Before my father died, I remember singing.
Story
Two
When morning arrives, I depart the hotel and make my way back to the interstate. Right as I merge onto I-5 on my way out of Eugene, I see a shooting range off the highway, with a billboard towering above it asking, “Do you have defensible space around your home?”
Three
Like anyone born between 1973 and 1989, my decision-making skills were heavily influenced by Oregon Trail, an educational video game in which the player leads his family of five on the titular journey westward in 1848. I spent days in my elementary school’s computer lab, absorbing all the knowledge the game had to impart, but gaining absolutely no relevant experience. As such, I have no idea how to ford a river, but I know when it’s ideal to do so. I have only fired a gun on one occasion, skeet shooting off the side of a cruise ship when I was 131, but I know that bison provide the most meat for the fewest bullets.
Four
The phone in my hotel room rings just before 11 a.m., and the front desk agent on the other end informs me that Maurice awaits my presence. As I scramble down to the lobby, it occurs to me that I have no idea if I’ll recognize Maurice Newman, Esq., whom I haven’t seen since a family trip here for the turn of the millennium. In the lobby, I spot a towering, overweight, graying man sitting alone who appears about the age my father would be if he had flown Continental, and sure enough, it’s Maurice. When I greet him, he says it’s good to see me, then adds, “You look a little bit like your father.”
Five
On January 15th, U.S. Air Flight 1549 left New York’s LaGuardia Airport en route to Charlotte, with continuing service to Seattle. Famously, that flight failed to reach either of its destinations—that flight didn’t even successfully leave New York City. Moments after takeoff, it struck a flock of geese, destroying both of the plane’s engines. With insufficient altitude to make it back to LaGuardia or any other airport, the plane’s captain landed it in the Hudson River. Rescuers recovered all 155 people from the plane, which led to the event becoming known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
Six
I have a little secret to confess, and now seems like as good a time as any: I am going to die.
Seven
The roadside signs in rural Texas read “Speed Limit: ‘We don’t care,'” or at least, that’s how I interpret them. Officially, signs declare a maximum of 80 miles per hour, but this strikes me as an arbitrarily large number put there because the signs can’t actually declare indifference.
Eight
“Bop-bah! This is the sound of settling! Bop-bah! Bop-bah!”
Nine
The last time I visited my uncle Steve, my father was still alive.
Ten
Two days ago, I received a series of texts from an uncle on my mom’s side of the family asking me to swing through Memphis on this next leg of my journey.
I will not be swinging through Memphis.
Eleven
Yesterday, my car’s odometer ticked past the 3,000 mile mark on this trip, which means it needs an oil change. Fortunately, I am in a major American city, where getting my car’s oil changed should simply require locating the nearest chain car maintenance location. Unfortunately, I am in a major American city in the South on a Sunday, which means every place that could change my oil is currently closed for church.
Twelve
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck, I think, far too early in the morning for this sort of thing. My car is going to explode.
Thirteen
The drive out of Atlanta begins on the proverbial heels of a Honda Accord from Shelby County, Tennessee, the county in which Memphis resides, and I wonder to myself if I’d know the owner of the car. It seems unlikely, but in my experience, that actually makes it probable.
Fourteen
Yesterday, Kathy spoke of how her husband’s murder brought her back to her faith, how she found solace in the church and felt a debt to it afterwards. While I suppose this is a common sentiment—my understanding of the appeal of religion is that it allows people to confront the scarier elements of the world—I’ve always felt the exact opposite.
Fifteen
A short metro ride carries me from my hotel to Arlington National Cemetery, our nation’s most hallowed ground. A military graveyard built on Robert E. Lee’s estate in the aftermath of the Civil War, Arlington marks the final resting place for more than 300,000 people who served our country1, including Presidents Kennedy and Taft, and Chief Justice Rehnquist. Inside its gates, one can find notable memorials such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as well as tributes to the astronauts lost on Challenger and Columbia.
In a back corner of little relevance to most of the population, there resides a memorial on which my father’s name is etched.
For most Americans, the War on Terror began on September 11, 2001, but there were many killed in that war beforehand. On January 5, 1993, Congress acknowledged that fact by passing Special Joint Resolution 129, which authorized the construction in Arlington of a memorial to those lost in the attack on Pan Am 103. It would be the first civilian monument ever erected in our nation’s most prestigious military cemetery.
The town of Lockerbie donated 270 pink sandstone bricks to the cause, one for each life lost, and Frank Klein, a man who lost his daughter Patricia in the attack, built a memorial cairn—a traditional Scottish structure—on a small plot of land.
My mom, sister, and I attended the groundbreaking and dedication ceremonies, both of which included speeches by then-President Clinton. At the end of the former, on the fifth anniversary of the bombing, the President made the rounds and offered his condolences to people there. That freezing cold day, I was the first person whom he approached, and he shook my hand, expressed sympathy for my loss, and signed an autograph.
I was awestruck. The President came to me first!
After offering condolences to my mom and sister, President Clinton made his way on to other families, and the three of us tried to leave the event. Secret Service agents blocked our path, telling us that the security protocol for the event meant that nobody was allowed to leave until the President did. I can’t say how cold it was that day, but in my memory, it was the coldest cold I had ever experienced. Our formal clothes meant we were underdressed for the occasion, and my mom pled with the Secret Service to let us slip out, but to no avail. Instead, we huddled in a corner and stared daggers at the President, hoping it would somehow make him go away a little bit quicker.
While I remember all of this, an octogenarian named Shirley, who greets me at the Arlington Visitors Center information booth, appears to be completely unaware of it. I asked her how to find the Cairn—every other time I’ve visited, someone else led me there—but she has no idea what I’m talking about.
“September 11th? That’s right here,” she tells me as she pulls a map from beneath the counter and points to a spot that is not where I wish to go.
The woman is tiny, her hands wrinkled and her voice meek, and as such, I stifle my exasperation and resist the urge to point out that she was alive when Pan Am 103 fell out of the sky. I expect this sort of reaction from my generation, but not from hers. Surely, Shirley has some recollection of the second-deadliest terrorist attack against an American target?
“No, Pan Am 103,” I correct her. “The Lockerbie bombing? The memorial cairn?”
Her finger circles feebly above the map, seeking a point it has clearly never sought before. I think back a few months, vaguely recalling the route the tour bus took when I attended the 20th anniversary memorial, and locate the memorial on the map myself. After I point it out, Shirley grabs a highlighter, draws a route, and tells me it’s a 20-25 minute walk. I thank her and depart.
Outside, I trudge uphill towards my destination, and feel out of place as tourists surround me. It must be spring break somewhere, as families are out in force, wandering the grounds as part of the kind of educational trip that brought my family here on a couple of occasions before we ever imagined my father’s name inscribed in this place.
Around me, families talk as they walk, oddly jovial for such a grim place. Their mood affects my own, and, with nobody here to talk to, I plug my headphones into my iPhone and listen to the Arcade Fire’s Funeral as I walk.
This is either entirely appropriate or entirely inappropriate. I have no idea which.
I never know how to act at cemeteries.
Many years ago, during one of our Month-Long Trips, my family visited my father’s grave. After placing rocks on his headstone, per Jewish tradition, we stood silent for a moment. At age eight, I felt uncomfortable with the silence, and, when my darting eyes noticed dandelions growing from the ground between him and us, I joked aloud about how he was “literally pushing up daisies.”
My mom yelled at me, began crying, and sent me back to the van, and I don’t blame her, because even before I said it, I knew it was wrong. The problem was, I had no idea what was right.
Clearly, I still don’t, because here I am, propelling myself uphill to the beats of arguably the decade’s finest album. I may not be whistling through a graveyard, but I am indie-rocking through one, a fact that I grow increasingly conscious of as the crowds thin out, branching off the path towards Arlington’s more famous sights and leaving me alone on my route.
Only halfway through “Une Anne Sans Luminere,” the third track on Funeral, I arrive at my destination much quicker than I expected. Dammit, Shirley. Old people have no concept of time.
The cairn lies in a far corner of the cemetery, beside a parking lot and a maintenance shed. The monument stands about eight feet tall and was constructed out of pinkish sandstone, which makes it a rather modest memorial, especially by D.C. standards. Given its circular structure, reminiscent of a silo, there aren’t truly sides, but one portion of it features a plaque which reads:
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
THE TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY
PEOPLE KILLED IN THE
TERRORIST BOMBING OF
PAN AMERICAN AIRWAYS
FLIGHT 103 OVER LOCKERBIE,
SCOTLAND
21 DECEMBER, 1988
PRESENTED BY
THE LOCKERBIE AIR DISASTER TRUST
TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Below, the cairn’s marble base is inscribed with the names of all those who died. I look for my father, and take pictures of his name on the base and the cairn from all sides.
