In and after death

True love can be found in many places. Not just in a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend.

She was under a fire blanket that she found in the emergency kit in the bathroom. It was agonizing for her. She couldn’t breathe. The smoke was so strong and harsh on her elf size lungs and the nausea in her was so great that she threw up. As she smelled vomit and smoke and she figured three things. That was the worst moment of her life, that moment would be her last, and she would suffer through it, all alone.

 

The fire was horrible. No matter what they did, the fire just kept spreading and it wouldn’t stop. John knew that there was still one person inside. That person’s name was Melanie.  And he knew that he had to save her. No one else knew why but he knew he was going to.

 

 John was a determined firefighter. He had lost his family to a fire. That’s why he became a volunteer firefighter. This was one of the biggest fires that the city of Green river, Nebraska had ever seen. Other than the one that John’s family died in.

The chief came up to John and said “It’s over. There is nothing you can do now. I know you want to redeem yourself for not being there to save your family but you have to know that it wasn’t your fault, and neither is this.”

“It will not be on my account of me losing my family again”

John said this and let a single tear fall from his left eye. With that determination to save a life, he put on an oxygen mask, and with his soot covered jeans and gray�"now black�" tee shirt, he threw open the front door of the building and embraced the fire that spewed out. He ran through the cubicles up the flight of stairs to the fourth floor. Burns were developing that seared him when his sweat streamed down into them. He blocked out the physical pain by only thinking of the reason for his pain. Adrenaline pulsed as it coursed through his vessels and he found the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor where she was. The woman who had been there.

This was the woman that had rescued him, that saved him from his horrible nightmares. The ones that were real and the ones that were only there when he slept. This woman who he only ever saw as strong, persistent, who never liked to admit she was wrong, and said she didn’t need a husband to take care of her, but only a son. He watched as his adopted mother laid helpless under her only protection of a fire blanket and for a split second, John stood there. And he knew what his last words were going to be. The words he never said to her enough. He said them so few times that he knew how many times he said it. Six.

He ran to her, threw off the blanket and she was looking up at him with her haggard look, severe burns, burnt and straggled hair, he took off his oxygen mask, and thrust it upon her so fast that the gasp of air she took by being surprised to see her son there, was the first gasp of oxygen she had within the past 15 minutes. And with that, John cried, the first time his mother had ever seen him cry. He cried three tears. One for sadness, that his mother would now live without him, one for happiness, that she would live and be with him soon, and the last, because he knew that now he would be going to meet his family, and his forever Love.

With a cracked raspy voice he spoke, “I love you mom” and then he died.

 

To Melanie, it seemed like a lifetime, although it was only a few seconds before a rush firefighters came in. Her eyes were burning because she wasn’t blinking, only out of shock, and she refused to leave her son. The firefighters didn’t have to fight because of her small body and they quickly and easily scooped her up and all she saw as she was convoyed down the stairs in the arms of strangers were streaks of red and orange flickering. They surrounded her as she watched the limp body of her son be carried by two firefighters and she didn’t hear anything.  She didn’t hear the fire burning, or the stomp of the boots on the men, or the doctors asking her if she could hear them, if she was OK. She screamed, but she didn’t know the difference between whimpering and screaming anymore. Her only indication that she was screeching was the fact that her throat scorched with pain. They just took her to the emergency room where she screamed and yelled until they put her on sedatives and when she woke up, she then heard it all. The beeping of her heart monitor, sneakers on the feet nurses shuffling from one room to the next, and in that moment, she said a prayer for the grief of her son, and was at peace. Peace that came from the fact that she would one day, see her son again, and that no matter the woe and suffering that she meets in this life, it is nothing to cry over compared to the amazing love she will cry for joy over when she too meets her eternal Love.