Fields of Grace

by Hannah Luce

  “Me either,” I said to myself after he was gone.

  Even after the peace I’d felt in the cornfield, I was still numbing with pills and the airplane-size bottles of alcohol I had hidden around my room. I’d even brought some bottles back from my trip to Kansas, where I’d stocked up at a convenience store next to my hotel. Before Cameron’s visit I had fooled myself into believing that, when the time was right, I’d wean myself off the prescription pills and alcohol chasers, but I kept pushing back the right time because it never was right.

  Seeing my brother so disillusioned and so disappointed really shook me. I thought I saw disdain in his eyes. I realized that if I didn’t finally face myself and who I had become, I was going to lose my brother’s respect and probably my brother. I spent the next day or so debating with myself over what Cameron had said. I loved my brother more than anything in the world, but I was still in so much pain.

  I thought about how when I first got home from the hospital I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror for fear of what I would see. After a while, Mom arranged my kaboodle of makeup and hair products on the bathroom vanity, I think hoping that I’d be inspired to use them. I’ve always loved bright lipsticks, and I had a full collection of colors. One day, without thinking, I grabbed tubes of pink-, red-, and maroon-colored lipsticks and began writing on the bathroom mirror. At that point, I still couldn’t write with my right hand because it was so badly damaged, so, using my left hand, I scrawled pictures of vines and trees and wrote messages to myself like “Hannah, you are not alone. The universe hears your cries at night,” and “Hannah, you will see beauty within your tragedy, so keep your chin up babe.” But I still wasn’t even close to being there.

  The sight of my skin sickened me, and I continued to feel the emptiness of the hole in my heart where my friends had once been. I wasn’t sure I was ready to face my pain head-on, not raw. Then I thought: “I have fallen so deep in a pit of snakes, what could be worse than this?” I’d made up my mind. I wanted to get better and I couldn’t get there by myself. I needed help. A couple of days passed and I approached my parents one night after dinner. “I can’t live like this anymore,” I blurted out. “This is not the way I want to live my life. I need help and I want to go away to someplace where I can get the help I need.” A moment went by and a palpable wave of relief washed over the room. My secret was out, but it hadn’t been a secret at all. My parents said they’d been worried sick about me but they hadn’t known how to approach me with their concerns. I asked Papa to find me a place where I could get the help I needed to continue healing my body and my soul.

  Within a week, I was on a plane to a holistic healing center in Washington State. I checked my phone and my laptop and all of my other personal possessions at the door and began a four-week recovery program. Mandatory classes were held six hours a day. At first I resented being there, and I fought the counselors on everything from not being allowed to have my phone to the evening curfew. I wrote my parents and complained bitterly about the people and the program. But I stayed.

  I began to let my guard down with both the staff and the other patients. During group sessions, I talked about the boys and the guilt I felt over their deaths. People seemed to really grasp the enormity of what I was dealing with, maybe because many of them were being treated for trauma. I tried to give back as much as I was getting. Rather than focus on myself and my loss, I reached out to one girl who had been sexually abused and was suffering from an eating disorder, and another who was chronically depressed and had tried committing suicide on a number of occasions. Helping them helped me. With the aid of natural supplements recommended by the doctors on staff, I began weaning off the myriad of prescription drugs I was taking—for everything from pain to anxiety to sleeplessness to depression. I began to feel hopeful.

  I’d been there for about two weeks when, late one afternoon, after my classes were done for the day, I took a walk toward the ocean and found myself exploring a sweet, sultry town along the way. The sun was shining bright and, as I was exploring the pretty shops and galleries, I suddenly realized that both my mind and my body felt healthy and free. I didn’t have any physical pain, and for the first time in nine months, my head was clear and my heart felt light. I looked down at my skin and rather than seeing lesions and scars I saw the beauty of being alive. A burst of energy surged through my body and I wanted to shout, “I want to live! I mean really live!” When I told the story at my next group therapy sessions, everyone cheered. After that, every evening I walked to the ocean to sit on the sand and watch the sunset. I was enthralled by the beauty of the exotic colors of the afternoon sun on the landscape. I had never looked at a sunset that way before. It was as if I was seeing it for the very first time. I never wanted those evenings to end, but I knew they had to.

  I returned home on Christmas Eve. Charity and Cameron were already there. Everyone was excited to see me. We all attended a candlelight church service then returned home for our Christmas Eve ritual, when we all gathered around Dad while he read the Christmas story and we each got to open a single gift, which usually ended up being three or four.