It’s strange to see my father’s name spelled out in full: SAUL MARK ROSEN. People’s middle names never come up unless they’re involved in some atrocity. In life, how many of his friends knew his middle name? How many of these 270 people’s middle names, engraved in marble, were used or even known before these people became murder victims2?
The only non-familial middle names I know are those of presidents or assassins, and my father was no John Fitzgerald Kennedy or Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, he died so young, he never qualified to run for the presidency—the 1988 election took place a few weeks before his 35th birthday. But while I can tell you about George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George Walker Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama, the presidents who I can really remember, nobody in my family knows for sure whether my paternal grandfather, Simon Rosen, even had a middle name.
Heroes and victims get middle names. The rest blow away on the winds of history.
As I’m about to walk away from the cairn, an older couple arrives, and I strike up a conversation. They tell me their names are Peter and Anne, and while I guess their accents are German, they’re actually from the Netherlands.
“Did you know anybody on board?” I ask, and Peter replies negatively. They aren’t even here at Arlington for the cairn.
“We came here to see Kennedy’s grave,” Peter explains. “We met a month after he was killed. We were both 18 at the time, and we were just so shocked that something like that could happen in the world.”
I tell them that my father died on board Pan Am 103, and they offer their sympathies.
“Did they ever discover why the plane went down?” Anne asks me, much to Peter’s embarrassment.
“It was a terrorist attack,” I reply, educating my elders for the second time in less than an hour.
“A bomb,” Peter adds.
Anne asks me follow-up questions, if they ever caught the people responsible, and both Peter and I catch her up to date, especially in regards to the trial at Camp Zeist, in their home country. After a few minutes, they decide to make their way to Kennedy’s grave.
I’m ready to head back into the city, but I figure that, if Peter and Anne paid their respects to the memorial that includes my father, I can stop by Kennedy’s grave for them. As I leave the area and make my way downhill to the gravesite of our 35th president, I take in the cairn’s surroundings. Civil War-era graves dominate the vicinity, while close to the cairn, there sits an old copper cannon, long since gone green. My map says this part of Arlington is known as Section 1, but I have no idea if sections here were designated chronologically or not.
As I walk past the Lee House, the Pentagon looms in the distance, and I think back to 9/11, and the pillar of smoke that emerged from it that day. The experience of 9/11 defines my generation, much as Kennedy’s assassination did our parents’. My mom was eight years old when Kennedy was gunned down, and she still remembers hearing the announcement over the intercom of her elementary school.
Likewise, I will never forget what I was doing when the first plane hit the twin towers that fateful day.
I was sleeping.
September 11, 2001 was the first class day of my third week of college, sort of. The UW’s Fall Quarter technically began in October, but in an attempt to escape Memphis early, I signed up for a program that let freshmen take a single, condensed class in August and September. As such, I was one of a few hundred students on campus, living in the dorms, when the attack happened.
Since I lived on the West Coast, pretty much all of that day’s horrors had happened by the time I knew anything had happened. I had set my alarm for 7:00am, and when it went off, I dashed off to the shower, as usual. When I returned to my room, I logged onto AOL to check my email, and was greeted by a picture of a plane flying into the World Trade Center on the home screen.
At first, I thought somebody had finally hacked AOL’s home screen, but I clicked on the photograph and saw a real story. Horrified that it was true, I turned on the TV and watched news footage replaying all the events they had footage of—the second plane hitting, the towers collapsing, and the smoke at the Pentagon. The sound of the TV awakened my roommate, whose lone class started at noon.
“What the fuck, dude?” he moaned, half awake. “Why did you turn the TV on?”
“I’m sorry, man,” I replied. “But somebody flew planes into the World Trade Center. One, maybe both towers collapsed. I have to watch this.”
“All right,” he moaned as he rolled over and pulled his comforter over his head, trying to go back to sleep. “But don’t let it happen again3.“
I threw open the door to our room, so my neighbors could come watch, but as people swung by, one question kept coming up: Did we still have class? Nobody knew for certain—we hadn’t gotten any emails saying we didn’t, so we went anyway, and the class became three and a half hours of pretending to care about anything but what had happened 2400 miles east. In the middle of class, my mom called, not to check on me, but to let me know that the first of what we called my “birthday checks”—the Pan Am structured settlement money—had arrived in the mail that day.
Unknown thousands dead, $34,000 in my bank account.
That night, my dorm’s RAs led a candlelight vigil to Gasworks Park, which has a scenic view of downtown Seattle, where we saw that the beacon atop the Space Needle was lit for the first time in ages. For once, no planes were aloft for it to blind.
That night, as several dozen of us stood on top of Sundial Hill in the park, I told the assembled crowd my story, letting them know that this was not the first terrorist attack ever, and would probably not be the last. On the walk home, several people approached me and expressed condolences or asked for my thoughts, which I freely provided.
Six days later, I turned 18.
Welcome to adulthood, kid.
The memorials to Kennedy and Pan Am 103 could stand in for their places in our cultural memory: Whereas the cairn feels nearly forgotten, tucked into a corner of the cemetery, Kennedy’s grave is central and well-visited by a crowd packed full of families of tourists, foreign military members, and, somewhere, a couple who came from the Netherlands to pay their respects.
I have no personal connection to any of the people buried here, to John or Robert or Jackie O, so I decide to spend only a moment as part of the masses of humanity gathered here. As I squeeze my way forward to glimpse the Eternal Flame, a teenage boy staring at JFK’s plaque asks his mother a question to which the answer is literally right in front of him, carved in stone: “When did he die?”
“1963,” his mother answers. “That’s when they stopped making convertible limousines.”
On the way out, I spend a moment taking in the scenic view of our nation’s capital, and I’m forced to admit that, if I didn’t loathe so much of what the city stands for, I would consider it fairly beautiful.
I suppose this makes the District of Columbia the metropolitan equivalent of Paris Hilton.
I listen to the rest of Funeral along the trek downhill to the Arlington subway stop. While I walk towards the subway station, a group in front of me stops to take a picture with the Memorial Entrance in the background. I try to duck out of the picture at first, but realize there’s no way for me to avoid the frame, so I keep walking along with the all the other tourists on this sidewalk.
Someday soon, one of these people will go home and load that picture onto his computer. The group will look at the photo, and see only themselves and the background. My face, like all the others, will blend into the scenery. We will be there, but we will not.
How many times has this happened to me now? How many pictures am I in, but nothing more than a ghost, a figure of no relevance appearing incidentally at best? How many times did this happen to my father?
Cameras have soared in popularity since my father’s death—the point-and-shoot camera existed for a while when he was killed, but they were far from ubiquitous back then. The decline of film as a medium led to a boom in photography—I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me more digital pictures were taken last year than total photos taken in my dad’s lifetime.
Still, this must have happened to my father, once or twice if not more. Somewhere, a photograph ostensibly of someone or something else features his face in the frame. Maybe someone noticed him while looking at the photo, or maybe nobody ever has. Either way, nobody ever knew who he was.
As I leave the cemetery behind, it occurs to me that being in the background of a photograph is a particular, peculiar form of immortality. Nobody can know my father died without first acknowledging he lived.
Back in the city, I meet my next interview subject, Mark Zaid, in the lobby of a hotel across the street from the White House, and we move into the coffee shop to speak. Zaid comes off as a high-powered Washington attorney, but fortunately, his schedule opened up enough for him to speak with me today. Even if he hadn’t told me that he had a meeting after this, I could guess from how he’s dressed: A tie featuring the designs of historical American flags complements his pinstriped suit and light blue dress shirt. His glare, even behind his glasses, gives him a hawkish look.
Everything about this man screams “lawyer,” probably because he’s worked as one for a long time now. But on the day the Pan Am 103 fell out of the sky, he was merely a senior from the University of Rochester, about to go on a cruise from Florida with his family.
A semester earlier, Zaid participated in the same London study abroad program that 35 students on board Pan Am 103 were returning from. When he first heard of the bombing, Zaid didn’t feel personally affected. Then, he learned the names of the students that died, and realized two of them, Eric Coker and Katherine Hollister, were fellow Rochester students. He didn’t know Coker personally, but they were a degree of separation apart, and Hollister was dating one of Zaid’s fraternity brothers.
