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.
- During my conversation with Dan Tobin.
- Only because that was the day I returned from Ireland, and jet lag is a thing.
- Very poorly.