Mercifully, the agony of her screams – surely the sound one makes when being slaughtered – did not come to me last night in my dreams as it had so many nights before. There was no overpowering smell of gasoline or burning flesh when I awoke.
Still, when I opened my eyes early the next morning for my shift in the emergency department, her memory entered and lingered in my brain. It had been several months since I had revived what was left of her, but she was still with me. She would be one of those patients that my psyche never forgot, even when my heart hurt so badly and wanted to stop remembering.
Brushing my teeth, I observed my half-awake self in the mirror. My countenance still appeared relatively young, with only a few wrinkles around my eyes despite the years of sleepless nights and long hours spent in the ER. Overwhelming feelings of gratitude surfaced for the first time as the deep frown line that scarred my forehead’s center gazed back at me. This was my one feature that I had despised, mostly because it reminded me of my estranged, abusive father. There was no mistaking our genetic connection. I was branded with his exact brow.
That all changed once I met her. Half of her face was burnt off, unrecognizable. She would be forever disfigured if she managed to survive, but I still saw her beauty in all of its anguish as her cooked skin bubbled and then sloughed. She was only eighteen with a full life ahead of her before this tragic moment.
Touching my wavy brown hair and noticing a few gray ones, I saw her bald singed head and the oozing blisters that were forming. Her left ear was completely missing. The flames had instantaneously cremated its delicate cartilage and skin.
Showering my tall, athletic frame, I flinched at the hot steaming water that engulfed me. Cringing as I thought of her mother, stripping off her own nightgown to toss it on top of her child’s tortured body, as neighbors gathered in the middle of the street from the noise of the chaos. She had hurled her naked, exposed physique and tackled her only daughter, in an attempt to quench the flames that were consuming her.
Shoving the cotton swabs in both my ears, I hoped to drown out her anguished pleas for help, to make the pain stop, but I would never forget her raspy voice. Standing over her, offering words of peace as her body writhed in torment, I prepared to make the suffering all go away.
I had to put her into a deep sleep necessitating life support to kill her pain. Impatiently yelling for the nurse to push the drugs, I made the mistake that would haunt me.
“Who did this to you?” I heard myself question.
“My Daddy,” she wailed as the drugs hit her system. She stopped speaking then breathing.
I quickly slipped the tube between her vocal cords just in time. My scope revealed all the surrounding tissue of her airway was engorged and charred from the inhalation of the smoke and flames. Seconds more and her oxygen supply would have been cut off; her young existence terminated.
With her pain now extinguished and her life stabilized, my job was done – or so I thought.
The nightmares of my Girl on Fire did finally stop, but she was soon replaced by even more tragic patients. Human suffering was my business. I had been intensely trained by the streets of Detroit to stare deeply into the eye of death and destruction and fiercely defy its aftermath with all my might.
Too bad no one had bothered to train young aspiring physicians to confront the turmoil our own souls would suffer from such cases. Back then, the best I could do was drown myself in a bottle of chardonnay, shopping, or even more work, hoping to find another way that would save my liver, my wallet, and my spirit.
The nurse blazed into my office just as I was packing up. My charts were complete and my ass was headed for the emergency exit after an interesting shift of Monday madness in the ER. The nurse guaranteed me this was a patient I would want to go see as she shoved the chart into my breastbone, preventing my escape.
Assuring her that smoking crack was dangerous for her health or that she had finally cracked into insanity under the pressures of our jobs, I told her there was no way in hell that I was seeing another patient, as I politely propelled the chart back into her arms.
“For god’s sake, go see this woman. You won’t believe your eyes and she is asking for you specifically.”
In my spectacles, I examined the chart for her name but it brought no recollection. Entering room twenty-two and staring back into her still-kind eyes, a flood of haunting memories swept over me.
There she was, many months later, standing before me so resplendent and peaceful. Recognizing her immediately even though her face was now reconstructed, we embraced.
“Thank you so very much for saving my life, all of you,” she wept through a very large smile, which appeared somewhat crooked due to the contracture at the one corner of her mouth. Half of her face was distorted by the skin grafts that did not match her brown skin tones, yet again I saw beauty and softness.
Several nurses and staff who remembered her horrific case had gathered in her room. Listening to her story of recovery, I took solace in the fact she could not remember much, as the burn center had kept her comfortably sedated. But she remembered my voice.
Sensing everyone’s unspoken question, she went on to explain that terrible night. At the early age of eighteen, she was already a mother of a young child, engaged to her love, and had her own small apartment and a steady job. She had taken both her father and mother in when they were nearly destitute. Her father had just recently been released from prison.
Soon realizing he was not a changed man and could not be trusted around her toddler, she had asked him to leave. In a drunken rage after slamming down several beers, he filled the last empty bottle with gasoline.
This daddy then ran up to his little girl as she was attempting to leave the heated scene, broke the bottleneck on her car and then flung the bottle straight into her skull.
He looked right into her eyes as she stood there in pure shock covered in gasoline and blood. Pulling out his lighter as he ignited her on fire, he yelled, “Burn bitch!”
Holding back my vengeful, disturbed voice was difficult, but I managed to coolly ask the fate of her father until my anger got the best of me.
“I hope he is burning in hell for what he did to you.”
A sly, cocked smile came over her face as she reassured us that she had taken care of him. My quizzical reaction and rising eyebrows made her laugh. We were in Georgia and when someone makes that kind of statement, I automatically think deep swamp and a body bag.
The District Attorney had fallen in love with her sweet nature and was just as disturbed by the heinousness of the crime. He basically allowed her any request and even offered some illegal ones involving a few criminals who owed him favors and were in the same prison where her father was being held.
But all she petitioned for was her own face-to-face private time with her tormentor. Thinking of how brave this young girl was, I still didn’t understand.
“Why?” we all asked in unison.
“Because he needed to see this.”
She was standing powerfully and shamelessly, so that we all could see her mutilated body.
“He needed to see that he could not rob me of my beauty or my smile or my joy. And then, of course, there was the real reason I was there.”
We were all waiting for it. My brain had already mapped out the scene. Did she punch him in the face or kick him in the testicles first?
“I had to look him in the eyes and tell him that I forgave him.”
I could not hold my silence any longer.
“What the fuck? You forgave him? The monster filled a beer bottle full of gasoline and then cracked it over your skull, dousing you in a flammable liquid before looking you right in the eye and lighting you on fire! And you freaking forgave him? That makes no sense!”
She smiled kindly as she shook her head at me as if trying to explain a pretty simple concept to a child.
“I forgave him but I did not excuse his actions. This was one of the easiest cases the DA has ever had. He will never leave prison. But I had to forgive him. That was for me. That was for my unborn child that I am carrying right now” she said, rubbing her belly lovingly.
“I couldn’t carry that kind of anger and rage inside my blood. That would only hurt me and my generations to come. No, I had to stop that evil from killing my soul. I had no choice but to forgive in order to heal and live.”
And healed she was. Those scars were not her burden but her freedom. There was no doubt in my mind that she would live a long, full life.
The scars that my Daddy had given me were hidden. They were all internal. And I had allowed them to come very close to incinerating me. But maybe there was a freedom for me as well.
This was the first time I had come to know what true forgiveness looked and felt like, despite years of therapists and self-help books. It was a lesson that I vowed to master one day and to never forget. It was a lesson that would yet again change the direction of my life.
This young healer gave me the insight to first forgive myself, and then others.
I urge you: when you find yourself in a situation that requires forgiveness, remember the Girl on Fire.
There is no grievance that can not be released.
Love holds no grievances.
image: DepositPhotos.com