The indiscriminate nature of the attack, and the knowledge that, months earlier, he had studied in the same program as those who died, hit home for him.
“This was the fall semester group of kids, and I was on the spring semester. So those of us who had who had come back the semester before, it impacted us a great deal too, because it was so arbitrary,” Zaid says. “It was one of those events, you didn’t have to have the real personal connection to have suffered the loss.”
The following Fall, when Zaid began law school in Albany, Pan Am 103 pushed his studies in a particular direction.
“I wanted to focus on terrorism, because of the personal connections,” he recalls. “In Albany, there were five or six families that had lost somebody. Paul Hudson4 was there at the time, and of course, Paul was the one who created the family group to begin with. He lost his 16-year-old daughter. Hartunian5, I’m forgetting the victim’s name, but her brother was class of ’86 in Albany Law School. I think Elizabeth Philipps6 was over there. I don’t remember who the others were, but there were like five or six families in the Albany region.”
Right away, Zaid utilized the community’s Pan Am 103 connections. He arranged for Hudson to speak to the law school, and he wrote a paper for the school’s law review on amending the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act7 and other laws to allow victims of terrorism to sue terrorists.
During his third year of law school, indictments were filed against the Libyans who authorities believed responsible. Months later, a conference about aviation security and terrorism at his school set up Zaid’s career, though he didn’t know it at the time. A friend organized the conference, and Zaid offered see if Pan Am 103-associated families and speakers would attend. One person he reached out to was a lawyer named Alan Gerson.
“I didn’t know Alan,” Zaid says. “I got him through a mutual State Department friend. As a result of the conference, Alan writes this op-ed that appears in the New York Times in July that talks about Libya should be held accountable.
“The trial against Pan Am and the insurance company had started in April and was going to the jury. The aviation lawyers, the family lawyers, flipped out because they were concerned that the jury would see the op-ed and go ‘Oh, yeah. Why should we hold Pan Am responsible? Libya’s the responsible party, let’s let the governments take care of it.’ So they were furious with Alan.”
Eventually, a man named Bruce Smith, a Pan Am pilot whose wife Ingrid died on board Pan Am 103, saw Gerson’s op-ed and hired him to sue Libya.
“Bruce knew that this could have happened to any of the airlines,” Zaid says. “There wasn’t anything unique about Pan Am that it happened to. The level of security that existed at the time, they could have done it to American, Eastern, TWA, whoever.”
At the time, if a plane crashed, the Warsaw Convention capped damages against the airline at $75,000 unless one could prove willful misconduct by the airline. Pan Am’s insurance company offered each next of kin $100,000, but only if they waived their right to sue. Smith, who believed that Pan Am wasn’t to blame, wanted 10 or 20 families to accept the insurance company’s payment, pool it together, and place a bounty on the people responsible for the bombing. According to Zaid, only three or four families joined with Smith, but they went ahead with the plan anyway.
After Gerson took Smith on as a client, he was forced out of his law firm due to a conflict of interest—Libya had hired another partner to represent it. Soon after, Zaid graduated from law school, and reached out to Gerson in the hopes the elder lawyer might know of some sort of job opportunity. Gerson remembered Zaid, and how the young lawyer’s invitation to Albany led to Smith hiring him. Gerson offered Zaid a job right away.
The Gerson legal team decided to ignore the ongoing Pan Am case and file a lawsuit against Libya, while also lobbying for legislation that would help their legal efforts. Unfortunately for them, Congress’s agenda changed in 1994, when Republicans won control of both the House and Senate. Republican leadership prioritized the Contract With America over terrorism.
Until Timothy McVeigh struck.
“What really changed it was Oklahoma City,” Zaid says. “When Oklahoma City happened, at first everybody thought it was a bunch of Arabs who did it, so international terrorism was back on the forefront.”
Congress scrambled to pass new laws in response to the attack, and Zaid was amused to see three different drafts of the legislation he worked on all in the same package.
“It was kind of pathetic to see, because clearly somebody had just taken every bill that had ever been introduced on the topic and just thrown it in. There were competing bills, there were ones we had modified. Eventually, I pointed it out or somebody realized, ‘Okay, let’s focus on one and work on it,’ and we got that switched over in April of ’96 and Clinton signed it.”
Prior to the bill’s passage, under the FSIA, it was illegal to sue another country in United States court. The bill amended that law to allow lawsuits to be filed against other countries under certain conditions: The country needed to be on the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the lawsuit had to be related to certain crimes, including terrorist attacks, hostage-taking, and exhibitional killings.
Soon after the legislation passed, the Pan Am 103 attorneys filed suit. Kreindler and Kreindler—the firm that represented a plurality of families, including my own—filed first, which Zaid resented.
“All of a sudden, suing Libya was the thing to do, because they didn’t have to do any work. We did all the work, they were fighting us all the way, and Kreindler was actually the first one to sue under the new law against Libya, because we were still rewriting the complaints and he just filed the lawsuit. Interestingly enough, you want to get a sense of his ethics and his colleagues’ ethics were, they filed the lawsuit for all their clients, about 100 families.”
I mention to Zaid that my family was among Kreindler’s clients, and he continues, no less furious at the firm.
Zaid claims that Kreindler interpreted the retainer agreements that families signed as applying to all Pan Am 103 cases, not merely the suit against Pan Am itself, and that the firm signed on clients to the Libya case without informing them. He tells me that two or three years after the Pan Am case ended, he received phone calls from people who hoped he would represent them in the Libya case, only to discover they were already listed as plaintiffs.
“This case, I’ll tell you, has been the best experience of my life and the worst experience of my life,” he continues. “The best experience being, I’ve really enjoyed working with all the families. It was very personal to me. It mattered a lot. The legislation was a high point. I mean, that was a significant accomplishment. A lot of people, not just Pan Am 103, terrorism victims have benefitted as a result.
“But it became the worst experience because most of the fighting we were having was between the lawyers on the same side about money, then about the way the lawyers fashioned the settlement agreement with all these conditions that we had no control over. They were controlled government to government, and essentially required the families, or put them in the position, that if they wanted their extra $4 million, their extra $2 million, you had to get Libya taken off the terrorist list and for sanctions to be lifted. Why the hell would we want to do that?”
Zaid had other ideas as to how the payout should have been structured. While he’s proud of the $10 million per victim settlement, his team thought they could get $20 million per victim, or perhaps the same $10 million, but without any conditions attached. He believes that at some point, Libya offered to discuss a $6 million dollar flat payment with no strings attached, but the plaintiffs’ committee rejected it.
The committee was appointed by Thomas Platt, the federal judge in Brooklyn who presided over the case. Any lawyer with clients received a seat on the committee, but membership was proportional to the number of clients represented. Because Kreindler and Kreindler had the most clients, Lee Kreindler chaired the committee until his death, when his son, Jim, took the seat.
A man named Doug Rosenthal represented Zaid’s legal team on the committee, and Zaid feels that the committee tried to minimize Rosenthal’s participation. Zaid alleges that the committee scheduled meetings with the Libyan lawyers without telling Rosenthal, or scheduled additional meetings after he left Paris, where they took place. At some point, Zaid’s team learned the committee had rejected the $6 million no-strings-attached offer in favor the $10 million offer with three conditions, and threatened to take action.
“We were going to sue the other lawyers on the plaintiffs’ committee if the second payment didn’t come in. Remember how the breakdown was: $4 million for the U.N. sanctions, that happened right away. That was clearly going to happen, but we had no idea whether or not, or when, the U.S. sanctions would be lifted or that Libya would be taken off the terrorist list. When the sanctions were lifted in 2004, total surprise.
“If we had not gotten that second $4 million, I was going to represent some family members and sue the other plaintiff committee lawyers for having screwed up that settlement agreement, because we could have walked away with $6 million free and clear, which would’ve been pretty good. The whole notion with a lot of the case was closure. Can we get this so all the families could just move on with your lives and not have this still hang over your heads?”
In Zaid’s mind, the case against Libya presented an opportunity that the Pan Am case hadn’t: The chance to treat everyone equally. The Pan Am settlement paid out based on the presumed worth of the victims going forward, meaning that in many cases, parents who lost their children received far less than women who lost their husbands.
