This First Person article is the experience of Linda Gerritsen, a plane crash survivor and social worker from Riverton, Man., where she leads a grief support group. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see this FAQ. You can read more First Person articles here.

Every year when March arrives, the same memories return — and I find myself carrying the weight of something that happened when I was 19.

The cold, the sky, the dates on the calendar — they’re all triggers that bring me back to the weekend in 1982 when my friend JA, a pilot, and I flew home from an annual youth retreat in Caronport, Sask.

We had refuelled in Swan River and headed out over Lake Winnipegosis for the last stretch home.

I never imagined we wouldn’t make it.

March 3: We crashed.

I remember everything from that day, except the six hours or so when we were unconscious after impact. It was –21°C. Even now, 44 years later, I still compare the sky on cold March days to the sky in my memory. Is it colder today? Would I have died of hypothermia? 

JA did.

I think about the conversations we had, the prayers we prayed, the songs we sang. JA made sure I got into the back seat of the plane. He covered us with a sleeping bag. We settled in for a long night.

I didn’t realize how dangerously cold he was. I kept covering his head, and he kept uncovering it. At one point, he asked me for my gauntlets. When I felt his hands, they were icy. I knew something was wrong. Around midnight, he began talking like the youth group leader he was — singing, praying — thinking he was in church. Hallucinations had set in. I kept checking his pulse. Around 4:30 in the morning, there was no more pulse. 

I felt like I had lost the biggest fight of my life.

March 4: The day I was rescued. My Aunt Colleen’s birthday.

I love my Aunt Colleen, and I am thankful her birthday falls on the day I was rescued, not the day of the accident. It helps me remember to send her a card. I will always know that date and always remember how it started, 44 years ago.

I woke around 8 a.m. to a bright blue sky. I was thankful for it. JA’s body lay beside me. I chose not to look at him after he died; I didn’t want that image in my mind forever. I prayed that God would rescue me before noon or let me die. I didn’t want to sit there hour after hour, waiting.

I was carried through something I should not have survived.– Linda Gerritsen

Around 11:30 a.m. I heard the drone of a small aircraft. I had a piece of a space-age blanket — the tinfoil kind. I stuck my arm out the window and waved it. Later I heard that the men in the rescue plane all cheered when they saw movement and realized someone was alive down there.

They circled three times and landed. The first person to reach the wreckage was JA’s brother-in-law.

“Is he unconscious?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “He is dead.”

He stepped back, and the rescuers lifted me out of the tin can and into the rescue plane. Two men stayed behind with JA’s body while they flew me to the hospital in The Pas.

In the rescue plane, I greedily drank coffee, though they were careful about how much they let me have. I was unconscious again by the time we reached the hospital. I don’t remember the ambulance ride from the lake to St. Anthony’s Hospital in The Pas. I wish I had gone back years later to thank them for caring for me when I arrived so broken.

That night my heart stopped. They kept calling my name until I finally answered. My dad was there. He told me not to talk so much. He had been out looking for me, too. 

March 5: I have no memory of the flight and ambulance ride from The Pas to Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. 

I remember lying on a bed, broken and bandaged. It seemed to take a long time before I was taken into surgery to place a rod with 16 screws to hold my left femur together. My right eye had been damaged by a piece of plexiglass and was patched. Intravenous lines and machines surrounded me. I was in intensive care.

I drifted in and out of consciousness. I had no sense of days or nights. I don’t remember many visitors, except my mom and her cousins. I remember them holding my hand.

March 12: My mom’s birthday. I was still in the intensive care unit. 

When my mom came, I had to tell her the doctor had come to talk to me about surgery the next day. I was going to lose my right eye. It wasn’t repairable, and there was a risk of infection and blindness in both eyes.

March 13: Surgery day. Extraction. 

I grew up with an aunt who lost an eye at nine. She did well for herself. I was alive, and I wasn’t worried about losing it. I was grateful I would still be able to see.

March 30: Amputation day.

Sometime before this day, my doctor talked to me about the possibility of losing my toes. I cried. I didn’t know I would lose much more than that. When I woke from surgery and realized how short I was, I was upset, although in fairness, they didn’t have time. Gangrene had set in.

I remember lying there, trying to make sense of what had happened while I was unconscious. They wouldn’t let my parents in to see me, but they let a pastor in. I was extremely thirsty, but they would only give me ice chips. I reached down and felt the bandages, and even though I couldn’t lift my legs, I knew that I was a lot shorter than I expected to be. 

It was a strange mix of shock and disbelief, although strangely enough, it was okay. I had survived a plane crash, frostbite, heart failure and the loss of my eye, but this felt different. This was permanent. This was the part of the story I would carry every day for the rest of my life. Losing my legs meant losing my dream of being a nurse.

Today: Forty-four years later, I am alive.

I have lived more years as a double amputee than with my own legs. I am thankful for the wonderful prosthetists I’ve had over the years. (Especially one person named Larry Lawson — he made my legs fit well, and he had a big heart. He has a place in mine.)

Surviving that night on the lake changed the entire direction of my life.– Linda Gerritsen

I think of JA a lot. He and I were friends. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, but still I miss the incredibly talented guy he was. I guess even now it is hard to explain how I feel about losing him. Even today, it still feels like I lost the biggest fight of my life, trying to keep him alive.

Why was I allowed to survive?

But while surviving that night on the lake changed the entire direction of my life, it didn’t take away my faith or rob me of my hope.

Every March, while the memories return — the cold, the sky, the dates — so does the reminder that I was carried through something I should not have survived. God carried me through that plane crash.

I am still here, and I am grateful.