Shine Upon Her
Comfort sat down
shakily on a hard plastic chair, feeling both physically and emotionally
exhausted. She placed her hands on her knees to keep them still. She was shivering,
cold despite the warmth of the autumn night. She felt like crying; a lump in
her throat that she couldn’t swallow made her feel sick.
“You’re a paramedic,
Comfort. This is your job. Pull yourself together,” she told herself. Why was
this, this particular crash, these particular victims, why was she unable to
handle this? She handled everything else. She could normally separate herself
from her work, keep a distance. If she hadn’t been able to do that, she would
have lost it a long time ago. But this incident was different.
Maybe it was that she
had been on the train. That she and Fin had been in the toilet giggling and
carefree one moment, and the next moment, she was hearing echoes of the metal
crunching, the glass breaking, the anguished screams. And there had been blood
on her face. Her face. Her blood. Her own injury. She hadn’t been the paramedic
who drove up ten minutes later, and was calm and able to assess the situation.
She had been the frantic one, she was one of the injured, a statistic,
mentioned on the news. She’d never been on that side of things before.
And it was that that
compelled her to carry on, to insist to Charlie and Josh that she was fine,
that they needed her help. She wasn’t fine. She was screaming, panicking, but
she kept it on the inside.
But even then, she
might have coped. If she had just helped a few people out of the wreckage,
waved a cheerful goodbye to Josh and Nikki, and gone home. If she had dealt
with victims who made it, who found their way out. Or adults. Or… anything
other than what she had to deal with.
She had stepped
through a field of bodies, some already assessed, wearing the label “DEAD”.
Some yet to be examined; yet to have the final indignity of being labelled.
These were not just the DEAD, the bodies. They were people, they were children,
parents, wives, husbands, friends… they were loved, and they had relatives and
friends who would mourn for them, who would cry for them. And Comfort could
have cried for them too, she would have cried for them. She would have cried
and prayed for them, given them the final honour of having a fellow human being
standing tearfully by their side in death. But there were so many. She
couldn’t.
And then she had
found the children. Innocent, wide-eyed, singing and asking God to send help
for them. And He had sent Comfort. He had sent her there to reassure them, to
try in vain to get them all out alive.
She had stood by that
young boy and heard him ask why his friend was not being taken with them. She
had felt incapable of bringing solace to him, as his eyes had filled with tears
at the realisation that his friend had died. And she had, in this midst of
darkness, thanked God for letting her be the one to find these children.
Letting it be she, and not Nikki, or Fin, or Charlie. Because, although her
vision was blurred with tears, her voiced choked with sobs, and her mind filled
with an utter sorrow such as she had rarely experienced, she was able to lift
her faith, and, holding out her hand to the child, she had spoken a prayer that
she had first heard many years ago, that had never failed to provide hope, no
matter how despairing the situation felt.
May perpetual light
shine upon her,
And may she rest in
peace.
And, as she had heard the child join in, she had felt better. She had helped him, it was slight, but it was a help to him. And, to know that, felt good. It made her feel that she had not been useless. It made her glad that she had been the one to find them. If it had been Nikki, or Josh, or even Charlie, they would not have reacted the way that she had done. And she had done the right thing. She was sure of that.
But, as she sat
there, on the chair outside a cubicle in the hospital, she felt worse. Visions
of the dead overwhelmed her. She had been on that train; she felt as though she
could have, should have, saved them all. She had failed in her job.
The lump in her
throat restricted her breathing; she gasped for air and felt tears rushing down
her cheeks, pooling on the jacket that she had not yet taken off. She pushed it
away from her body, onto the floor, impatiently. She had failed, she was a
wreck, and she didn’t deserve to be wearing it. She couldn’t even handle one
train crash. The jacket was meant to convey that she was in a position of
trust, that she was capable. She wasn’t.
“Comfort?” came a
gentle voice next to her. Fin. He picked up the jacket and placed it on another
chair, before pulling her into his arms. “Oh, Comfort.” He stroked her hair gently.
“It’s okay, baby. You’ve had a long day.”
“No longer than you,
or – or anyone else,” she choked out, trying to slow down the sobs. “I don’t
see you crying, I don’t see Lara crying, or Josh, or…”
“Josh and Lara came
into work prepared for this. They know that they’ll have to deal with bad
things. You didn’t know that you were going to be in a train crash. You’re not
the paramedic today, Comfort, you’re the victim.”
“So are you. You’re
not crying.”
“I didn’t see the
things that you saw, baby.” He sighed, a sigh of relief that he had not had to
see the atrocities that Comfort had had to. “Look, come home with me, yeah?
Have something to eat, get away from here, and the memories and all.”
She nodded. “Please.”
As they walked away,
she saw the young boy. His face was wet with tears, and he was holding tightly
onto his mother’s arm. They passed close enough for Comfort to hear the child’s
words.
…may perpetual light
shine upon her…
Comfort leant against
Fin to steady herself. Maybe she could get away from the injured, from the
dead, from the hospital. But she could not escape from the memories.