Out of the Fog

It was a very dark rainy night out in the Indiana countryside when a midnight fog rolled in.  A family of four was heading home to a small farm town in central Illinois.  In the front seat driving was a father with his eight year old daughter at his side.  Mom rode in the back seat with her five year old son stretched out asleep with his head in her lap.

Back in 1923, country roads didn't have any night time railroad warning signs to alert drivers of the danger of oncoming trains approaching the roadway.  On this night, with the lack of visibility due in part to the fogged up automobile's window glass from the rain, and with the addition of the dense fog further hindering night vision ... tragedy happened.

Call it bad luck, an accident that just happened, or driver negligence ... it was bad.  The train always wins in this kind of contest.  As the vehicle crossed the railroad tracks, out of the fog, the big steam locomotive hit the back half the the car on the drivers side crushing the two passengers in the rear seat killing them instantly.  One was a loving wife and mother, the other a son and brother, taken from this world way too soon.

Death has no respect for love, age or relationship.

With no time to react to the brute inescapable crushing power of the train dragging the car down the tracks, the driver instinctually grabs for his little girl who is now being thrown out of the right hand door head first.  But before he can pull her back to the relative safety of the front seat with him, her head is dragging along the side of the tracks opening up her scalp and skull, filling her cranium with cinders from the roadbed.

After some time, help does arrive and the father and his little girl end up at the nearest hospital.  Dad is given first aid for his minor injuries, but he is told his beautiful little eight year old daughter won't live through the night.  So she gets no care whatsoever.  No first aid, nothing.  She will be the third fatality in this wreck.

But God wasn't through with her yet.  God has plans for this special girl. 

In the morning the doctors are amazed that she is still alive and decide to clean out the packed cinders imbedded deep in the hole in her head.  They wash out all that can be reached, and close up her scalp the best they can.  It will take time, but the prognosis is now much better ... she should be okay.

Was she just lucky or was the hand of God upon her?  She would say later, God must have been with her because she lived.  Yes, she was almost killed.  And yes, her mom and brother were taken from her ... but she still had her daddy.  But it wouldn't be easy.

Years later, the only remaining evidence of that dark foggy night, other than the bad memories, was the fact that she did have a bad scar on the right side of her forehead at her hairline ... but she learned how to comb her hair down over it, keeping it from showing.

Time stops for no one.  Her life goes on in her small farm town where she meets a young  man her age.  Could there be love in the air?  A relationship grows between them which leads to marriage, a small house, and three sons born to her over the next eight years.  God has blessed them and life is good.

But tragedy from the train wreak 25 years earlier was about to rear it's ugly head again.

For the past twenty years or so, small particles of the cinders that could not be removed from her brain were evidently moving inside of her skull, working down into her ear canal ... so that when she washed her hair these tiny cinders would wash out of her ears periodically.

But they didn't all wash out.  Only the small pieces washed out.  The movement of the larger ones damaged her brain tissue ... or so the doctors thought.

As her 4 year old middle son ... I remember mom became very sick one day as she developed a high fever and couldn't control her movements or speak very well.  It was as if she was out of her head and didn't know what she was doing.  The fever was burning her up.  I was scared ... what was wrong with my mom.

My last memory of her ... still vivid in my mind 66 years later ... is of her screaming, out of her head as she is being loaded into an ambulance for the ride to the hospital.  I never heard her voice again.  Later that very same night, my father sat on the side of my bed and told my older brother and me that our mom wasn't coming home because she was in heaven. 

Oh ... how I missed her.  I was never the same after that.

Dad always said, I was more like her than my two brothers were.  She lost her mom and now I had lost mine.

But God wasn't through with me either.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-14 (edited) ... "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die ... a time heal ... a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn ... a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing ... a time to love ...

I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever: nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before Him."

Some things in this present life are forever, like the death of a mother.  But God also made a way for my two brothers and me ... to enjoy life again.

I will speak to this in my next post.

Blessings ...