"The Send Off" Part 3 (Final)

An ambulance barrels through the narrow streets of Uniontown.. The trip from Consolidated Coal Company's Brady Mine takes time…at least forty minutes. As the left turn is made off Main and onto Church Street, the paramedic tending Charlie stiffens to keep the jostling to a minimum. The hospital’s emergency room is just ahead. He is no doctor, but the EMT attendant knows instinctively there is probably no need to hurry.

Charlie had arrived. Actually he had gotten here while the ambulance was passing through Brownsville. As he slipped in and out of consciousness, Charlie had tried with all his might to orient his mind. He desperately tried to make sense of all this. "Come on Charlie," he scolds himself, "Wake up!" He tries to convince himself that this is but some crazy dream—a nightmare that surely will end when he awakes. But in his soul, he knows there is something wrong. Ever since his first stirring upon arrival, there has been a growing premonition that this is more than a dream from which he must awake.

Within minutes and in spite of every argument he can muster and every hope that he is still delusional, Charlie can no longer deny what is. Panic such as he has never known consumes him and strangles him with fear. He has just realized that he already IS awake! But Charlie is not only awake, he finds himself conscious in a place where his reason and logic and education had nearly convinced cannot exist.

Charlie carefully tries to go over every detail of his final minutes in the Brady mine. There isn't much he can recall. He remembers hearing screams as tons of slate and coal collapsed and buried him as he was checking the new heading. Just as he was about to lose consciousness, Charlie frantically realized it was his own screams that he was hearing. From some vast distance, he had also recognized the voice of the fire-boss, Tony Angellini, pleading with him to "Hold on, Charlie! We’ll get you out!!" At the very end, he can remember the total darkness entombing him as the slate and coal continue to crash down upon him.

Charlie always hated the dark. Even when not in the mine, he hated it. The blackness so thick and oozing, it grabs you and chokes you. He hates it even more now. The only other thing that Charlie is aware of, or that matters, is the unspeakable pain. As he arrives, the pain is brutal. Every inch of him is immersed in agony and burning. Spasms of intense hurting assault him. Wave after wave of misery crash him with monotonous furry. He curses God, Christ, the mine, the pain, himself and, most of all, this God-awful blackness.

Incredibly though, neither the fear, nor the pain, nor his hatred-- not even the blackness-- diminish Charlie's immense vanity. He tries with all his might to touch his face---first with the right hand and then with the left. But nothing will work. He thinks at first the doctors have put him in some sort of body caste . . . a plaster encasement. Terror grips his soul as he realizes this is not plaster but some other invisible chain or restraint of an unknown power that holds him.

Charlie's conceit is undiminished. Charlie was good-looking, at least he had been. His whole being now yearns to know how badly his face may be injured. He wonders if by some miracle his face may have escaped unscathed. All his life he has known he is handsome. He believes this the way some believe there is a God. His women friends knew it, but Charlie knew it better.

Amazingly, however, in these brief moments since arriving, Charlie already is beginning to realize that Anne was right about one thing. His “looks and charm” are all there is about him--- nothing more! It is then that Charlie first recognizes something else. Anne is not with him. Where is she? She must be on her way. But Anne is not coming. Neither is a nurse, or doctor, or orderly, or friend….no one is coming to be with him.

Charlie suddenly is also aware that “time” is now meaningless. Yesterday, tomorrow, or next year are all merged into the eternal “now.” As Charlie groans he is tormented with the realization that what he was before the accident or what he might have been no longer exist. These are eternally fused into what he was at his arrival here. What he is now is what he must be forever.

He knows he is trapped! It is too late for repentance or regret, or mercy. He is hopelessly confined by an impassable chasm that will neither allow him to go back to what was nor go on to what might have been.
Charlie has arrived but Charlie isn’t leaving.

Click here for Part 1 https://steemit.com/religion/@willsplace/the-send-off-part-1