Authors: Dale Black

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

Flight to Heaven (11 page)

My faith was doing handstands. I could hardly contain myself. That’s when I prayed,
God, I’m going to get to know You better. I’m going to work with You to get the job done that You have in mind for my life. I don’t know what Your plan is exactly, but I have a feeling it’s something special. I’ll tell You this: I’m going to stick close enough to You to find out exactly what it is.

SURVIVING THE UNSURVIVABLE

It was late November.
I had to get out—out of the backyard, out of the house, out of town. I asked a friend to take me to the Portal of the Folded Wings in Burbank.

I had to see it again, this time up close and personal. I had to see the place where my pilot friends had died and where I had lost so much of my life, so much of my memory. Maybe something would come back. An image. A feeling. A missing piece to the puzzle my life had become.

We drove to North Hollywood, where Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery was located, just off the flight path of Runway 15. After we parked, I eased into the wheelchair, and my friend wheeled me to the memorial.

The closer we got, the larger it loomed.

The larger it loomed, the smaller I felt.

It was massive, a huge cube of a building topped with a colorful dome. As we approached it, I saw a large bronze plaque that read:

WELCOME TO THIS SHRINE OF
AMERICAN AVIATION.
THE PLAQUES HEREIN MARK
THE FINAL RESTING PLACE
OF PIONEERS IN FLIGHT.

On each side there were sculpted cherubs and female figures lifting their hands skyward. It felt strangely comforting, this lifing of hands. My prayers to God were for clarity about the crash. They were questions I raised to Him. I came empty-handed. Would I leave the same way? I didn’t expect all my questions to be answered, but I expected to leave with something.

We looked at the dome. The place of impact was still being repaired. I didn’t say much that day, but I did a lot of thinking.
The FAA classified our accident as non-survivable.

At that moment I asked God,
Did I survive only to find out that I caused the accident, the deaths of Chuck and Gene? Will that be the outcome, once the investigation is complete? Do I need to learn to live with the guilt and the shame? How can I live with it? How can I move on? Was it a blessing that I lived, or a curse? Perhaps the investigation will reveal I wasn’t to blame, I wasn’t at all responsible. Perhanps the crash was caused either by mechanical or pilot error.

As we got closer, I saw another plaque identifying the Italian-American artist who created the sculptures and ornamentation:

Frederico Augustino Giorgi
PORTAL SCULPTOR
1878-1963

I later learned the sculptor considered this work to be his masterpiece. It was beautiful in one sense. In another sense, it was grotesque—a hulk of a building standing so stoically; an immovable object that had snatched our plane out of the sky and threw it to the ground. An unchanging structure that forever changed three lives. Without apology or the slightest show of remorse.

We went inside to see plaques of remembrance for the fallen pioneers of aviation. The ashes of fifteen of them were buried there. Sensing I needed time to process my thoughts, my friend left me alone. I looked up to see that the dome was a mosaic of stars—a portal to the heavens. All of my thoughts were drawn there, all my empty-handed prayers.

The questions that had hounded me before, the ones I thought had been held at bay, came back at me in a vicious assault.

Why did
I
live? Why me and not the others? Why, God?

I sat beneath the dome of stars, wondering with my questions, waiting for His answers.

Was I spared because God had a special plan for me?
Is that true, God? Do You? Did You save me so I could serve You? God, almost all of my friends have left me. I am no longer popular. I’m the guy in the wheelchair who survived “that crash.” I can’t play sports. I can’t remember what was said in class, no matter how hard I try. How am I going to do this, God? How am I going to go through life with this limp body and this lame brain?

I paused, waiting for something, unsure what it was. Was I waiting for one of the angels on the shrine to come down and explain it all? Was I hoping for heaven to open and spill out the answers like gum balls? Was I waiting for a sign? A word? An audible voice? An inner conviction? I had no idea. Not even a clue.

But I was there. I showed up. And I was there with my one hand raised to heaven. I was not one to beg, but I was begging.
I’ve never known loneliness before, God. Is this a season in my life when You want it to be just You and me? If so, just say so. I’ll be fine if that’s what You want. Is that what You want? Please, do something, say something. Anything. Just don’t leave me alone.

During those weeks I made many visits to the memorial, by myself mostly. Sometimes I would get in the car and drive there at night. The cemetery was closed at night, and I would drag my bent and broken body to the fence, crawl under it, casts and all, in order to spend a few hours alone there. I prayed there, flat on my back, looking up at the dome. I thought there, trying to dredge up something from my subconscious. And I cried there. For Chuck. For Gene. For the robust person I once was. For the shell of a person I was now.

Dale and the Piper Aztec that he and Chuck flew regularly before the crash. Photo taken November 1969.

I think I used the memorial as a focal point to help get my memory back.

Doctors who worked on me talked with me only briefly about my memory loss. Dr. Graham didn’t seem as concerned with it as with the other losses I had suffered. Maybe it was because he felt he could help with the ankle and the shoulder and the face but not with the memory.

