[Image: GoFundMe]
In the heart of Kentucky, where the sky turned black and the wind screamed like a banshee, a storm didn’t just tear through homes, it tore through lives. Inside one shattered house in Laurel County, Paul and Gail Cline clung to each other as the world around them was ripped away.
“The doctors said that they lost opposite arms is because they were holding each other,” Brandy Bowman told NBC affiliate WLEX, speaking of her uncle and aunt who are lovers in their sixties.
The storm struck on a Friday, May 16, an ordinary day turned biblical. Paul and Gail were in their bedroom when the twister clawed its way through their town. A neighbour, drawn by their cries, pulled them from splintered walls into the narrow safety of a hallway, per People.
The family remembers how someone searching through the ruins heard Gail’s voice rising from the rubble.
“She said, ‘I need help. I see an arm down the hallway,’” Bowman recalled. It was Gail’s, the limb torn and ruined, still reaching.
Rescuers rushed the Clines to London Hospital. There, Gail lies tethered to life by machines, her lung punctured, her ribs shattered inward by the storm’s fury. A GoFundMe now seeks to patch the life the wind tore apart.
“Their home and vehicles and everything they’ve worked for is gone,” wrote Taylor Baker, another niece, in the fundraiser’s raw and aching lines.
“They are two of the best people you could ever find. My aunt’s daughter also has stage 4 cancer so they were already battling that before this hit. They need all the help and prayers they can get.”
Paul, stabilised but lost in the fog of dementia, hasn’t yet reckoned with the storm that changed everything.
“All I can’t get out of my head is just how terrified they both were. I cannot imagine the fear that was going through their minds, but there’s one thing about them, they are godly people,” said Baker.
The storm that dismembered their lives took others, too – nineteen dead across Kentucky, most from Laurel County. The tornado that struck London was no mere storm, but an EF-4; “violent,” the National Weather Service declared. Governor Andy Beshear had already declared a state of emergency, but even warnings couldn’t hold back the wind.
In the storm’s shadow, hope still flickers in the smallest acts.
“To my friends who showed up with trucks and trailers and drinks and who were ready to help any way they can, I will never be able to explain to you what it meant to me,” Baker wrote in a Facebook post on May 18.
“To the strangers who dropped food and drinks and supplies and helped carry and load.. thank you from the bottom of my heart. I know my aunt and uncle would be so grateful for this outpouring of help. And for the calls, texts and prayers for my family, Thank you all so much.”
“My uncle Paul is stable but did have to have an arm amputated,” she continued. “My aunt Gail is on life support still and also had an arm taken off. She needs all the prayers she can get.”
And so, in the quiet after the storm, a community gathers; hearts open, hands extended, prayers whispered into the winds that once roared.
[Source: People]