“If I had been on that flight, I was worth nothing. I was 20,” Zaid muses.
Anyone who lost someone that didn’t have economic worth was offered a flat settlement of $575,000, but Zaid feels that the line was somewhat arbitrary8.
“If you had a twenty-year-old who was working at a job, that person had money. But if the Harvard valedictorian was on the plane and had just graduated but hadn’t started their job yet, they weren’t worth anything, even though you knew they were going to be the top doctor in the world and would probably make a million dollars in their lifetime. Didn’t matter. So if you think about it, what kind of disservice was done to the family members who lost their children?”
In hindsight, Zaid wonders if Bruce Smith had the right idea in taking the insurance company’s $100,000 offer in 1989, instead of going through seven years of legal wrangling that, at the time, seemed like it might be a lost cause.
“Not that anyone’s life was worth $100,000, but insurance-wise it was a decent offer, especially because you had no idea. What could Pan Am have done that would have contributed? You didn’t know that they had lied about the dogs. You didn’t know they lied about the x-ray machines. You didn’t know they lied about all sorts of stuff. That came out later.”
With all these complaints, what would Zaid have done differently if he had the chance?
“I would’ve fought harder against the plaintiffs’ committee. I would’ve fought harder against our own lawyers. There were tactical decisions, there were a lot of ethical violations that I thought happened. We wanted to push harder against Libya. Now, it ultimately worked out fine. You can’t misjudge that this was a good end result. I thought it could’ve been better, and I thought we could have avoided the last four years, five years. I think we could’ve finished the case in 2003. It dragged it on unnecessarily for five years. I think we could’ve controlled more of that as lawyers. We were lucky it worked out the way it did in many ways, because it was out of our hands in the last five years.”
Zaid objects most to the position that the final agreement put the families in. Because the deal linked payments to government action, some families felt they had to lobby on Capitol Hill to get American sanctions against Libya lifted, even if they truly wanted the opposite.
“That was really draining, and I think a lot of family members felt they had to. I always wanted it to be a choice, and at times, I don’t think there was a choice. I think a lot of the family members felt it was forced on them.”
Zaid sounds as though he plans on walking a different path going forward. He worked on plenty of cases other than Pan Am 103 over the last two decades—he only found time to speak today after a fire department-related hearing was rescheduled—but he expects to avoid cases like ours in the future.
“I never did get involved in any other terrorism cases. I’ve been asked many, many times. For the most part, a lot of them ended up going to some big firms. This became their cottage industry. At some point in time it became a question of money. The big firms, all they saw were dollar signs, and it was never about that. The case meant something to me, not the recovery.”
For Zaid, the case concluded, but his passion remains.
“Now, you look at the family group, it’s a shell of what it used to be, understandably, because I think many family members now have decided it’s closure. Not only the final payment, but twenty years, it’s a new generation.”
“I think I’ve only missed one December 21st ceremony in the last 16 years, and it’ll be very interesting to see what the 22nd one looks like. I wonder if there’ll be anybody there. I’ll go.”
After saying farewell to Zaid, I head back to my car and leave the city, his speculation about the group fresh in my head.
My family never engaged with Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 as much as some did, and the memorial last December was the first event I attended related to my father’s death since the trial in Zeist in 2000. I felt out of place for a variety of reasons, but one thing that particularly stood out was my youth.
It makes sense, really. While many people got involved in the group because of the raw emotions they felt in the days and weeks after their loved one’s murder, my mom tried to shelter my sister and me from the storm. The few events we made trips to attend were more informational or ceremonial than emotional, and as a result, while I appreciate the family group’s work, I don’t feel much a part of it. I attended the 20th anniversary, but I have no intention of attending the 21st.
I can’t argue with that part of what Zaid said, at least.
Those of us who were meant to carry the torch may choose to extinguish it instead.
Before I know it, I’m winding my way through the hills of western Maryland, driving into the sun. The sky contains no clouds, but it’s not exactly clear—there’s a vague haze that makes the sun seem just a little more radiant than normal. As I drive, a river appears to my left, while on my GPS’s screen, the water is bisected by a dotted line to signify a state border. Across that river, an Ichiro outfield throw away, lies West Virginia.
It’s entirely possible that I’m in the early stage of a thousand-mile detour to nowhere.
I’m trying not to see this as a metaphor for something.
I accept this risk, and continue onwards, into and through Pennsylvania, even as the sun sets beyond my car’s windshield. When I finally feel tired enough to stop for the night, I pull off the turnpike in a town called Monroeville, which, based on the road signs, appears to be outside of Pittsburgh.
A Hampton Inn with an attached Outback Steakhouse greets me off the highway, so I get a room, change into my gym clothes, and head downstairs to the fitness center. Two minutes after I climb onto the elliptical machine, a pair of teenaged boys enters the gym, their postures clearly indicating that they’re not here to exercise, but rather, to avoid their parents.
The mirrored wall in front of me reflects them on the exercise bikes to my rear, where they interact with the machines the same way that I used to ride my grandmother’s exercise bike as a child: Sitting near-idly with their feet on the pedals, suddenly ramping up to an unsustainable velocity, and returning to idle once more. As they apathetically pedal, I grow self-conscious of my every movement, somehow convincing myself that they’re judging me for using the elliptical wrong, despite the facts that a) I’m not, and b) they don’t care in the slightest.
I know they don’t care, because I didn’t care when I was them.
I remember vacations when I convinced my mom to let me go wherever I could just to get away from her and my sister. At 16, I spent a trip to New York largely wandering around Times Square because I found it preferable to being dragged along to the museums and Broadway shows they attended. Three months later, I did basically the same thing in London on the Magical European Murder Trial Tour, taking the Underground to the Trocadero and watching movies9 or playing in the arcade every day because I wanted to get away from them.
I should have felt lonely doing these things—I should feel that way right now. But I’ve always felt alone in life, one way or another: As the only Jewish kid in my Kindergarten class; as the only boy in my household growing up; as one of the few who, lacking anywhere better go to, stayed in the dorm during Spring Break my freshman year of college; as a nearly friendless intern in Manhattan; and here, now, at this very moment, as the one person genuinely making use of the fitness center of this Hampton Inn in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.
I’ve acclimated to this feeling. I couldn’t survive for three days outside of civilization, but I’ve achieved a strange degree of self-sufficiency within it. There’s no person, place, or thing in my life that I couldn’t live without—some days, I feel like there’s no person, place, or thing in my life that I can live with. I’ve embraced loneliness. I feel uncomfortable when I’m not .
In that way, it’s fortunate that I’m here now: Thousands of miles from my friends, in the middle of what may be a pointless detour, laboring on an elliptical machine in a town whose existence I learned of two hours ago.
Behind me, the teenage boys grow bored with being bored and depart, presumably to return to their families, leaving me all alone.
As I move in place to the sounds of a podcast, I see no difference between loneliness and liberty.
Sixteen
Seventeen
Yesterday afternoon, after I reached Ann Arbor, I received an email from a woman named Teresa Smith confirming that she could speak today about her sister, Pamela, which means that this detour was not in vain. My morning drive takes me westward once more.
Eighteen
Since Austin, I have suspected that this road trip may be too long. Granted, it’s basically the length I always expected it to be—I’m surprised that I’m exactly on schedule so far—but I didn’t anticipate the effects that it’s had on me: the exhaustion, the aching right leg, the mental meandering. This whole time, I’ve been searching for some objective way to qualify whether or not this journey has reached an excessive length, and today, I have an answer. Today, I am driving through Canada.
Nineteen
Syracuse, New York never mattered to me.
I lived far away from this Rust Belt town, knowing little about it aside from the tragedy that its namesake university and I shared. This place never registered for me, with the exception of maybe a week of my senior year of high school, when I considered applying to SU under the theory that I would basically be a shoo-in for acceptance.
Twenty
My present situation, in three words: Scott awaiting Scot.
Twenty-One
Twenty years ago, this story began in a New Jersey town called Morristown, where today will end.
Twenty-Two
I spend more time than I should probably admit thinking about alternate universes.
Twenty-Three
Many people have that former significant other whom they broke up with not for one big reason, but a thousand little ones. Time passes, and despite knowing that the relationship was far from perfect, they place it on a pedestal as their romantic ideal. Whenever their current relationship sours, they go back and think Oh, things were so good with so-and-so. I should give her a call, maybe we can give it another chance. While others feel this way about men or women, it perfectly describes my feelings about New York—my personal paradox, my great white whale. We broke up, but any time Seattle, the lovely woman with whom I’ve settled down, disappoints me in the slightest, I feel the urge to give New York a call1.
