the morning after......

With the passing of a good friend, come many mixed feelings that each personal interprets and processes differently. I experienced a whole spectrum of feelings. It started with doubt and disbelief. How could the lord take someone so young and strong so quickly? It didn’t seem fair, and certainly could not be true. It was as though we were all waiting for Dave to walk into the party at any minute. Then those feelings of disbelief and shock blended into feelings of sorrow and grief. We realized that he was not coming back and it was a hard thing to deal with. But, but the grace of god we were all blessed with a large group of friends and a family to lean on. We cried, we laughed, we told Dave what a punk he was…..and at the end of the day it made us feel better. Now that the wake and the funeral have passed we can move on with the mourning process and move forward. This is my first death of someone so close to me as an adult, and it was very difficult. But seeing a church filled with close to 1000 people, from as far away as Korea, it really touched my heart. My feelings are slowly turning now to a mixed feeling of great joy in knowing that Dave is with the lord in an awesome place, but very sad in that we will never live with him on this earth again.

In my attempt at gaining some assemblance of normalcy, I went out to the airport Saturday morning to work my dispatch shift. A guy called looking for a flight review. I offered to do it for him in his own aircraft. He flew a TB-20….a Trinidad. A very nice aircraft that would’ve been a joy to fly if it were a hair bigger. But I enjoyed messing with the avionics and letting him show me how to operate the autopilot. His BFR consisted of the standard ADIZ departure. Once over Winchester we did some stalls, slow flight, steep turns. Being an obvious master of his own airplane, I decided to shift gears and see if this guy really knew how to use his avionics. What a blast. 6 miles south of the Martinsburg VOR we set up the radios to fly the ILS approach to runway 26. We crossed the Initial approach fix and turned outbound before making the procedure turn inbound and intercepting the localizer. The winds were strong and you could see the autopilot was crabbing the nose of the airplane quite a bit to the right to maintain on the center of the localizer. We reached mins and cut off the autopilot and put the bird down in a fabulous x-wind landing. Dip the right wing to maintain runway centerline, but straighten the nose with left rudder and land on the right wheel. A complex yet graceful maneuver when done with finesse.

The second time down the localizer was a real treat. The Martinsburg airport lies in between the Blue Ridge Mountains. There are ridges to the east and west of the airport. Field elevation is 700ft, and the tops of the ridge reach about 2k. Not the Rocky Mountains but big enough to set the scene for a great sunset. As we came down the final to the west runway, the orange ball of sun sat teetering upon the ridge waiting to set. As soon as the sun dips below it is only a matter of seconds before it disappears behind the horizon. The absolutely gorgeous sunset and the chance to fly in the plane reminded me how luck I am to be alive and to be able to chase my dream. The setting sun was somewhat metaphorical in symbolizing the end of Dave’s life, and the eventually beginning of our lives anew. Bringing with us the strength, wisdom and inspiration that Dave left us with. His 29 years of life allowed him to see and do much more than many people see or do in a lifetime. I anticipate spending my next 30 years in much the same way. And when we meet again, I will tell him about all the great places I have flown and foreign lands I have seen. And how he inspired me to be a better person. For this I am thankful.