Doctors explained that there are different types of amnesia. The two most common are retrograde and anterograde. The former type involves memory loss before the cause, such as a motorcyclist not remembering driving his motorcycle prior to his head injury. The latter has to do with the inability to store new memories after the cause, such as the motorcyclist not being able to recall his hospital experiences or conversations with family and friends who visited him there.

Posttraumatic amnesia, which affects memory before and after head trauma, can be transient or permanent, depending on the severity of the brain damage. Some of my memory loss has proven to be permanent, some of it transient.

The transient losses return at the oddest times and in the oddest ways, with no particular pattern. The memories are random.
When
they return and
why
they return are also random.

The depth and duration of this kind of amnesia are related to how severe the injury is. Often people with head trauma may remember events, but they will not remember the faces of the people in the events. Another type of amnesia, called source amnesia, is when people can recall certain information, but they don’t know where or how they obtained the information.

Since different parts of the brain store different types of memories, the more pervasive the damage, the more types of memories are affected. All this to say I suffered a lot of damage and as a result experienced a lot of memory loss.

At the memorial that November day when my friend took me, I still had no memory of the crash. No memory of the three days in a coma. There were only sketchy memories of people and events in my past. There were no words from heaven. No answers. But it was important for me to be there. I’m glad I went. Something had drawn me there—it was almost a gravitational pull. I felt as if I were some small, inconsequential planet orbiting closer and closer to the sun, and the closer I got the more of me was being burned away.

Somehow—in ways I can’t understand, let alone express—it felt good. Cleansing. Cathartic. And in some way necessary.

I would be back.

And I would keep going back until the shrine gave up the secret it was keeping.

Or until I was burned away completely.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS

The crash was almost six months
behind me now. I had faithfully made the pilgrimage to Dr. Graham’s office more times than I could count. They were mostly routine visits. Routine X rays. Routine checks to see how I was healing, how I was holding up.

Today was different. Today he brought out the usual X rays, but he said something most unusual. “Well, Dale, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

I perked up, all ears.

“The good news is that your ankle is doing surprisingly well.”

“Great,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”

“Well, it’s not really news to us, but it will be to you. It’s your shoulder.” Dr. Graham looked me straight in the eye, as if to see how I would take the news.

“My shoulder? I know that I can’t move my arm now, but it’s going to be OK someday, isn’t it? It was just dislocated, right?”

“It wasn’t dislocated, Dale, it was disintegrated. In fact, on the medical report I described your ball-and-socket joint as having exploded. We even found shoulder bone throughout your back, neck, and chest. It had blown to bits. And the muscles and ligaments all around that area were stretched way beyond their elasticity.”

“So that’s why I can’t lift my arm.”

“That’s exactly why. When we did the surgeries, we put all the pieces of the bone back together the best we could. We hoped that eventually you might gain some mobility. At this point, I’m pessimistic. You have no strength in that shoulder, and no control of it. We hoped by now you would. Not only that, Dale, but your shoulder muscles have been inactive for almost six months now. In that amount of time, injured, unused muscles grow brittle. Before much longer, you’ll have virtually no chance of ever using your shoulder and most of your arm again.”

Not the news I was prepared to hear. Questions raced through my mind.
What about my plans for flying, for ground school, for flight instruction?

“So, what can we do?” I asked tentatively.

Dr. Graham spoke enthusiastically now. “If we can go back a third time into the left shoulder area and take out some more slack muscle, I think you might have a 10 percent chance of lifting your arm about 45 degrees someday. That’s the best we can hope for, Dale.”

My heart sank. “Ten percent?” I took a deep breath and with it came a surge of faith. “Well, Doc, a ten percent chance of success is ten percent more than God needs. Let’s go for it.”

Dr. Graham looked at me soberly. “OK. There really is no other choice. The muscles are deteriorating rapidly. To tell you the truth, I’m very concerned about what we’re going to find when we get in there. It could be too late.”

Dr. Graham had only one date open for surgery. If I didn’t take it, I would have to wait another month, which he thought was perilously late.

This will be the
last
operation,
I vowed to myself. But I had made that same vow so many operations before. I had already had twelve surgeries, and here I was agreeing to go under the knife again.

When I checked in to St. Joseph Hospital, the staff was eager to see me, see the progress I had made, and was ready to help me get through the next phase of my recovery. In spite of the cheerful staff, the place had been a prison to me, a place of pain and shadows and horrible memories. I arrived as late as I could.

When I got to my room, I noticed the curtains were drawn between me and my roommate. It wasn’t long before I learned why.

“Nurse!” an angry voice blurted out. “Get in here! Can you hear me? Nurse!”

When the nurse came in, you could see the weariness on her face from having to answer endless calls like this from the crabby old man. He rattled off a litany of complaints: Dinner was cold. The meat was tough. Everything tasted bland. The TV wasn’t working right. The volume was set too low. Then another diatribe about his medication.

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