Twenty-Four
Three weeks ago, my father’s best friend told me how he knew another man on the same plane as my dad, a cruel twist of fate. The odds seem slim enough for any two people I know, who don’t know each other, to be on the same plane at all. To be murdered in that situation? The odds must be astronomical1.
Twenty-Five
I was a precocious child, even if I didn’t know the word: I read my first book before my second birthday1, learned Chess from my father soon after, and, over the course of several family visits to New York’s museums, decided that Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night was my favorite painting.
And I loved the tunnels.
Twenty-Six
Four months have passed since I last set foot in a synagogue, a streak which I would prefer was far longer. Every time I leave a house of worship, I hope that it will be the last time I ever set foot in one, and so far, every time I have thought that, my hopes were dashed sooner or later. There’s always another family bar mitzvah or wedding to attend.
And then, there’s today.
Twenty-Seven
Morning brings good tidings, a rare experience for a night owl like myself. When I awaken in my 18th hotel room of this trip, I discover that a) floor tickets for tonight’s Bruce Springsteen show at TD Banknorth Garden are selling for below face value, and b) the Red Sox just released a batch of tickets for Friday night’s game against the Yankees, the first tilt between the archrivals this season.
I jump on both immediately, spending more than I’m comfortable with, but still less than I expected. Tonight, I will see the Boss, but before that, I have an appointment with Victims of Pan Am 103’s former president, Elizabeth Philipps.
Twenty-Eight
I was born on September 17th, 1983. I first crossed paths with death three days later.
Twenty-Nine
Intellectually, I know that Marcia and Bill Scanlon have not always resided on Cedar Street in Wakefield, Massachusetts. I know that Aunt Marcia, my father’s older sister, grew up in the same home on Richardson that my father did, but I’ve seen no evidence of this. For the entirety of my lifetime, every visit to my aunt and uncle has involved a single home.
It’s this home’s driveway that I pull the rental car into, driving to the back and then, breaking from tradition, circling around to the front door to knock. Marcia opens the door, greeting me with her thick Boston accent and a hug. Inside, the house smells of chocolate chip cookies, which slightly perplexes me—I can’t remember Marcia ever having made cookies before, but she informs me they’re for an upcoming visit to one of the couple’s three daughters. By the end of the night, I will eat my share.
We sit down at the kitchen table, and Marcia tells me the story I want to hear, right from the very beginning: Saul Mark Rosen, the early years.
“He was born the day before Thanksgiving. So the next day, for Thanksgiving, we had to go to my grandmother’s house, because my mother was in the hospital. He must have come home on a Sunday night, because he cried through a TV show. After that, he was okay. He got better.”
For my father’s early years, his mother, my grandmother Ethel, stayed at home, but once he started school, she returned to work as an eye and ear tester. Despite my grandmother’s stay-at-home status, Steve and Marcia, who were respectively 12 and 10 years older than my dad, inherited a lot of responsibility.
“We would babysit at night if she had meetings, or Saturdays, we’d have to take him to the park. By the time he was born, Steve and I had to share the responsibility of doing dishes: one would wash, one would dry. One would dust, one would vacuum. We had all these responsibilities, and we used to say that little Saul didn’t have to do anything.”
Marcia remembers that two of her friends had younger brothers the same age as my father, so they all hung out together.
“We took them everywhere, we did everything with the boys, because there were three boys. I taught him how to read. He was young. He must have been like four years old. So, he knew how to read. He knew his numbers. I think he was advanced for his age.”
By the time Marcia finished high school, Steve had already flunked out of college. As such, Marcia attended Boston State College, a commuter school.
“Steve dropped out of college, therefore I’m being punished for Steve. Poor little Saul is sitting there saying, ‘I’d better be really good, because otherwise God knows what’ll happen to me.’ He was prissy to that point, but he was a good kid, and he did what he was told to do.”
Marcia’s big rebellion arrived a few years later, when she married her now-husband of 42 years, Bill Scanlon. She had gone to school with Bill’s brother, but the two of them first met when she worked at the Wakefield Theatre in 1964.
“My mother didn’t let us date, because he was Catholic. So we never dated, but we got married in 1967.”
Ethel took the idea of Marcia converting to Catholicism and marrying a gentile poorly.
“She didn’t go to the wedding. Steve and Nancy came. Saul did not come. He was like 14 at the time. So that weekend in particular, Mom, Dad, and Saul must have gone up to Portland, Maine to visit Aunt Edie. That’s where they had to go instead of coming to the wedding.”
At the time, Marcia taught at the same middle school that my father attended. Marcia never had him in any of her classes, but says he used to say hi in the hallway. Ethel worked in the schools at the time, too, which meant information traveled through the grapevine.
“I was not spoken to until we told them I was pregnant, and she said that was nice. She knew, because I was teaching, so she would know through the school system. The day that Carolyn was born, that afternoon, they came into the hospital room and said, ‘We have our first grandchild!’ They came in with a car seat. During that interim, between the wedding and Carolyn, there was no contact. And Saul had no contact. He couldn’t.”
“After my mother had passed away, my father said his hands were tied. So, you know where the fault laid. Someday, when you get married, you will understand that.”
Marcia finds the whole situation especially ridiculous in light of her parents’ marriage.
“My mother would have told you that when she married my father, they eloped. Supposedly, they eloped because her parents did not approve of him, because he was only a window-washer. Going through that, I would think there would be more compassion, but she stood her ground and said no.”
In 2004, Marcia and Bill’s middle daughter, Christine, married a Persian man who had immigrated from Iran as a child. World peace may be difficult, but my family has overcome cultural differences with ease.
“I feel you don’t look at a person for their race or their religion, I would look at the way they live their life, and their morals more than anything. Why would I marry a Jewish person just because he was Jewish?”
Ethel passed away in 1980, shortly before my parents met. The next year, when my father married a nice Jewish girl1, my grandfather Simon suffered from eye problems, heart problems and type II diabetes, but wouldn’t dream of missing the wedding in Memphis. With two children in braces, Marcia couldn’t afford to attend it, and feared Simon would drive down alone. She tells me she talked him out of it by suggesting he would have to drive his sister, Helen, down as well. He flew instead.
Simon died nine months later.2
“Now, if you want to play numbers, he died on June 21st of 1982, so six years and six months later, Saul died. Isn’t that ironic?”
Marcia tells me about the day her little brother died.
“I worked down the corner there at a little bank. The bank closed at 4:00. I came home. The girls were home from college, in ’88. I walked in the door, and Bill said, ‘There’s been a terrible accident. Pan Am 103 crashed.'”
“And I said, ‘Really? That’s horrific.’ We were watching that, and your mother called and said she had just come in from shopping. Did she? She must have told you that. And you guys had turned on to watch Sesame Street or some wonderful program at the age of five and said she heard about it.”
I tell her the story as I was told, that my mother turned on the TV while doing chores around the house, and first heard the news while my sister and I were elsewhere. Even so, I have no idea which of us, if either, remembers correctly.
My mom told Marcia that she thought my dad was on that plane, but couldn’t get any information from Pan Am. Marcia called a friend who worked for Delta, hoping they might be able to help, but to no avail. Later, she tried Pan Am, who told her they had no record of a Saul Rosen, but they had one for Paul Rosen3.
“By the time we went to bed that night, we were 90% sure it was Saul, but we weren’t sure until your mother called the next morning and said that was it. At which point, we said we would be right down. But she said she didn’t know whether she’d get any remains or not at that point. So she said, ‘I want him buried—or something—in Wakefield.'”
Marcia agreed to arrange for whatever remained of my father to be laid to rest beside his parents, then drove down to help my mom.
“We ended up going to New Jersey, just Bill and I. We left the three girls here. We had a memorial service for him on Christmas Day4, and then we left there, came home.
“So then, New Year’s Day, we were going to celebrate our Christmas finally, because we hadn’t had Christmas, and that morning, your mother called and said that they had called and identified or found remains of your father, and that she wanted to plan the service up here.”
As Marcia remembers it, my mom’s parents and all of her siblings came to Wakefield for the funeral. Unlike Steve, she also remembers that my sister and I stayed in New Jersey.
