One winter day my nephew, Keith, was in an airplane accident. Really. He and three friends (a young pilot, a pilot-trainee, and Keith's new girlfriend) had gone for an evening joy ride in a single engine Cessna. Keith was 20 years old. The student pilot practiced his take-offs and landings at a small airport about a half hour from where I lived.
On what would be their last take-off attempt, both the student and the licensed pilot failed to notice the flaps had been left in the down position. The airplane struggled to climb, stalled, and fell to the runway, one hundred feet below. Of my nephew and his girlfriend seated in back, the girlfriend was the only one to walk away from the scene. She had been on the right side of the airplane (in both senses of the word), which had tilted to the left as it fell. When the Cessna hit the ground, she flew into Keith, whose body acted as her air-bag. Keith was banged-up badly.
When I arrived at the intensive care unit of the hospital, I found Keith strapped to a wheelchair, incoherent, struggling against the straps, in great pain and agitation. The left side of his head was shaved. There was a crooked line of staples in his scalp. Besides the blow to his head--and the bruise to his brain, we would later learn--Keith's left arm was broken in two places and his lower left leg was "smashed." That was the term the doctor used.
During my visits over the next few days, I saw Keith improve. Although he needed to be administered significant doses of pain-killers, he experienced a few hours of moan-free consciousness. His vision cleared from completely blurry, to only partly screwed-up. He could engage in conversation and would remember a substantial amount of what was happening in his life: Who had visited, what the nurse had said or done.
Over those same days I got to know the plight of the other flyer's. The young man in the left front of the craft had been thrown from the airplane and was in a condition similar to Keith. Unlike Keith, he would fully recover. The pilot, seated in the right front, had been knocked into a coma, suffering serious head trauma. When paying my respects to his family, upon entering the room I nearly gasped. The kid had a face like a jigsaw puzzle that had been sewn together, but not quite right. The edges to the hundreds of stitches were angry with bruising and dried blood. He could have starred in a horror movie. Without makeup.
The young man's mother and I engaged in some whispered conversation. Otherwise the hospital room was silent, save for the beeping machines monitoring her son's vital signs. The woman mentioned how miraculous it was that none of the four had been killed. She nodded and said -- to herself as much as to me -- "God was watching over them." If the boy's mother didn't have a tear in her eye, she certainly had one in her words.
Looking on a brighter side is one thing, but "God was watching over them"? This statement made less than zero sense. In terms of my nephew, when was a god watching over him? When the plane hit the pavement and Keith's foot was crushed like a soup cracker? When his head hit the aluminum sill of the window, causing him permanent visual problems? Was that when a god watched over him? Did a god spot an airplane going down and put out his invisible hands to ease the fall so Keith's life wouldn't be immediately lost, just forever broken?
The poor woman. That's quite a whopper to tell yourself. God was watching over my son, who, because of one small error, will never be the same. Yes, I know perfectly well how religious people employ their god-thoughts. Selectively. So, no, she didn't consider that her god failed to whisper to the pilot and co-pilot "Don't forget the flaps!"
No, the accident wasn't her god's responsibility. What her god did do, what her god was responsible for, was ensuring that the four passengers survived. That single thought was a comfort. Things could have been worse (certainly true); they were spared by a benevolent force (not true). What had happened wasn't simply a tragic accident that could have been prevented. From the wreckage the woman was able to salvage the belief that there was some greater meaning, some greater purpose in this life. She was able to deny that the accident was just that--an accident--and the outcome purely sucked. She was able to cloak her pain and find a modicum of relief, at least in the passing moment.
It seems many people are inclined to tell themselves lies both small and large in the effort to fit the events of their lives into something resembling a fairy tale. With a happier ending, of course. Beyond looking on the brighter side, is the fictional component to the story-telling a necessary and good thing, in the short and long term? I wonder.
My nephew never fully recovered. He died a couple years later. I still can't find a rosier way to view that deeply troubling fact.
The end.
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