The calls came when I was at lunch two years ago. I returned to the office to find my voice mail full of urgent messages from California. First from my older sister, Gioia. She was breathless and in a hurry, jumping into her car to drive to the hospital in Long Beach.
“Ricky,” she said, “we need your help. There’s been an accident. Mike was in a plane crash. Right at the airport. He’s the only survivor. Five other guys died. He’s being rushed to the E.R. Please pray. Pray.”
My mom was the next to leave a message: “Honey, I don’t know if you heard but it’s Mike. He was in a plane crash at the airport in Long Beach. I’m heading down there now. He survived. I don’t know how he survived but it’s very, very serious. We need your prayers. Poor Diane and the girls.”
I listened to the messages with a sinking feeling. Mike is my younger sister Diane’s husband. He’s a big boisterous guy with bottle-brush blond hair, a loud voice, a louder laugh and thighs the size of tree trunks. His idea of fun was to ride his bike 100 miles before breakfast.
It was impossible to imagine that anyone so physically fit could be hurt. He was wired and funny and full of energy. When he led grace at family dinner, his voice could be heard all the way down the block.
I felt so helpless. I wanted to be with Diane and her three girls in the hospital waiting room, getting constant updates. I wanted to hug them, talk to them. I wanted to hear it straight from a straight-talking doctor coming out from some swinging E. R . doors. Was Mike going to live?
I got Gioia on the phone. “They were on a business trip,” she said. “They took off from the airport in a small plane. It crashed right after takeoff. The plane was in flames. When they put out the fire Mike was the only one alive.”
He was badly burned. Doctors didn’t know yet about brain damage, internal damage. Two of the guys on the plane were not only colleagues but really good friends, Mark and Jeff.
I put down the phone and rocked in my chair, leaning forward, gripping my stomach, hugging it, trying to hold the pain in. There was no prayer for a moment like this except, “Nooooo.” I couldn’t find anything else.
I called my wife, Carol. “I have this feeling that Mike’s going to make it,” I said, wanting to reach for hope. Grasping at straws. “He’s really strong. He’s got a strong faith, a strong will to live.” Who was I spinning things for? It didn’t take away the pain.
Mike and Diane’s friends gathered at the hospital. Many of them were mourning Mark and Jeff. All they could focus on, for now, was the one who survived. He had to make it. Calls, e-mails went back and forth. The doctors worked on Mike all night. They gave him 40 pints of blood and ran him through a battery of tests.
There is a litany of medical terms to classify a patient’s state, putting into dry, clinical language what is too horrible to describe: “The patient is in critical condition…serious condition… critical but stabilized.”
Around midnight my “Nooooo” changed to a “Please, God, please….” The doctors fed us bits of information. No apparent brain damage. His heart, kidneys and liver were all right. There was hope for his lungs, even after all that noxious smoke.
But second- and third-degree burns covered over a quarter of his body. Once he was stabilized he would have to go to a burn unit for the painful scrubbing of old scarred tissue and grafting of skin.
I felt greedy praying “Please, please” in this terrible disaster. Five good men had been killed, leaving behind wives and children, empty desks, empty beds. “Please, God, can’t some good come from this? Can’t there be one ray of hope? Don’t give up on Mike.”
An ambulance rushed Mike to the burn unit. Now a new vigil took over, people sitting by his bed in between his treatments. “He’s in a medically induced coma,” Diane explained. “That’s the only way they can scrub the skin. Otherwise it’s too painful.”
“Does he look okay?” I asked. A stupid question. But I wanted to know, How is he going to be? Will he still be Mike of the booming voice and the dinner-table prayers? Where was God in all of this? What was going on inside Mike’s head?
“He thrashes around,” Diane said, “but he does that when he sleeps.”
I flew out to see him, bringing my pocket version of the New Testament and Psalms. His head was bandaged, his right arm and right leg had swaths of gauze that had to be changed every time they scraped off the skin. His eyes were closed, an IV drip in his arm, a feeding tube in his nose. He was a living, breathing miracle.
But could he hear me? I touched his free hand. “Hi, Mike,” I said. “It’s Rick. Here are a few Psalms.” I flipped through some pages and read: “For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up…” His eyes opened, but didn’t focus. Then closed again.
For five weeks he stayed that way, in some land between life and death, slowly being healed. Then finally he woke up. He looked into his wife’s eyes and asked her what had happened. What accident had he been in?
“I’ll tell you when you’re ready,” Diane said. “Are you ready now?”
He paused, shook his head. Then had one question. “Was it my fault?”
“No,” she said.
Mike was moved to a rehab hospital for physical and occupational therapy. He worked in earnest, walking, stretching, lifting weights, doing puzzles, talking. Daily he was regaining his strength. He was becoming the Mike we remembered, intense, energetic, loud. But there was a sweetness too, a new appreciation for life.
Friends visited him. Friends called and emailed. But did he notice that two of his closest friends never came? Was he aware of who was missing?
Two and a half months after the accident Mike was finally ready to come home. Diane sat with him and told him the story, the plane that rose in the sky and fell to the earth. The fire, the quick work of EMTs who saved his life, the deaths of five men. The time in the E.R., the burn unit. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
“Do you remember any of this?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t even remember being in the burn unit. All I remember are two telephone calls from friends. They both said almost the same thing, that they were all right. I wondered why they were telling me that.”
“Who?” Diane asked.
“Mark and Jeff. They called.”
It made me think of all those prayers we had said, from my first “Nooooo” to the Psalms I read at his bedside. No, he had no memory of them, but the spiritual world, God’s massive support network, had taken charge.
Two friends who were now closer to the realm of angels had offered deeper reassurance than any of us could have given. Lost to us, he was borne up by the world beyond.
Mike is back biking again—not exactly 100 miles before breakfast, but he looks pretty amazing these days. He laughs, he sends me funny e-mails and inspiring messages. He still prays with a voice that can be heard down the block.
Last summer he prayed at the dedication of a beachside memorial for Mark. He feels the loss of his friends intensely—he is an intense guy—but he knows he will see them again. That he was saved and they died is still a mystery. But that God has been with them all he has never doubted. Neither have I.
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