such a large burden.  She was almost glad that we didn’t have to know.  Not yet.

            She touched her belly.  Her own first baby was growing there, only a few months along.  She had told mom about the baby what seemed like such a short time ago and mom had cried with joy.  Sandy had been so excited that she would be able to introduce them some day.  That was all gone now.

Kim and Rick both had head dressings just like mine.  Sandy had gone back and forth to each of us that morning and spent time singing softly and telling stories to our un-hearing ears.  She had heard that that was a good idea.  Now she sat next to me stroking my shoulder so that I could at least feel the warm touch of another, and softly and sang a lullaby.  She did not want to leave us.

            A wave of motion from deep inside me gently rocked my body, ever so slightly.  Sandy stopped and looked at me intensely, staring at my closed lids.  Behind them, my eyes darted back and forth.  Somewhere beyond, I floated in a dark liquid-like world of darkness swirling around me.  It was now slowly beginning to drain, like if I were lying on my back under the water of a full bathtub and then someone pulled the plug.  The surface slowly lowed toward me until the interface between it and air beyond reached the tip of my nose. 

Without a ripple or sound my body slowly broke through, and emerging from the fabric of my dreams I opened my eyes. 

Sandy looked back at me for an excited second and gripped my hand, joy pouring into her heart.  I weakly smiled back at her, but did not speak.  I had no idea where I was or what I was doing there.

            “You wait here!” she said, barely able to contain herself, and shot to her feet.  A tear ran down her check.  She squeezed my hand and lifted it to her warm lips and pressed them against it, trembling.  She then laid it gently across my chest.

“Welcome back,” she whispered and hurried out of the room.

I stared up at the lifeless television bolted to the opposite wall and wished someone would turn it on.

Dad and Chris came to see me later on.  Chris had a new cast on his arm.  He said hey to me and then took off with some relatives.  He tried not to act sad, for my benefit.  Lots of other people came and went in the hours or days or weeks or whatever it was that passed.  I had no reference for time, but it seemed like it went on forever.  It was only shortly after I woke up that I asked the obvious question.  I was hurt and wanted my mommy.  When I cried for her to come at some point, dad gently took my hand and told me that she couldn’t come.  Confused, I asked why.

“Mommy died, son,” he said, his voice breaking as he did.

“Who killed her??”  I asked breaking into tears of my own, not even really comprehending what that meant.

“She died in the airplane,” dad said, almost with a whisper and looked away from my wide-eyed stare. 

My dad, throughout my life has never told me a lie.  So he couldn’t tell me then that everything would be alright.  His body hurt too, and he was still trying to make sense of it all.  He wasn’t so sure at that moment that it would be alright.

When he left and I was alone, I just lay there in stunned disbelief unable to comprehend the enormity of what dad told me meant.  I don’t think that feeling has ever really left me.

Kim and Rick still lay fast asleep and would be out for the next three days.  Kim seemed to come around quickly once she awoke and got over her shock.  I was sitting in my bed next to her watching TV and when I looked over, she had sat up and was quietly blinking at me.  I swung my cast leg off the bed and carefully made my way to her.  She smiled at me, and I held up a small stuffed dog someone had left near her so she could see.

A nurse came in and quietly moved me aside and looked Kim over, stroking her head.

“Randy’s teasing me.” Kim said with a smile.  I smiled back, and the nurse laughed and quickly turned to get a doctor.  My little sister had made it, and knowing that filled me with joy.

Rick wasn’t doing so well.  He had emerged from his coma a few days after Kim while I was out of the room, and when I saw him he seemed to be very slow and weak.  He couldn’t speak at all at first, and uttered strange words that only seemed to have meaning to him.  They said he’d be okay in a little while and I believed them, but I was impatient.  I wanted to play with my big brother again.

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.

-Going Home

Dr Bunting walked out of the emergency room at Hebron that morning, feeling drained.  Helen and Pembry had just gotten back from the hop to Lincoln and had found him in the cafeteria sipping a cup of badly needed coffee.  The family had made it, they had said.  For what they had done, they had done it as well as could be expected.  The family was safe, and that was what was important.  They would put the fiasco of the night behind them. 

Outside the sun was up.  It was a clear and beautiful winter day, crisp and cold and not a cloud to be seen.  The emergency room had been restored and cleaned up from the shenanigans of the early morning, and there was little sign that anything out of the ordinary had even occurred there.  The on-call staff had all gone home and the place was quiet, except for a couple of staff coming in to start the day.  No other emergencies had occurred last night which he was very grateful for.  He could rest soon, but now he needed to take care of one more duty.

He opened the door to the small exam room and turned on the light.  On the table, covered by a thin white sheet, mom lay naked on her back.  Beside the table, a plastic bag containing her clothes and effects had been placed.  He picked it up and looked in.  On top of the dirty and bloody blouse was a necklace that she had worn.  It was a small white porcelain medallion depicting a windmill drawn in blue in the Delft style.  He held it for awhile, then closed his palm around it and looked at her.  It gave him a glimpse into the person she had been, and he felt a pang of sympathy for her.  He would make sure it made it back to the family with her.