“So they came over here, and we went to the cemetery. We’ve talked about that. It was the coldest, windiest day you could ever imagine. It’s right on the lake, and the wind was just phenomenal. I remember, prior to that, I got a call from the funeral director. They sent all remains in a pine box, which they had built over there. He said, ‘Do we want to change it to a regular casket?’ and we said no.”
“That was my decision. I never said that to your mother. I just said, ‘Whatever he comes in,’ because we have no idea, to this moment, what they found.”
Soon after the news about my father broke, the local newspaper, the Wakefield Daily Item, called Marcia to ask where people should send flowers or donations. Since he had attended Wakefield’s public schools, Marcia decided to set up a scholarship fund in his memory to benefit local students.
“We could have set it up to be specific for engineering or whatever, but we just said no, as long as they’re a Wakefield High School graduate. They give scholarships each year in his memory, and we usually get a letter from each person that gets a scholarship.”
This year, the scholarship awarded funds to three students, who will be attending Merrimack College, the University of Rhode Island, and Notre Dame in the Fall.
“We set that up, and it started with a minimal amount of money. It has grown. They have a fundraiser every spring, and people do donate. We donate every year, your mom donates every year, and Nancy and Steve donate on a regular basis. It’s a good program. Maybe the scholarships don’t pay for much, but maybe some books or whatever. It does help.”
Marcia grappled with her little brother’s death for years afterward. For a while, Marica refused to fly anywhere, but eventually, she didn’t have a choice.
“When did I start flying again? I can’t think where we were going. It was like we had no choice but to fly there, and I can’t think what it was. I’ve been to Switzerland. We did get over there a few years ago. And San Francisco. Maybe that was probably why, because the kids were out in San Francisco, so there was no way else to get there. Carolyn had moved out there in, I would say by ’92, ’93 maybe. There was no other way to get there, so we did that. I’m not happy, but I do it.”
Beyond her fear of flying, Marcia questions the justness of a world in which someone like my father can be cut down in his prime. Her youngest daughter is almost as old as my father was, and Marcia thinks she still has her whole life ahead of her.
“I’m looking at, for instance, Janet, who is going to be 34 this year. Why would I even think that she would leave this Earth at 35? Why did your mother, who had married your father, after, what, seven years of marriage, lose him? You don’t get married for a seven year span of time. I’m sure when they got married that they figured for a lifetime, but a lifetime was not seven years in their estimation. And yes, he did plan, and he did protect his family. Under the circumstances, yes, you did come out okay as far as economically. Mentally, it must have done a job on you.
“But, to go back to God, I believe there’s a supreme something out there that controls part of all that. I believe there’s a reason for everything, but you won’t always know the reason. The reason for my parents dying was so that they wouldn’t see Saul die. That’s my reason for that.”
Marcia never got particularly involved in the victims’ group, but she did follow along with the criminal trial through the Syracuse website, and feels strongly about security.
“If they had started security after 103, 9/11 wouldn’t have ever occurred, and that’s my bone of contention.”
When my family agreed to the settlement with Libya, Marcia asked my mother for a portion of it. My mother called me to discuss the topic, and I pointed out that if the money was meant to compensate us for our pain and suffering, we should respect what she’d gone through as well. Ultimately, we gave both Marcia and Steve portions of that first payment, but while we heard about the things that Steve and Nancy had done with their share, we never learned what Marcia and Bill did with theirs.
Apparently, there’s a reason for that.
“I put it aside. Just as easy as that. I put it aside. We did give a portion of it to each of the three kids.”
When that first payment came through in late 2003, all three of Marcia’s children were going through life-altering changes. Carolyn had recently given birth to her first child, while Christine and Janet were due to get married the following summer.
One night, Marcia’s daughters and their significant others were going out for dinner together instead of buying each other Christmas presents. Marcia and Bill agreed to babysit Carolyn’s son, and asked for all of the girls to swing by Carolyn’s house after dinner. When the girls returned, Marcia explained about the settlement, and gave each of their daughters a check. Stunned, the girls asked if Marcia and Bill could afford to give that much away.
“We didn’t tell them what you had given us, because it’s nobody’s business.”
The girls suggested that Marcia and Bill do something with their share of the money, and Marcia insisted that they already had. I’m surprised by this—after more than five years, this is the first reference I’ve heard to Marcia and Bill doing anything for themselves with the money.
“I can even show you what we bought. You don’t even have to move,” she tells me as she reaches into one of the cabinets behind me in her kitchen for the big reveal. “We bought a matching set of travel mugs. They said, ‘That’s what you bought? You should do something more.’
“We didn’t really need anything. We had people leave us money at different points in our life. When my parents were both gone, we got some money from that, and we put it away for the kids’ education, because at that point, we had to worry about education.”
Now, though, Marcia has little to worry about. Her children are grown, and she’s a grandmother three times over. She retired four years ago, but still works part-time in the same bank she worked all those years. And, every spring, she revisits a little ritual she maintained for nearly 30 years: Planting flowers at the graves of her family, on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt.
“Every May, once we can start planting, I do begonias for Saul and my parents. Begonias grow great there.”
By the time we’ve finished speaking, evening has set in, and Marcia and Bill offer to take me to dinner. As we eat, I fill them in on my life in Seattle and assure them that I’m doing great out there. Marcia, at one point, comments on how scruffy I’ve let myself get—I’ve got a week or two of scruff growing, which is actually my usual state, but I normally make a point of shaving before I see her. Bill remains reticent as ever, speaking up only when we discuss the theatrical nature of modern airport security.
After dinner, along the way back to their home, we drive past Lake Quannapowitt, Wakefield’s most defining characteristic to a visitor such as myself. My father’s grave lies elsewhere on the shore, but we drive past a portion that serves as a park. On the softball field, a team goes through warm-up exercises as we pass, and I’m hit by a sudden, crippling desire to be home. I’ve already confirmed my roster spot on my softball team—I paid before I left home—but practices should be starting soon, and I want nothing more than to climb a fence onto the field where we practice and play catch or field grounders with my friends.
Moments after passing the field, we arrive at Marcia and Bill’s house. After a little more conversation and a lot more cookies than I should have eaten, I bid Marcia and Bill adieu and head back to my hotel. Two days from now, I will return to their town, but I have no idea when I’ll see them next.
Thirty
Thirty-One
Before my hotel room’s phone rings with a wake-up call, I’m already conscious and exhausted. It took hours for me to fall asleep last night, as the euphoria of the Red Sox walk-off win hung in the air long after I returned to my hotel room and exchanged Facebook messages with the friend who’s gotten my mail this last month. She found a letter from my doctor, the envelope for which prominently features both “OPEN IMMEDIATELY” and “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL HEALTH INFORMATION” on the exterior. The former led her to believe it needed to be opened, but the latter scared her off. I suspected it was just a bill—I couldn’t think of any other reason why my doctor would be contacting me—and replied that it can wait until I return to Seattle.
Epilogue
A couple hours after I left my father’s grave, I pulled off the highway in Connecticut and into the parking lot of a roadside diner.
Something happened in there. I don’t remember what.
After lunch, I walked back out to the Pacifica, climbed into the front seat, and reached into a cup holder for the digital voice recorder that proved my constant companion throughout my journey. Briefly, I paused to compose my thoughts, to recount for the record what had happened while I ate lunch.
Then, as I prepared to press record, I stopped, and put the voice recorder back.
After a solid month of recording notes both profound and mundane, of recording everything from widows speaking about their late husbands to—accidentally—myself singing along to the New Pornographers for 20 minutes in Virginia, I had nothing left to say for the record.
The story had concluded.
None of this mattered anymore.
I left Wakefield on a Saturday, and reached Seattle the following one, just in time for a friend’s birthday party. My first week back, nobody wanted to discuss anything with me except for this tale, and I wanted to discuss anything but as I tried to reacclimate to everyday life. My body suffered from imbalance as much as my social life—a couple of days after I returned, I walked around running errands, and discovered my left leg tiring far before my right. For all the time I spent on ellipticals, my car’s gas and brake pedals impacted me more.
A week after I returned home, I attended a different friend’s space-themed birthday costume party, for which I’d done little preparation. As I sat on a sofa in the living room, engaging a friend in what felt like the first substantial conversation that hadn’t referenced my dad’s murder in more than six weeks, I looked across the room and noticed a cute, bookish brunette.
Then, I noticed the Pan Am t-shirt she wore.
