renaissance 2

 

 

Rose Gardens

It has been a mad, sad week. Yet as I write this I am more profoundly grateful to be alive than ever before. This story starts on a Thursday night, 27 November 2008, while my wife Elena, my oldest friend and I were sitting around our dinner table eating dessert. I had experienced some chest pains on the left-hand side of my body earlier in the evening, and we were discussing how fragile life can be. My oldest friend was telling us how dangerous his crossing of the Mediterranean from Mallorca to Saint Tropez had been in his yacht.

At that moment the phone rang- it was Dee, our receptionist in the Chateau, who had just heard on the news that an Airbus carrying 7 pilots and engineers from Air New Zealand and XL Airways, had crashed into the Mediterranean 3km off the coast of Canet, after taking off from Perpignan airport that afternoon. There were no survivors.  

We live about a five minute drive from Perpignan airport, and often have pilots and their crew staying with us. About six hours earlier I had shaken hands with Noel, Murray, Brian, Michael and a German pilot who had been staying with us for a while in our self-catering apartments. (Captain Brian Horrell, 52, from Auckland; and engineers Murray White, 37, from Auckland, Michael Gyles, 49, and Noel Marsh, 35, both from Christchurch.) I wished them the best of luck for their long journey to the other side of the world.

We had chatted with this crew on several occasions and developed a great deal of affection for them and for Noel’s wife and two small boys. I flew light aircraft and gliders for twenty years and had experienced several close shaves with death in cars, planes, fighting apartheid and in the South African Army. I’ve known many heroic men and women, and admired them all. We chatted about the joys and risks of flying and life in general, and laughed together at the absurdity of it all. I could tell these guys were silent heroes too. Face everything, avoid nothing.

We exchanged gifts- we gave them some our best local Roussillon wine and they in turn gave us a cute little Maori handbag with a small Air New Zealand replica aircraft inside. They were due to fly the Airbus home via Frankfurt, Gander (in Canada), Los Angeles, Samoa then Auckland.

Rose from La Tour Apollinaire Gardens

We were shocked and deeply saddened by this sudden loss. The pains in my chest increased, and my old friend and wife rushed me to hospital, suspecting a heart attack. Both my grandfathers died of heart attacks in their early fifties, and my father followed in their footsteps at 68. I am 52.  After several cardiograms, some drugs and a few blood samples, I was told to stay for the night. I slept in the emergency ward on a gurney with Elena by my side in an armchair. As I lay there I kept on thinking that I was the lucky one, because I was still alive, and the last words spoken between Noel, Murray, Brian, Michael and their bright eyes and big smiles played over and over again in my mind. How could it have all gone so wrong, with such a gifted crew? The doctors and nurses at the hospital also shared our sadness and disbelief.

After a tortured, broken nights sleep, we were moved to a hospital corridor the next morning after having been told that there were anomalies on my cardiogram and that I would have to see the cardiologist. We were surrounded by elderly patients on hospital trolleys, with visiting relatives crowding round them. We kept on asking for news of our Kiwi friends, but no further news was forthcoming. At 5 pm I was wheeled into the operating theatre, for a coronoragram- a procedure where the cardiologist inserts a long tube up the artery in your arm starting from the wrist. This tube then reaches the arteries supplying the heart with its precious oxygenated blood, and enables the heart specialist to effectively see the state of the coronary arteries. When people have a heart attack it is because one or more of these arteries becomes narrowed or blocked and the heart is starved of blood.

No anesthetic is involved, so one watches the sight of one’s own heart beating on the screen and sees the doctor injecting the radioactive fluid into the arteries one by one. I was lucky: my heart and coronary arteries are in great shape, so the pain in my chest is probably due to stress and perhaps a small hernia of some kind. Despite the crowded and slightly run down state of the old Perpignan hospital facilities (the brand new flagship hospital opens in September 2009), we were highly impressed by the empathetic and competent doctors, nurses and administrators we met. It was wonderful to meet so many people who really cared.

I spent the night under observation in the cardiology ward with a friendly elderly gentleman who was recovering from a heart attack and was hooked up to a satellite via an implant in his chest so that if his heart failed it would be automatically restarted. He would never be able to go home, but would have to live in a rest home for his final days. Yet he smiled a lot and offered me some of his biscuits and pepper because the food was a little bland.

I awoke the next morning crying silently for our Kiwi and German friends and their families. Why do such bad things happen to good people? The image of that Airbus turning over the sea then veering downward and plunging suddenly into the ocean played like a tragic action movie in my head. How could this happen? Did the left engine fail? Why could they not pull out of the dive? I wished I would somehow have warned them, if only I could have foreseen this possibility. Would it have made any difference?

And I was simultaneously wildly grateful to be alive, to realize how lucky I was to have a strong heart, a loving wife, gorgeous children, a caring mother and many good friends. For any survivor there is both a combination of guilt at having survived, and also a simple joy at being alive. There are moments in life, even whole days and weeks, where we should be celebrating just how sweet it is to be alive, able to turn our heads toward the sun and breathe the fresh air deep into our lungs.

I silently thought of all the unsung heroes in all the airlines and hospitals and places around the world where people are putting themselves on the line every day for others without ever asking for any thanks or special treatment. These are the unsung heros, the people who make our world go around. We salute you.