They would all live, he was pretty sure.  They survived the night with an almost total lack of care, except that given by the dad.  At least he was a doctor, and seemed to know for the most part what he was doing.  Doctor Bunting just wished they could have helped more.  It is very important to the staff to feel like they are doing something in cases like that.  God forbid one of those kids died there.  Some of the staff would have not been able to handle that, he knew.

He turned to the table and gently pulled the sheet back.  Mom lay before him, exposed and vulnerable, just as she was when she came into the world only thirty two years before.  He carefully examined her body, noting to himself all of the broken bones and bruises she had suffered.  It was very obvious that she had died immediately, and didn’t have to sustain the pain from all of her wounds. 

Most of her major bones were fractured, and cuts and contusions were present across her entire body.  She had been subject to an incredible force when she had been ejected from that plane.  The ghastly wound on her head was indicative of an impact by a flying object.  Probably some piece of the plane, he thought.  It had caused massive damage to her head. 

Mom was dead before she was flung through the windshield and out onto the field a split second later, when we impacted into the ground.  No one can say whether if she had been wearing her seatbelt she’d have survived.  For me, I try not to wonder about it.  I guess it doesn’t matter now.

Doctor Bunting concluded his examination then signed the death certificate.  He wrote the cause of death as a compound fracture of her skull.  It didn’t seem to do justice to the rest of what she had gone through.  Rather, it seemed like such a simple thing, like a bump on the head.  Someone else would have to fill in the blanks.  That wasn’t his job, as much as he’d have liked it to be. 

The family minister in Lincoln had told Helen that a funeral home up there would be sending someone down to recover her later that day.  Nothing more he could do.  He hung the clipboard on the end of the bed by the paper tag that was tied to one of her toes and pulled the sheet back over my mother.  He stretched and sighed deeply, rubbing his eyes.  It had been a long night.  He couldn’t think of a longer one in recent memory.  Hopefully he could get a little sleep before the next emergency. 

He walked from the room, flipping the light off as he went and closing the door behind him.  The dead body of the young woman who gave me life now was left all alone in the cool darkness.

A tan hearse pulled out of the garage at the Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home.  It made its way to the interstate and headed west toward York where the driver could pick up highway 81. Once there, it turned south, traveling several miles, past the road where my dad had stood, past the wreckage of our plane three-quarter miles away, past the monument to the pioneers, into Hebron.  It was the same exact route that Kim and I would follow thirty years later. 

A black vinyl body bag lying on a rolling stretcher was awaiting the driver when the hearse pulled up to the hospital.  They had said it was a woman killed in some kind of airplane crash.  Without much ceremony, the driver signed the release, placed the bag in the back of the hearse, and pulled away, bringing my mom the rest of the way home.

-Anguish and Salvation

Betty and Ken drove in silence toward grandma’s house in Cerritos.  Betty sniffed from the passenger seat and occasionally broke into full sobs, wracked with grief.  Ken found it hard to be stoic, but he had to.  Jeff and Darren sat silently in the back seat.

           Presently they pulled off the freeway and made their way into grandma’s neighborhood just off the 91 freeway, slowly working up the street and pulling up to the house.  Ken shut off the car.

            “Do you want me to do it?” he said. 

Betty clenched her jaw and shook her head, a fresh stream of tears welling from her eyes.  She was about to do the hardest thing she had ever done, Ken knew, but she had to be the one to do it.  She opened the door and got out.  Ken guided Jeff and Darren and they followed her to the door.  Betty produced a key and unlocked it quietly, and slipped in.  Ken followed and directed my cousins to sit in a couch in the front living room, while he and Betty made their way to the back of the house where grandma’s bedroom was.

            They made their way across kitchen where we had all sat yesterday morning for breakfast, a complete family.  Betty could still picture mom, how she had been sitting there and sipping her coffee, laughing and…alive.  The image brought a fresh wave of sobs which stopped her in her tracks for a full minute. 

Grandma’s room was off to the side of the kitchen.   Betty hugged Ken tightly for a few moments in the darkness of the kitchen, and then turned to walk into the room alone, closing the door behind her.  Ken could see the light that filled the small hallway leading to the room through the crack under the door.  He sat down at the table and listened to the murmur of Betty’s voice as she softly woke grandma up.  The murmuring became excited and suddenly the house resonated under grandma’s wail, followed by screams and hollering cries from her and from Betty. 

It was the worst sound Ken had ever heard.

He held his hands to his face and lowered his elbows to the table.  His body began to hitch and he started to cry too.

