'My determination overrode my fear’

Most people with an intense fear of heights usually avoid anything involving high altitudes — like, you know, falling out of a plane for instance.

But Carol Goodman Heizer isn’t most people.

The 78-year-old Granbury resident was recently featured in the popular “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book series for the eighth time, in which she tells a whirlwind firsthand account of the time she got to feel like a bird in the sky.

“Chicken Soup for the Soul: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone,” by Amy Newmark, is a collection of 101 stories designed to help people overcome their fear and broaden their world — something Heizer got the opportunity to do at the age of 70 when she went skydiving for the first time.

“I have always had such a terrible fear of heights, but one of the things I wanted to do was skydive, because my daughter had done it years ago,” she told the HCN. “(My daughter) said, ‘Mom, it's the most thrilling, but the most terrifying thing you will ever do when you fall out of that plane.’ It was eight years ago on my 70th birthday, when she said, ‘Mom, you're going into a new decade. What special thing would you like to do this year?’ I said, ‘I want to skydive.’ She said, ‘Mom, you're 70.’ I said, ‘Well George Bush did it at 90.’ She said ‘Yeah, but he did it during the war. He knew what he was doing,’ and I said ‘No, I want to skydive.’”

Determined to pursue this newfound idea of hers all the way through, Heizer signed up not once, not twice, but three different times to skydive, as unfortunate bad weather led to her first two attempts being canceled.

Now, many people might take two cancelations as a warning or a bad omen not to entertain the idea any further, but Heizer was committed to her new skydiving hobby.

"We climbed to 10,000 feet in this small private plane, and on the way up, I kept thinking, ‘Why am I in my right mind going to jump out of a perfectly good plane and fall 10,000 feet to the earth?’” she said, chuckling.

Heizer explained in her story “Flying High” that, during the instructional skydiving lecture, she learned she would have a total of three parachutes on hand in the event that one or two failed.

“That thought was both comforting and terrifying and brought back my fear of heights in full force,” her story read. “Suddenly, everything became real.”

She recounted hearing the “reassuring hum of the plane’s engine one second,” and then the next hearing only the roar caused by her body “falling at one hundred miles per hour” in tandem with her instructor.

“I felt my skin sliding backward as Mother Nature gave me a natural facelift,” her story reads.

Heizer said at 5,000 feet in the air, her body jerked violently upward as her parachute opened, followed by the surrounding of complete and utter silence.

“You can almost hear the quiet,” she said. “It was magical.”

Her story describes in detail what her experience was like as she descended, and how the earth “became a checkerboard of farmland, subdivisions, and concrete roads.”

“I loved doing it so much,” she said. “The magic of falling, especially after the parachute opens, and it's so quiet. Now, I know how the birds feel up there in that quiet air just going with the air currents."

As soon as she landed and her “heels dug into the sod,” she knew she wanted to skydive again.

Unfortunately, Heizer’s next jump was not meant to be.

“The irony of it was that I landed, and I did fine. The only injury was to my blue jeans; I got a grass stain,” she said. “But two weeks later, I went to a friend's house. I stepped off her back porch on the edge of a concrete slab and did a total spiral break of my foot. I tore up my ankle so severely, the surgeon said, ‘I promise you, this will hurt the rest of your life,’ — and it does.”

Heizer giggled as she explained the irony in the situation of stepping six inches off a porch and doing that much damage to her ankle but falling 10,000 feet out of an airplane and not even getting a bruise.

"That's one of the ironies of life,” she said, chuckling.

Heizer said she even asked her orthopedic surgeon if she could ever skydive again, and he highly discouraged the idea and recommended she not take any chances.

"He said, ‘Well, let me put it to you this way, if you can't live without skydiving, I guess go ahead. But one wrong landing, and you're going to be crippled the rest of your life,’” she recounted. “And he said, ‘You have torn up that ankle so bad, you'd have been better off if you'd have just broken it.’ So, I got to thinking about it, and you know, I've been there, done that. I wanted to do it. I did it. The cost could be too, too much.”

Along with her several published works in the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books, Heizer is an eight-time published author. Her latest books include, “Losing Your Child-Finding Your Way,” “Seasons of a Woman’s Life,” and “Snapshots of Life from a Writer’s View.”

Her writing has also appeared in several publications such as Christian Communicator and Mature Living.

Heizer’s “I’ve Been Thinking” column can be found twice a month in the Hood County News.

Following her giant leap of faith — literally — Heizer recounts how she learned that stepping out of one’s comfort zone can “bring tremendous, satisfying rewards,” and how that realization gave her courage to consider trying other new adventures.

"I'm so afraid of heights,” she said. “I could no more climb up on the roof of my house. But I was so determined that I was going to (skydive), that my determination overrode my fear.”

ashley@hcnews.com | 817-573-1243