  As we settled into the living room, waiting for Papa to read, I took off my stockings and sat on the floor with my bare legs stretched out before me. I looked around the room at each of my family members. “I want you to touch my skin,” I said. My parents and Charity and Cameron knelt around me and put their hands on my burned leg. I began to cry, but my tears weren’t sad or bitter, they were tears of gratitude. “I know I’ve been a basket case for the last few months,” I said. “But I just want to let you know that I love all of you so much. You’ve meant the world to me as I’ve gone through this and I’m happy to be home with you. I’m getting better and I feel so good. My skin is healing and my mind is clearer than it’s ever been. This has been the hardest time of my life and you’ve all been there for me. I want to tell you that I’m back.”

  Papa and Mom and Charity huddled close to me. Everyone was crying. “I love you,” I said. “We love you, Hannah,” they replied. “We love you so much.” I felt so blessed to have the family I did.

  That was a momentous time for me. I began to forgive myself for the death of my friends and made a commitment to turn my anger over losing them into determination to do something to make them proud of me. For the first time since the crash, happiness seemed almost plausible. After rehab, my skin had taken on a voice of her own, and she had a way with words. When I was feeling overwhelmed and weak, she reminded me of the courage and strength it took to come as far as I had. When I felt shackled by my pain, she reminded me that everyone feels pain, and she encouraged me to see that mine was evidence that my body and my soul were on the mend. Every day I felt her healing me more. Then, one night, in a dream I saw her begin to morph and fade. I cried out, “Please stop! Where are you going? I am just beginning to be able to touch you, to accept you, to love you!” I realized that I had actually become quite fond of my new skin. I woke up, expecting my scars to be gone. When they were still there, radiant and smooth, I sighed with relief.

  It was at that moment that I realized that I was free.

  Epilogue

  I have learned many lessons during my recovery. Lessons about beauty and what matters. Lessons about family and friends and love. Just the other night, while Mom was making homemade vegetable soup, and we waited for Papa to come home for dinner, I sat by the lake behind our house, thinking about how fortunate I am to have parents who took care of me, but also encouraged me to become my own person. It’s really quite extraordinary that by showing me unconditional love and support, they gave me the confidence and the gumption to get out there and ask questions and seek my own answers about faith and God.

  For months after the crash, I couldn’t even hold a book with my burned hands. But recently I grabbed one from my bedroom shelf. It turned out to be a volume of Paulo Coelho’s work that a friend had sent me in the hospital, By the River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept. I cracked o
pen the book and the pages fell onto each other before settling on an early page.

  I began reading.

  “Rarely do we realize that we are in the midst of the extraordinary. Miracles occur all around us. Signs from God show us the way, angels plead to be heard but we pay little attention because we have been taught that we must follow certain formulas and rules if we want to find God. We do not realize that God is anywhere we allow Him/Her to enter.”

  I closed the book and smiled. In Coelho’s words, I realized that all along I had been looking for God in all the wrong places. Or, rather, I hadn’t not found Him. I hadn’t let Him in. I was so busy looking for “proof” that I hadn’t been paying attention to what was right in front of my eyes.

  So there it was. The answer I had been seeking for most of my life. I had been taught that God could only be perceived in certain prescribed ways, but after the crash, after everything that followed, I now realized that the God I had been searching for was right there all the time. I just needed to allow myself to see the signs, and they were everywhere. In the beauty of nature, and the wonder of love. In the circumstances that converged to spare me an early death. In the courage of my friends in the last minutes of their lives. In the legacy of Austin and Garrett. In the hope I feel for my future.

  I have experienced the miracles. I have heard the angels. I have seen God. I see Him everywhere now. In the majesty of beautiful summer nights that I almost didn’t get to see. In the sweet deeds of friends and the kindness of strangers. In my mother’s gentle reassurances, and the loving eyes of my father as he wraps my hand in his and sits by my bed when I am too afraid to fall asleep, because, sometimes even now when I do, it is May 11, 2012, again and I am back in that plane, looking into the faces of the people I love as we prepare to die.

  Everywhere I go now, I carry a remnant of my past in my pocket, a single shard of metal I collected from the crash site when I went back there. Most people would look at it and see just a rusty piece of scrap metal, but it’s the most precious thing I own. When I get on an airplane, I hold it close to my heart and hum an old hymn or say a prayer. At night, I place it on the desk, next to my bed, beside the rosary my sister brought me from Spain. To me it’s a token of what was and what can be.

  Despite what I have been through, mine is a story of hope. And faith. Hope from knowing that, even through great adversity, we can live good and purposeful lives. Faith in knowing that we can see the divine, if only we open our eyes. It is a story of perseverance and finding light in life’s darkest moments. Above all, it is a love story about three friends whose bond cannot be broken by death.

