TikTok Post 37

Post 37  

       The plane carrying their soccer team had crashed, killing players and fans including Nando Prado’s mother and sister. In his text, Miracle in the Andes, Nando told of his harrowing 72 days being snowbound and craving for air, food, and life amidst  the frigid Andes peaks. Rescue searches had ceased, and their unending deprivation ultimately forced them to do the unthinkable.

        Nando thought of his childhood and father. “My respect for my father was endless … I wanted desperately to be like him…”  Despite his pain and suffering, Nando could not stand the thought of his father grieving for him. “I could not stand the idea that he thought I was dead. I felt an urgent, almost violent longing to be with him, to comfort him, to tell him  he had not lost all… ‘I am alive, I whispered to him, I am alive.’”

        After his miraculous climb over the peak and down to civilization, when he admitted to his father that they had eaten the flesh of those who hadn't survive, his father replied, “You did what you had to do. I am happy to have you home.”

          Nando recalled: “There was so much I wanted to tell him, that I had thought of him every moment, that his love had been the guiding light that led me to safety.…He was never an openly affectionate man, but I never doubted his love when I was a boy. It was quiet love, but solid and deep and enduring. When I was in the mountains, stranded in the shadows of death, that love was like a safety line anchored in the world of the living. As long as I held on to that love, I was not lost, I was connected to my home and to my future, and in the end, it was that strong cord of love that led me out of danger.” That father/son bond not only gave him identity, it also gave him life.