After the Accident

Sometimes love shines extra bright during the hard times. On June 4, 1952, a haggard train of cars and ambulances carried Meher Baba and His mandali back to Myrtle Beach from Prague, Oklahoma, where they had been treated after the terrible car accident of May 24. Mehera, Baba’s beloved, still couldn’t open her eyes fully after a severe brain injury. Elizabeth had eleven broken ribs. Baba Himself had a fractured leg, a broken arm, and a face swollen up beyond recognition.

Even during the journey, there were moments of unearthly sweetness. In the back of the ambulance carrying Baba and Mehera, Mehera had become more upset over the extent of Baba’s injuries than her own. But Baba Himself stayed awake during the journey to comfort her, holding her hand and asking her to look, look out the window—and tell Him what she saw. “A town is coming,” she would say, and, adding a little cheer, “It looks nice.”*

They arrived at Youpon Dunes, Elizabeth’s family’s house in Myrtle Beach, and kept taking care of one another. Elizabeth, though gravely injured herself, had thought of everything, including arranging for an air conditioner in Baba’s room. Meheru, with two injured hands, read to Mehera out of National Geographic to try and keep her spirits up. Mani wrote in a letter to concerned loved ones in India that “Goher, Rano, Kitty, and the others have all been wonderful,”**—dressing the wounds, tending to the household, doing anything they could. Mehera sat by Baba to keep Him company, sometimes massaging His feet, and Baba reassured her about her injuries, told her not to worry.

During the New Life, Baba renounced His divinity to play the role of a seeker, and prayed to God. Perhaps the kindness of that omnipotent, formless God shone through during this time, as well. I see it in Mehera’s description of Youpon Dunes: “Here, in this nice, big house, all could stay together… there was a window facing the sea of our second story bedroom, and a lift-chair running from the upstairs to the dining room and garage. [Elizabeth’s father] Mr. Chapin had built this house for his wife when he retired. But it was as if he had built it for Baba.”***

And then there was the day that Baba asked Rano to look for some entertainment in the paper that would assuage Mehera’s pain, the deadening of her spirits from the shock of His condition and discomfort of her own. Rano found a movie and a play; He said keep looking. Then she saw it: the first ever horse show in Myrtle Beach, happening that weekend. Mehera had always loved horses. At the show, they saw beautiful, high-stepping animals, and a twelve-year old girl, crippled from polio but passionate about horses, who was lifted into a buggy for one of the races, and won. It made Mehera smile.

These little gifts were everywhere, but perhaps the most overwhelming came from Baba Himself, personally, physically. It is clear from His itinerary after the accident. Mehera described that by that time the rest of the trip had lost its appeal; the shock and fatigue left them lackluster and ready to go home. Baba wasn’t sleeping well and was in constant pain. But instead of focusing on His recuperation, Baba tended to His lovers.

A few visitors came during the stay at Youpon Dunes—and then Baba went up to New York City, and the floodgates opened. Baba agreed to give darshans, to visit people’s houses, to have teas. Through the discomfort and exhaustion, He smiled and joked, He threw grapes as prasad, He gave people stories of intimacy with the God-man that will be with them forever. Ivy Duce recalled: “It was a wondrous sight to see people come—from all sorts of places and all walks of life—for their two or three minutes with Baba. It seemed as if some were almost dead, but they would walk out transfigured and newly alive. Some smiled, some wept heartbreakingly. It was a three-day love-feast.”****

Baba says that our love is a reflection of divine love. All the care that Baba’s close ones took of one another, despite their personal suffering, those tiny acts of kindness, were the same love that people responded to during the darshan days in New York, and later when, still in pain and wearing a cast, Baba visited with His lovers in England and Switzerland. It was the love that the Avatar has gone through so much suffering to reaffirm for us, the love that underpins everything, and changes lives with just a drop, and that Baba poured out during those difficult weeks in the West where its fragrance remains to this day.

*Mehera-Meher, by David Fenster, vol. 3, p. 63
**Mehera-Meher, by David Fenster, vol. 3, p. 68
***Mehera-Meher, by David Fenster, vol. 3, p. 63
****Lord Meher Online, p. 3107