Before my father died, I remember singing.
In the waning weeks of 1988, my kindergarten class took part in the school’s Christmas program, performing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Somehow, in the heart of New Jersey, I was the only Jewish kid in my class, but I burned with a secular fury.
I wanted to sing the fun bits.
We kindergarteners were taught the song as written, while the second-graders in the chorus sung lines I’d never heard before: “Like a light bulb!” “Like Monopoly!” “Ho, ho, ho!” and so on. From where I stood, I could see the joy in their faces which only made me angrier.
Two decades later, it feels strange to have been so angry about particular lines in a Christmas song, but I was five years old, and five-year-olds tend to fume about this sort of thing. Instead of rebelling, I yelled the song I’d learned while silently resenting the second-graders. As we sang about the fine line between a safe flight and catastrophe in the skies on a cold December night, I learned a valuable lesson.
Life is not fair.
My father worked his whole life, and ultimately, that’s what killed him. Or, to be more precise, what killed my father was a 31,000-foot fall, caused by an explosive device detonating in the luggage compartment of the Boeing 747 which was carrying him home from a business trip to England. My father was killed by a bomb planted by agents of the Libyan government, an act of terrorism.
Saul Mark Rosen was murdered. He was only one of many.
On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 carried 243 passengers—including 35 Syracuse University students returning from a semester studying abroad—and 16 crew members en route from Heathrow Airport to JFK when that bomb ripped it apart in the skies above Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 of them died. Eleven residents of Lockerbie were killed as well, incinerated when the wing section, which carried enough jet fuel for the transatlantic voyage, exploded upon impact with their homes.
That night, at 7:02pm local time, 270 people lost their lives in what remained the deadliest terrorist attack against an American target until September 11, 2001. They were only the most immediate victims, though. Hundreds of us lost friends, lovers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, or siblings. Thousands of lives were never the same.
Including mine.
When I bought my condo a year and a half ago, my mom told me to forget about my budget and spend the extra ten percent on this one. The view won her over.
On rare clear days, Mt. Rainier dominates the view outside my windows, while on the cloudier days that typify my beloved Seattle, the art deco former military hospital which houses Amazon’s headquarters looms a neighborhood away. Weeks after my 24th birthday, I bought my first home in a “luxury” condo building on Capitol Hill, the city’s hippest neighborhood and raging heart. But then, I didn’t pay for this place.
My father’s death did.
Twenty years, three months and four days ago, I awoke and discovered my mom sobbing in our living room, where she told me that my father’s routine business trip had come to an unexpected end an ocean away from our home.
On this morning, I’m tidying my condo and packing my car, about to leave on a trip of my own. Today, I’m leaving the only place I’ve felt at home since the morning I learned of his death, and spending the next month on the road in an attempt to understand my own, strange life.
My father’s grave lies a 3,059-mile drive east of me, beside a lake in his hometown of Wakefield, Massachusetts. That’s where I’m going, but I’m taking the long way, meandering around America. Along the way, I’ll speak with others who lost friends or family in the bombing of Pan Am 103, asking them to share not only their loved ones’ stories, but their own as well. I’m embarking on this journey because in the two decades since my father’s murder, I’ve realized two things: The story of Pan Am 103 is as much about those of us who lived as those who died, and nobody is completely dead as long as they are remembered.
My memories of my father exist as fragments, at best—I once explained to my younger sister that the moment I learned of his death marks the transition from slideshow to video in my mind, the first memory I could recreate in a cinematic setting if requested. Having such a trauma as my first memory1 could be torture, but the timing might have been ideal. I remember pieces of my father, but all I really remember is life without him—I was young enough when he was killed that I didn’t even have to make an effort to adapt. When you’re five years old, everything that happens to you is the most normal thing in the world.
Because I’ve lived this, I’m not seeking answers. I know who killed my father, I know why, and I know it altered the arc of my life so greatly that I can never even begin to comprehend what it might have been otherwise. I honestly believe I know all I really need to about my father’s murder.
I understand my father’s death, but my own life remains a puzzle.
As a kid, I knew my circumstances were atypical—all of my friends had dads, while I had a checking account2. Years passed before I realized the impact of my father’s absence and the strangeness of my experiences. My mom spent my formative years sheltering us from the fallout, but the slow-motion nature of the 20 years of lawsuits meant my life has gotten weirder as I’ve grown older.
I wonder if I’m alone in that. I wonder if others have handled the last two decades of drama better or worse than my family. I wonder about the stories I never heard, the things I never learned, living 1,000 miles away from the action raised by a mom doing all she could to give my sister and me normal childhoods.
I wonder what we missed so far away, and if we really missed out at all.
My schedule involves ending today nearly 300 miles south in Eugene, Oregon, but I begin my day like every Thursday during the school year, by driving seven miles north to the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. On the neighborhood’s namesake street, behind the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company, lies 826 Seattle, the writing and tutoring center where I’ve volunteered for the last several years.
Thursday mornings, teachers bring their classes in for field trips and, over the course of two hours, we write stories with the kids, then quickly turn them into books so that each kid can take home a copy as published authors. Today’s program involves splitting the class up into four teams of six kids, and having each group write and illustrate its own tale.
