November Ever After

Ed Carter is thoroughly convinced that divine intervention saved his life. Twelve days before the crash, he got a long-distance phone call one afternoon after practice. It was his mother calling from Wichita Falls,Texas. She broke the news that Ed’s father had died, and that Ed was to leave school and come home for the funeral. During the course of that conversation, Sarah Word emphatically told her son that he should not go to East Carolina. She explained that the plane would crash and that there would be no survivors. Ed, a starter at offensive tackle, played in a home game later that week, and then left town for Texas on the Monday prior to the East Carolina road trip. Ed was stunned and puzzled by what his mother told him. "How could Mom know this and be so sure about it actually happening"? he thought. "And how could she know about a plane trip that I didn’t even know about? We always traveled by bus for away games." During the week before going home for his father’s funeral, Ed never mentioned the conversation he had with his mom to anyone. In his mind, the idea was simply too farfetched to take seriously. “I didn’t believe there would be a plane crash,” he said. Ed had sufficient time to make it back to West Virginia to rejoin the team for its upcoming game. He had a roundtrip plane ticket, so he could have returned in time to get in two days of practice. In the meantime, Sarah kept insisting that Ed remain in Wichita Falls for a few more days. He wanted to get back to playing football, but eventually his mother was able to change his mind. “Once I got back to Texas, Mom never mentioned anything about a plane crash,” he said. “All she kept saying was how I needed to stay and help console my younger brothers. Every time she told me she didn’t want me to go, she’d start crying. I didn’t like seeing her cry, so I decided to stay home just to satisfy her.” Sarah’s words proved to be prophetic. The night of the crash, Ed was on the phone with a friend when he heard the radio news bulletin about the tragedy in far-away West Virginia. “I was just stunned,” he recalled,“everything happened so quickly.” The next day, Ed read about the disaster in the local paper, which erroneously listed him as one of the casualties. “It was like reading my own obituary,” he said. On that night and over the next few days, the phone never stopped ringing. Concerned friends and neighbors called to express their condolences. Ed answered some of the calls, which provided some much-needed relief for those who assumed that he was with the Marshall team. “In later discussions, my mom said that it was not a premonition when she told me about what would happen,” Ed said. “She made it clear that God gave her that revelation as we talked. After the crash, it didn’t take much to persuade me to ride the bus back to West Virginia.” During the twenty-eight-hour bus ride back to Huntington, Ed could not escape the constant visual reminders of the tragedy. At every bus station, it seemed, every paper in the news racks featured front-page stories about the crash. The huge headlines in bold-faced type verified a chilling fact. Most of Ed’s teammates died in that crash, but for some reason that was yet to be discovered, his life had been spared.