  Coelho wrote, “To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God.” I loved Austin and Garrett. They are gone, but their dreams live within me. Because of them, in honor of them, I will find a way to make the world a better place in a way that would make them proud. In them, I have seen the spark of God, and that has given me the courage and the will to go forward.

  Afterword

  I was first approached to write a book while I was in the hospital, heavily sedated on narcotics for excruciating pain from my burns. I couldn’t imagine what to write about because I wasn’t even coherent. But late that night I had a clear flashback to a conversation I’d had with Austin before the crash. He’d told me he had a vision to change the lives of victimized women all over the world. Austin wanted to start an organization called Mirror Tree that would redefine what it meant to be a beautiful woman. No matter your age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, or environmental conditioning, we all deserve a shot at contributing to our world in a meaningful way, and that journey begins from within. From the moment he told me about it, I wanted to help make Austin’s vision come true, and we were in cahoots to create Mirror Tree long before the airplane crashed.

  Back during my first semester of grad school at Oklahoma State University, I happened upon a cultural studies class that became a favorite of mine. I was young and naïve, just starting out in graduate-level academia. The class explored psychological issues of race and ethnicity, and as part of it, we studied the plight of refugees. I realized that different environmental, political, and socioeconomic factors place layers of challenges on these many innocent lives.

  Everything changed for me in the airplane crash where my four friends were killed and I was severely burned. After the accident I realized that what was the most horrific day of my life is everyday living for many refugee women around the world. And for that reason and to honor Austin and his vision, all of the proceeds from this book go directly to Mirror Tree, the nonprofit I’m in the process of forming. My aim is to create hope in a dark world. Female refugees are victims with no one to defend their honor, no one to protect them, and no one to rescue them from unholy crimes. At Mirror Tree we will research and create opportunities for people in the United States to help rehabilitate and reintegrate female refugees and others suffering from the aftereffects of rape, genocide, and loss of identity. Mirror Tree is committed to doing everything it can to give hope to those victims. By buying and reading this book, you’re helping to memorialize Austin and continue the good work that he began, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  Hannah Luce, August 2013

  Mom and Papa with me as a baby.

  Papa teaching me to play the guitar.

  Me and Papa.

  Mom with me and baby Charity.

  Papa driving me, Charity, and Cameron on the four-wheeler in our front yard.

  I was a flower girl in a Teen Mania alum’s wedding. I was five.

  The family outside the house in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I was born. This was before we moved to Texas.

  We love to celebrate birthdays, and little Cammy loved chocolate cake!

  Summer always meant fun in the sun.

  Here’s me and Charity holding dolls. We liked to have tea parties in the forest! We were country gals.

  Family pyramid.

  Jet-skiing on our lake.

  An Acquire the Fire weekend. Thousands of young people attend every event. (Michael Mistretta, 2013)

  People worshipping at Acquire the Fire. (Michael Mistretta, 2013)

  At my Oral Roberts University graduation.

  Graduation 2011.

  In Paris with Papa in the summer of 2010. My father preached at a church in Paris, and I came along for the ride!

  The whole family.

  Self-portrait. These were the glasses I wore on the day of the accident.

  Having fun in my office at Teen Mania Ministries.

  This is how I decorated my office at Teen Mania Ministries.

  This was taken an hour before we got to the plane, May 11, 2012.

  I took this pic with Austin (left) and Garrett (on the right) before the plane took off.

  Mom stayed by my bedside at the hospital as much as she could.

  Resting at the hospital. I had to have that bear every night before I went to sleep.

  With the burn doctor in Kansas City who did my graft surgeries and my favorite nurse.

  I had to get up and walk every day. This was the first time I stood up after my surgeries.

  With fire chief Duane Banzet and Robin Gaby Fisher.

  Me and Mom.

  Acknowledgments

  Gratitude to Brandi Bowles and Peter McGuigan at Foundry Literary and Media for seeing the beauty and the possibilities of this story and putting us together to write it. Judith Curr at Atria, having your confidence meant everything. Sarah Durand at Atria and Beth Adams at Howard, editors extraordinaire, your insight and talent are matched only by your sensitivity and kindness. Thanks aren’t enough. (And welcome to the world, little Lucy!) To Chief Duane Banzet, thank you for being willing to share your memories of that painful day and, even more, for doing God’s work with kindness and compassion. Thank you, Heather and Linda for piecing together parts of the story that only you could, but most of all for your humanity in a time of crisis.