1
It wasn’t the crash that killed my dad when his plane went down over the Atlantic. He died from hypoxia, a state of oxygen deficiency that impairs brain function. And it wasn’t his airplane. We aren’t the kind of people who own airplanes. Ma used to work in an old folks’ home, and Dad drove a FedEx truck but dreamed of getting a pilot’s license. He was with his flight instructor, who actually flew the plane.
They took off from Marietta on a clear, crisp Sunday in February. After takeoff, something must have gone wrong. They didn’t notice the drop in air pressure in the Learjet’s cabin. Or maybe they did but couldn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have any extra oxygen onboard. The plane kept climbing right through its assigned altitude while flying east toward the Atlantic coast.
Once you rise above twelve thousand feet in a depressurized cabin, it takes only twelve minutes to lose consciousness. I never knew that.
On the evening news an Air Force pilot said that the jet was “porpoising” while it fluctuated between fifteen thousand and forty thousand feet. As in the way dolphins move through the water. I wished they hadn’t used that word.
The search-and-rescue team told us that Dad and the instructor had most likely blacked out long before the plane ran out of fuel and dropped thirty thousand feet. They said Dad and the pilot didn’t feel the impact. I hoped they were right.
* * *
After the search-and-rescue people called, there was an explosion in my brain, and a cloud appeared, spreading out over everything. The cloud pressed down on me like overstuffed down bedding, the kind you want to push away so you can breathe. Except there was nothing I could do to lift it. The cloud made all my thoughts seem as though they came through a fun-house mirror, like the one Dad and I had stood in front of at the county fair last year, laughing. Everything was distorted, drawn into longer, thinner shapes; or shorter, wider ones; or ones with missing pieces. But now, the effect was disturbing rather than funny. It made it hard to think.
It was because of the cloud that I didn’t notice at first how much Ma had changed. I didn’t remember her often being angry before. She had always been the more practical of my parents. But given her cooking skills, it actually wasn’t that practical of her to turn down the casseroles that her coworkers from the nursing home tried to drop off at our house in the week following Dad’s death.
“We really won’t need those,” she’d say, standing at the door with a fake smile whenever someone came by.
“Couldn’t we take at least one?” I asked when the two of us were alone. “We could have thrown it out if we didn’t like it.” Not that I was particularly hungry. But food would have been a welcome distraction from the cloud.
“I don’t want these people’s food,” Ma said, a dangerous edge in her voice. “They just want to make themselves feel better.”
If Dad were still here, he would have told us that there was nothing wrong with helping others. “So one good deed makes two people feel better,” he would have said. “What’s not to like?”
Perhaps Ma would have shaken her head at him, smiling. She actually used to shake her head often at him, but in a loving way. Like when she called him a dreamer, and Dad said, “Oh no, my dear. I am a seeker of possibilities.”
It hurt to think that it would never be like that again. Never.