I went over to talk to her, and when I told her about my connection to the defunct airline, she apologized profusely, which I assured her was unnecessary. She had drawn inspiration from Kubrick’s 2001, from a vision of the future when America’s greatest airline had escaped the bounds of gravity, instead of being destroyed by it.
Later that night, as I spoke with the birthday gal, she asked what I’d discussed with her downstairs neighbor, the brunette. I told my friend how the conversation began with her shirt and sprawled from there, and how I hoped we might see each other again. My friend noted how I had led the conversation with an odd approach, and I agreed. And then, I expressed my frustration, about how this night that I’d looked forward to for a while—my first escape in months—had been somewhat sullied.
I had a feeling this was never going to end.
Three months later, in August of 2009, word finally came down from Scotland: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only man ever convinced in my father’s murder, had been granted his compassionate release.
That afternoon, I arrived for my usual shift in 826’s store, and my friend who had the shift before mine immediately asked how I felt.
I shrugged.
I spouted the talking points I mentioned earlier in this story1, about how this is what makes Western societies better than Libya; about how al-Megrahi was dying a slow, painful death halfway around the world from me, and I didn’t care where; and about how there was nothing I could do, so I wasn’t going to let it bother me.
During my shift that afternoon, 826’s executive director wandered into the store and asked me if I wanted a pair of club-level seats to that night’s Seattle Sounders match, which one of the organization’s board members offered to give away to a volunteer after a scheduling conflict arose. I had wanted to go to a match the entire inaugural season, but they were all sold out. I considered this the universe’s attempt to even things out.
Later, at the match, my sister called me, and left a voicemail in which I could hear her tears. I called her back when I got home, and she told me how she had gotten into a fight with our mother over al-Megrahi’s release. My sister had called my mom, upset and wanting to vent, and somehow the conversation escalated to the point where my mom asked my sister, “What do you want me to do about it?” My mom meant to express that she was as helpless as my sister, but my sister took the response as glib instead, which led to her calling me for support.
I told my sister that I somewhat agreed with our mom, that there was nothing we could do, and therefore, couldn’t get too upset. Take the high road, I explained. Be better. Be kinder. Don’t view it as a monster getting to go home to his family, but rather, a family getting the kindness of being near a loved one during his final days.
Those days weren’t as final as we thought.
Two years after my trip, the Arab Spring swept through much of Northern Africa and the Middle East, including Libya. Gaddafi’s government lost its grip on the country, and the dictator himself went on the run.
That August, almost exactly two years after al-Megrahi walked free from Scottish jail with mere months to live, a CNN reporter tracked the bomber down at his family home in Tripoli. According to the story, al-Megrahi was comatose and near-death.
Six weeks later, my mom called from vacation in the south of France, where she’d spent the previous several days on the beach, watching jets fly overhead on their way to bomb Libya. She asked if I’d seen the news, and I told her I had.
Gadaffi was dead.
I took only the smallest amount of joy in the news—I took only the smallest amount of joy in anything that week, or for the better part of the next year. Days before Gaddafi’s death, my girlfriend of the previous year had dumped me. After my mom asked me about the international news, I filled her in on my personal developments.
I spoke to my ex a few days later, and she claimed to have broken down crying in a thrift store parking lot when she learned about Gaddafi. I have my doubts, but that’s another story, one best not told.
A month after Gaddafi’s death, my sister’s boyfriend had a conversation with her that started similarly to the one I had with my ex. My sister’s boyfriend told her that he no longer wanted her to be his girlfriend.
He wanted her to be his wife.
On the second-most surprising morning of my life, I dashed through my mother’s house, screaming for her, getting no response.
My father’s cousin was staying at my mom’s house that weekend as well, and she sat in the chair I’d cried in the morning I learned about his death as I dashed past her, looking for my mom. When I reached the garage and saw my mom’s car was missing, I dashed back up to my former bedroom and called her.
As soon as she picked up, a single word erupted from my mouth: “DIDYOUSEETHENEWS?”
“News?” my mom asked. “What news?”
“Megrahi died.”
“Oh! This is a wonderful day!” I heard my mom scream on the other end of the line, as though the people around her didn’t already think that.
At that moment, my mom was at a salon, along with my sister, my sister’s best friend, and our cousin.
My mom was too overcome to think to hang up the phone, so I heard her break the news to them, and then immediately admonish my sister.
“Get out of the chair,” she told my sister. “No, no, no, you can cry, but get out of the chair. Let’s go outside, let someone else have her turn.”
The chair was the makeup chair. The other two girls there were my sister’s bridesmaids.
The only man ever convicted in our father’s murder died the morning of my sister’s wedding.
(This was a much better story before she got divorced.)
When we all arrived at the wedding venue that day—my sister’s hair and makeup still done on time despite the good cry outside of the salon—the wedding planner greeted my sister with a question: “Did you get your father’s present?”
My sister told him—the son of the man who’d planned our father’s wedding—not to say another word, because she couldn’t get her makeup redone at such a late hour.
I had always assumed that, if and when my sister got married, our mom would walk her down the aisle—after all, she’d done all the other fatherly duties she could muster for as long as my sister and I could remember. The wedding planner had other ideas, though: I should join them. After all, he said, “It’s always been the three of you against the world.”
I wore my father’s old watch and gold cufflinks as my mom and I walked my sister down the aisle, throughout the ceremony, and on into the reception, where I gave a toast in his stead. After I’d spoken, I finally found a lull in the swirl of family and friend and festivities, and the day truly hit me.
I felt uncomfortable.
As I looked around the room, seeing both halves of my family united for the first time since my bar mitzvah almost 16 years earlier, my mind darted across the sea. While we celebrated, somewhere in Libya, a family who I once claimed deserved some amount of compassion mourned the loss of their patriarch.
Yes, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was a mass murderer, but he was also a father. As the absence of my own dad weighed on me, I thought of all the joyful remarks people had made throughout the day about al-Megrahi’s death. Somewhere, his death likely felt like a raw wound to his children.
As I ducked downstairs to trade out my father’s cufflinks for a pair my sister gifted me, I relished a moment away from the celebration.
The year before I left for my massive road trip, my mom’s younger brother found a relic of a road trip my dad took.
My uncle conceded his house in the divorce, and while he packed his belongings to move out, he discovered an old, beat-up notebook from Northeastern University—strange, considering he had attended Oklahoma. Upon further inspection, he realized the faded red signature on the front was my father’s, a journal of the journey he went on with Maurice and Raschko in the summer between undergrad and grad school.
I asked my mom for the notebook—my sister had received Simon’s old camera, so this felt like a fair ask—and she passed it along to me. I took it on my road trip—I even let Maurice read aloud from it at one point in our interview—but deliberately excluded it from the narrative, because I felt its presence somehow would change the story I wanted to tell. After internal debate, I decided to not read it until after I was done writing this tale.
Which took a little longer than I expected.
After my sister got engaged, I called my sister and told her I wanted to do something special for her and her fiance instead of getting them my traditional wedding present of a waffle maker. Whatever they wanted.
After some debate, they settled on a trip to visit me in Seattle—her then-husband had never seen my city. That week, while they visited, my sister asked if she could borrow the notebook, which she’d never read. I passed it along, asking for her to return it when she finished reading it.
I never expected her to do what came next.
Late in the summer of 2017, my sister called with a confession: She had gotten a tattoo.
Four years earlier.
As she told me the story, the night I gave her the notebook, as soon as she got back to her hotel room, she started reading it, and soon, grew overwhelmed by tears. She felt as though parts of herself that she never understood suddenly made sense, the influence of a father she couldn’t remember coming into focus.
When she returned to Memphis, one day, she grabbed her husband and declared they were going to a tattoo studio before she chickened out. There, the artist copied my father’s first name—the only part of the signature still crisp enough to read—off of the notebook, and inked it onto my sister’s ankle.
My sister didn’t want to tell our mom, who hates tattoos, and she didn’t want to tell me until she’d told our mother. So, she sat on the information for four years, until she confessed to our mother one day, and to me shortly after.
Suffice to say, my mom and I had very different reactions.
A couple months later, my mom had a several-hour-long layover at Sea-Tac Airport on her way to a vacation in China, so I met her for lunch across the street from the airport. I had turned 34 a month earlier, and 35 loomed large.
On my 35th birthday, I would receive the last of the money, which had been held in trust since I was 20. Four weeks later, I would pass my dad in lifespan. Already, it weighed on me.