The emergency room staff milled about near the entrance of the ER, in anticipation.  Ron Craig had made all of the arrangements to receive us and Bruce had called some friends, too.  Many of the hospitals staff came in as soon as they heard.  Together, they had assembled their one of the most skilled group of medical staff any of them had ever seen.  Dad was one of theirs, and now they would be taking care of him, and his family.  No one else would die today, if they could do anything about it.  And they all believed that they could. 

The ambulances were on their way, and would be pulling in shortly.  People chatted softly and got charged up with cups of coffee, but by and large the facility was quiet.  It was a somber time, but a time to be as excellent as they all could be.  That emergency room, like all, had seen its amble share of horror and mayhem, but this one had hit a little too close to home, and every one of them knew that by the grace of God they had a chance to make it right.

The wail of the sirens approached from the south.  The morning sun was slowly beginning to brighten the landscape just beyond the glass doors of the ER.  Suddenly the ambulances roared in and screeched to a halt right outside. 

Bruce stood just inside waiting to receive us.  After a few moments, the doors suddenly burst open flooding the foyer with bright sunlight in front of the first stretcher, which happened to be the one I was strapped to.  Someone directed it to an empty bed and Bruce followed it in.  Rick and Kim were sent to two other rooms and Chris was immediately taken to get his arm X-rayed. 

Bruce was now my savior and he quickly recognized me.  He was a veteran ER doctor and trauma surgeon, but seeing me, his godson and his son’s best friend, like that - and still alive shocked him.  I was quickly transferred to the ER table and the stretcher was removed from the room.  He made a quick assessment of my injuries.  The deep gash in my leg was wide open and packed full of dirt and dried blood. 

Bruce saw that the sharp piece of steel had incised the pack of the knee and appeared to have sliced directly along the margin of my tibial nerve, which was now stretched and hanging out of the back of my leg, but seemed in tact.  It also sliced neatly right along the posterior artery of my leg, which had been packed deep into the wound but also appeared unscathed.  A fraction of an inch to one side and I would not have ever walked on that leg again.  A fraction of an inch to the other and I would have bled to death in minutes, long before dad even dug me out. 

He couldn’t have been more precise with the cutting if it had been done during surgery.  Luck, Bruce decided, was on my side that night.  But he shook off the thought and amazement.  Now he had to fix it - but that was what he did.  He fixed these kinds of things, and he was damn good at it. 

“Prepare an IV and ready OR one,” he told the ER nurse. “Prep him and get him up there stat!  I am going to operate right now.”

She departed the room and I was wheeled out to be prepped for surgery.  Bruce could see the activity in the other parts of the ER.  He could hear dad’s voice in one of the curtain draped beds and poked his head into the room from which it came. 

Dad was standing next to the bed of his little girl and was conducting himself more like a doctor than a patient.  He was acting in charge of and still trying to direct the care, which he was capable of doing Bruce knew, but his friend needed to be a patient now.  Bruce called to him and they connected eyes.  Dad was a mess, but he was still a doctor, and having a hard time being a patient.  Bruce motioned him to come over and they stepped into the brightly lit hallway between the curtained divided rooms of the ER.

“I’ve sent Randy to surgery,” Bruce said.  “I’m going to operate right away.  He’s going to make it.  Why don’t you sit down take it easy and I’ll get scrubbed.  Let them clean you up.”  Dad nodded and turned away.  Bruce was satisfied with that and went to the doctor’s lounge to get changed into scrubs for my surgery. 

A few minutes later he reemerged.  Before he went up to the operating room he went back to the ER to check on dad.  To his surprise, dad was still up and again trying to direct the care of the rest of the kids.  The staff was trying to calm him, but he was having a really hard time throttling down.  Now he was more in the way than anything else.  Bruce went to him and pulled him aside, speaking to him as gently but as firmly as he could.

“Jim, we’ve got them,” he said.  “You have to let us take care of them, and we are.  But we need to take care of you, too.”

Dad was physically exhausted, but there was determination in his eyes.

“We’ve got them…” Bruce said again and placed his hand on his friends shoulder.  Dad’s eyes softened.  Bruce wrapped dads arm around his neck and led him to an empty bed, bearing most of his weight, and caught eyes with a nurse who quickly hustled over and helped him lift dad onto the bed.  Dad lay back for the first time since he woke up a little over 24 hours ago.  He finally closed his eyes.  Bruce squeezed his hand. 

“We’ve got them.”  He said. 

Another nurse came into the room and they began to clean the wounds on dads face and head to prepare them for sutures.  He’d need quite a few.  Dad let out a long deep sigh and Bruce felt his body slump, completely exhausted.  But finally he could just lay there.  He had done more than he thought he would ever have to do that night, Bruce knew.  He was a hero, if that’s what you want to call it.  But the night was over.  Now he had to rest and let the other heroes do their jobs.

Bruce looked over his friend once more, and sadly shook his head.  A tear ran down dad’s cheek and he began to tremble.  What did he go through tonight, Bruce thought? 

Then he turned to go to the operating room and put me back together.