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.
- And many of their spouses.
- Two days ago, Kathy told me that her husband’s middle name—Alan—had been misspelled as Allen on the memorial in Lockerbie. It was never fixed.
- I’m proud to say that, all these years later, I haven’t let it happen again. You’re welcome, Taylor.
- Paul’s daughter, Melina Kristina Hudson, was studying abroad at the Exeter School in England.
- Lynne Hartunian was a senior at SUNY-Oswego.
- I will be speaking with Mrs. Philipps, who lost her college-aged daughter in the attack, in Boston.
- A 1976 law that limits the circumstances under which other countries can be sued in American courts.
- The smallest payments were $575,000, while the largest was $10 million, paid to the family of a Vice President at Pepsi. The value of non-dependents was determined by actuarial tables.
- Turns out, the Ben Affleck flop Reindeer Games was retitled Deception in the UK, as it came out in the summer.