I told my mom about my plan to celebrate passing my dad with a big party, because, as I put it, “I can either let this be weird, or I can make it weird.” As we talked about my impending birthday, my mom told me a story of her own 35th, one which made me realize the psychic wounds from my father’s death kept coming long after the initial dust settled.
She remembered one of us kids—she couldn’t remember which, but I’ve since concluded it was likely me—asking her that day, “Now that you’re 35, are you going to die, too?”
Twenty-eight years later, her face revealed that the question still broke her heart.
Over the next six months, my attitude on having a party to celebrate passing my dad in lifespan slowly soured. For one thing, a little math revealed I would tie him on a Sunday and pass him on a Monday, not exactly the ideal nights for a massively boozy soiree. For another, I didn’t want to plan a big party for myself.
Then, another plan came together.
By this time, I had started referring to the day I would pass him as Did It Day, my own personal holiday that felt like crossing a finish line, and even seeing it in the distance, I felt a looming dread. The money was coming before then, and I had to do something about it.
Unless I didn’t.
What if I ran away instead?
Quickly, the plan for a manic month materialized. I considered traveling for a month solid, but already had tickets to various events at home, so I instead developed a schedule where, between September 14th and October 15th—Did It Day—I would spend only a single quiet night at home2.
The money could wait. My friends could wait.
Everything could.
My first destination for that crazy month was Glasgow, a town that I’d spent less than two hours in during our previous trip to Scotland, but I’d heard great things about in the years since. I would only have two full days there before flying on to Dublin. Then, I realized where I was going, and when I would be there, and decided to light one of those two days ablaze. I fired off an email to Scotland, who put me in touch with a guy, and we agreed to a schedule.
The morning of my 35th birthday, four weeks before I outlived my dad, I took a train to the town where he died.
I spent my birthday in Lockerbie.
A recently retired Scottish police officer named Colin Dorrance greeted me at the town’s train station, wearing a Syracuse sweatshirt, and began a tour he apparently gives fairly often.
Colin told me his tale as he showed me around his hometown. He first became aware something was amiss as he was returning to Lockerbie on the night of the 21st, when as he approached the town on the main highway, he watched a mushroom cloud form before his eyes.
Sherwood Crescent, partially vaporized.
I’ll leave the rest of Colin’s tales for him to tell, if and when he chooses—I certainly didn’t plan on including him in this story when I met him—but suffice to say, the skills that make for a good police officer translate well for the sort of tour he provided. He kept a binder in his car full of print-outs and GPS coordinates from the official incident report, which he showed me when we arrived at the spot directly beneath where the bomb went off. A few hundred feet away, we stopped again at the spot where he was, 45 seconds later, when he saw the explosion.
The town of Lockerbie remains placid, and its people still kind. At Lockerbie Academy, Colin introduced me to the headmaster, who took us to view the wall featuring the names of all the Lockerbie Scholars. When I mentioned I had spoken to Kirsty Liddon all those years ago, the headmaster told me she’s now one of his teachers.
Colin and the headmaster also told me about a charity bike ride they had planned with a few other men, one from Lockerbie to Edinburgh, from where they would fly to Washington, D.C., and ride on to Syracuse. They aimed to raise enough money to hire a mental health counselor for the school, but also to pay tribute to all the people who died in their town, three decades earlier.
At Tundergarth, Colin took me to the memorial chapel, where I discovered my own handwriting in the guest book from nearly half a lifetime ago, a tribute I had forgotten ever paying. Across the road from the church, Colin pointed over a fence at the field where the plane’s nose cone struck. Thirty years later, we could still see a dent in the earth.
At Dryfesdale Cemetery, we visited the collection of memorials. I stopped at the graves of Steve Butler and Sarah Philipps, buried where they fell.
Near the end of the tour, we went to Rosebank Crescent, the neighborhood where the most bodies fell, including my father’s. I had contemplated asking if I could go to the exact spot where he fell, but never actually asked if anyone knew it. Perhaps that information has been lost to time.
In Rosebank Crescent, we stood before a plaque paying tribute. From that spot, I could see through rows of backyards, and I flipped through Colin’s binder until I saw a photo of the scene days after the bombing, in which many homes had been devastated by a rain of debris and corpses. Miraculously, only one home was unsalvageable.
As we drove to Sherwood Crescent, where the wings stuck, a downpour confined us to the car as Colin told me how the park that replaced the former homes of Lockerbie’s 11 dead featured two plaques: One for eight of the people, the other for the remaining three. People died, but their neighborly disputes never did.
When Colin returned me to the train station, I thanked him as profusely as possible for spending the day showing me around. He seemed genuinely happy to have done so—it’s become a bit of a hobby for him over the years.
Then, at the same age at which my father’s life ended in that town, I boarded a train and left.
From there, I continued onwards. Glasgow to Dublin. Dublin back to Seattle. Seattle to camping for a couple of days. Back to Seattle, then off to New York, where I got a phone call from a reporter about a letter I wrote.
In late August, I jolted to attention when I heard the word “Lockerbie” on an episode of Pod Save America. The hosts were discussing dirty ads in congressional races, and one on their radar involved a man named Aftab Pureval, a Democrat of Tibetan-Indian descent running in Ohio’s 1st District.
When he graduated law school in mid-2008, Pureval took a job at a mega-law firm in D.C., which counted Libya among its many clients. These were the dying days of the Libya settlement—Congress had long ago unanimously approved the deal, all the triggers had been met, and we were basically just waiting to see if we’d actually get the third payment.
Pureval didn’t work on Libya’s case, but he had worked for the firm, and had a name and skin color that made him ripe for a xenophobic attack, no matter how tenuous the connection. A super PAC ran ads tying him to Libyan terrorism, showing those iconic images of a shattered cockpit in the field at Tundergarth.
Never mind that Pureveal was six years old at the time my dad was murdered.
I called my mom and sister, rallying them to donate to Pureval’s campaign. My mom suggested we mail a letter with checks instead of donating online, and a week later, the campaign contacted us, asking if they could release the letter.
My mom and sister debated the idea, while I was on board from the start. Ultimately, after a minor rewrite to remove some personal information, we agreed.
Ten years ago, I looked forward to the day this would all be over, the day when I no longer had to worry about the latest breaking news story directly applying to me, and over the years since, almost everything I imagined on that list got crossed off. Al-Megrahi released. Revolution in Libya. Gaddafi dead. Al-Megrahi dead.
Somewhere, Fhimah lives.
In the near-decade since I left Seattle on my trip, I’ve realized the story will never actually end, no matter how many lives do. By now, the parents of those lost Syracuse students have reached old age. The day I began sharing this story, November 24th, 2018, would have been my father’s 65th birthday, a milestone formerly associated with retirement. Even I, a kindergartener when this all started, now possess my share of gray hairs.
Time passes. People forget.
Then, the bullshit starts.
When my sister expressed reluctance to release the letter we sent Pureval’s campaign, I argued that like it or not, we children were the guardians of the legacy of Pan Am 103. I’ve accepted that, after 30 years of explaining what happened to my dad, I’m only getting started, because every day, the people who remember are dying out, replaced by those who never knew.
If finding out about my dad’s death is my first real memory, I may be the youngest person who can remember at all.
Which means it’s up to me to preserve the truth.
I marked Did It Day as permanently as possible.
My mom never worried about me getting tattoos or piercings—I still react as poorly to needles as I did in middle school3—but by the time my sister confessed about her tattoo, I’d been considering the idea for a while. I had no concrete ideas, just the abstract thought that if I were ever to get one, it would probably be something related to my dad. Then, my sister said she had his signature on her ankle, and it all came together quick.
My sister returned the notebook to me, but I wanted the full signature, not just his first name, so I asked my mom to dig through the artifacts she keeps for something crisper. In the end, she mailed me a couple of his membership cards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, which I took into the tattoo studio for a consultation.
The artist chose the signature from his membership card for 1989, the year he never made it to.
On my left arm, I now carry a tribute for the rest of my life: His signature, Saul M Rosen, with our shared initials in black and the rest in red. The artist warned me to take care of it, that it might crack or wear or change with time, and I replied that I was fine with whatever happened. There’s poetry in my dad’s signature aging going forward from the point he never did.
Today, I posted the final pieces of this story—these very words—exactly 30 years after the detonation that started this all. My mom is in Arlington, attending the memorial for the first time in years.
I’m not there. I’m doing something else.
After more than a decade, it’s finally time to sit down and read my dad’s old notebook.
But that story is just for me.