Upon arrival, I discover we’ve added a pack of new volunteers, who are getting the rundown from the field trip’s coordinator and a volunteer who, along with myself, co-founded what we call Team Thursday a couple years ago. After the coordinator explains the basics, the other volunteer and I explain a bit more what to expect, and we pair the new people with veterans just in time for the class’s arrival.
What I love about these field trips is that it’s the rare environment where kids are encouraged to let their imaginations run wild— the tales that emerge every week tend to lie somewhere between absurd and ridiculous in the best way possible. Approximately two-thirds of the stories involve space, with plane crashes, tropical islands, caves full of treasure and haunted houses making up most of the remainder. Today’s story starts out no different—my group wants the main character to be an alien who fights a robot—but it quickly devolves into the weirdest story I’ve written in this program.
The students’ protagonist, Puko the blue and yellow plaid Plutonian, burps out suit-wearing flying kittens when he gets nervous or excited. The antagonist, an unnamed robot, has stolen Las Vegas and absconded to Pluto with the city, thinking it’s a pinball game. All the Plutonians are genderless, which means the other adult—who’s old enough to be these kids’ grandfather—and I facilitate a conversation with ten-year-olds about what terms to use to refer to agendered aliens’ grandparents.
This is a normal Thursday morning for me.
This is as normal as my life ever gets.
Once the kids shuffle out the door with their books in their hands, we adults discuss how things went. One minute, I’m explaining to the new recruits what to expect in the coming weeks. The next, I’m out on the road, unsure what the next month will hold for me.
On southbound I-5, as one crosses the Ship Canal Bridge, the whole of downtown Seattle appears in near-panorama. Even after seven years in this city, I’m amazed by how much time I spend gawking at the Space Needle and thinking to myself Holy shit, I live in Seattle.
It’s a weird time to live here. In the last ten days, the city lost the better of its two daily newspapers, celebrated the rebirth of beloved music venue the Crocodile Cafe, debuted a Major League Soccer team, and had nationally syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage declare he was running for mayor, with his primary platform being that he would resign after 24 hours.
As downtown Seattle leaves my windshield and reappears in my rear-view mirror, I take a moment to appreciate my beautiful and bizarre city, and say my farewell.
Traffic flows smoothly through King and Pierce counties. As I leave the latter, I enter personally uncharted territory. In all my years in Seattle, I’ve never once driven south of Tacoma. I’ve never had any reason to.
Until now.
I have three days to drive almost the entire length of I-5, down to Los Angeles, where my father’s best friend, Maurice Newman, will regale me with tales of their adventures together. While I speed out of my comfort zone, I realize that I should probably figure out what I’m doing before I get there.
The towns of the Puget Sound region give way to the verdant hills and occasional towns on the road to Portland, and my confidence starts to slip. Already.
Here’s what I know: While I’m the one going on this adventure, and I’m the one writing this memoir, this isn’t my story. At best, my story remains unwritten, still unformed. I’m too young to be writing my story, no matter how many times friends suggested it over the years. I know why they’d suggest such a thing, because the events that have happened to me, the events that have thus far defined my life— and likely will still be among the most personally influential I will have experienced when I do reach my deathbed—sound fascinating. Weird shit has happened. Weird shit has happened to me.
Weird shit doesn’t make a story, though.
At 25, I long ago reached physical maturity, but I haven’t lived life. The connective tissue of my tale still hasn’t formed. I know, because I tried to write my life story a couple years ago, and even as I wrote it, I knew it wasn’t interesting.
My dad, though. My dad’s story has always been more fascinating to me. What I know—what I think I know, at least, since so much of it was learned at such a young age that it all could have gotten fuzzed up into a poor facsimile of the truth—seems like a classic American dream, or at least the first half of one.
Until the abrupt ending.
His life didn’t end alone, of course. What are the odds that I happened to know—to be the child of—the most interesting person who died in that attack? How many more fascinating lives were lost? How were their loved ones’ lives reshaped?
These thoughts rattle in my mind as I plunge further southward, across the Columbia River and into Oregon for the first time in my life. One doubt keeps leaping above the jumble: The loudest question in the chorus, the one I least want to acknowledge.
What makes me think I can do those lives some sort of justice?
Eugene, Oregon somehow sneaks up on me: One moment, I’m driving through a hilly rural area that looks remarkably like the area where the colonials decided to settle at the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica3 a couple of weeks ago, and the next, I’m back in civilization. I divert from I-5 to I-105, and discover a Red Lion feet from an exit, where I decide to stop for the night. Inside, I settle onto the bed with my computer and begin copying a batch of albums onto CDs for tomorrow’s journey. My computer sits on my lap as my music collection gradually re-emerges from the hard drive. This is my life, and yet it is not.
The bed on which I’m reclining is not mine, and the floor where my suitcase lies isn’t either. This is not my TV providing background noise. These things were rented with money that came from my father’s death, the same money that paid for everything I own, but they are fundamentally different, because tomorrow night, they will be someone else’s.
This is not my home, but hours from now, when I set my computer on the floor and go to sleep, I will slowly start to understand that this is the closest I am going to get for some time.
- My sister’s first memory is being bitten by my friend’s dog, so neither one of us got off easy here.
- My mom had to set up a joint checking account for me, and another for my sister, in order to deposit the Social Security checks that came in our names. I was consistently the only kid to bring in a check instead of a $5 bill when it was time to pay for field trips.
- Spoiler Alert.