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.
Two hours later, I reach Kalamazoo, and wind my way through acres of suburban tract housing until I arrive at Teresa’s home, where I walk across the frosted-over yard and knock on the door. A man answers the door in a Detroit Pistons 2006 NBA Champions t-shirt and gives me a disdainful look, as though I’m a door-to-door salesman or perhaps a Mormon missionary, but when I say I’m here to speak with Teresa, he shows me in to the house and calls upstairs for her.
Teresa’s husband returns to the living room, where he joins a friend in front of a TV displaying a basketball game. Teresa greets me and shows me into the dining room, where we begin to speak of her lost sister, Pamela Elaine Herbert.
The Herbert girls were born and raised in Detroit. Teresa was the oldest of five, with Pamela in the middle.
“We were raised kind of strict,” Teresa tells me. “The neighborhood was, well, back then, it was middle class. My dad worked for the city. My mother stayed home. Had no brothers, no dogs. None of us liked dogs. We lived in the middle of the block, and because it was all girls, they were pretty strict. But that’s just how we grew up. We say strict back then, but it’s just like, when the street lights come on, you come in the house. That’s just how we were raised.
“Growing up, it just seemed hard. Church every Sunday. No smoking. None of that stuff. None of that was in our household.”
As young children, Teresa didn’t particularly like Pamela, in that way that many siblings dislike each other.
“She was a tattletale. I didn’t like her too much, because she always told. She would always hang around me, and she’d want to be around me and my friends. She was just like a typical little sister, I guess. As she got older, we started finding out we had a lot of similar things, and we became a lot closer. We started writing each other. Sometimes you can write things better than you can say it, and we became closer.”
Teresa and Pamela wrote to each other more and more as the girls grew older, starting when Pamela enrolled in various advanced academic programs. From the ninth grade onwards, Pamela was away at school for most of the year, including summers. Still, she found time for her family when she could.
“Most of the time, she would come home on the weekends. When she could get home, she would. It was just like she was in college when she was in high school.”
The Herberts moved from Detroit to Battle Creek, Michigan in 1983; a few months later, Teresa, who was unhappy in Battle Creek, moved in with her aunt in Kalamazoo, where she met her husband. They married in 1986, the same year her parents separated.
Meanwhile, several colleges accepted Pamela, who narrowed her choices down to Kalamazoo College and Bowdoin College. Teresa remembers the decision came down to one key point.
“She wanted to be sure that in her junior year, she could travel abroad. We were like, ‘Why do you want to go overseas?’ She wanted to do it, and Bowdoin offered her a better scholarship. She was really excited.”
In the Fall of 1988, Pamela traveled to London through a partnership between Bowdoin and Syracuse. For all intents and purposes, she was considered a Syracuse student while on that program, but she didn’t know any of the other students going in. While she became friends with another girl in the program, Kesha Weedon, who was also killed on Pan Am 103, she largely looked elsewhere for community.
“One of the most exciting things she was talking about was she found a church over there. She had met a gospel artist, and she had gone to her church. They became friends in that little short time they were there. Her name was Lavine Hudson, and for Pam’s memorial service, she came and she sang and she talked to us about Pam and what it was like knowing her.”
Teresa and Pam sent letters back and forth, in which Pam expressed excitement over meeting Lavine and visiting Paris. While Teresa felt happy about her sister’s adventure, she was also eager for Pamela to return home for Christmas. Teresa remembers the events of the day the plane went down quite vividly, including the joke the family discussed ahead of time.
“My mother was in Battle Creek, so she was actually going to come back to Battle Creek. We were going to pick her up at the airport. Just so we could have a lot of people there, we were going to have a big sign that says ‘Welcome Oprah.'”
Teresa had been taking care of Pam’s car, and took it to get washed. When she got home, she received a phone call from her younger sister.
“She was crying on the phone, and at the same time, on the news, all I remember seeing was fire. They said a plane had crashed, and I went and grabbed the itinerary that she had sent me. It had 102 on it, flight 102, and I’m thinking, No, that can’t be it, because it was awfully close to 103. Then we found out that it was the plane, and I’m thinking, Maybe she got delayed. Maybe. Nothing happened to my sister. It couldn’t be.”
Teresa made the hour-long drive from her home in Kalamazoo to her mother’s in Battle Creek. The phone rang the moment she arrived, London calling.
“Heathrow called my mother and told her that her name was on the manifest. We were a little disturbed, because before they had even called us, that night on Nightline, they had all the students’ names before we had even gotten confirmation. That was pretty upsetting.”
That night, worries Teresa couldn’t have imagined hours earlier kept her awake. Were they sure it was Pamela? If it was her, would her body be damaged from the six-mile fall?
Teresa couldn’t sleep that night, and eventually got tranquilizers from a doctor. Then, she started letting other people know, which she describes as “surreal.” She remembers the newspapers getting many details wrong, an effect amplified in the local media because Pamela was one of only two victims from Michigan. Teresa, who had taken her husband’s surname, was safe from the media attention, but her mother wasn’t so lucky1.
“Herbert is not a real common name. They could find us in the phone book, so they were pestered.
“They were willing to talk, but it seems like it’s all just for news. You’re not really considering the families’ feelings, especially right after. They talked to my mother. She was stoic. She did interviews and everything.”
Teresa’s father, who lived in Detroit, took the news worse.
“My sister said he didn’t take it very well. He kind of shut himself out. He was a media hound. He would record everything that came on about Pan Am or something. When he passed, we had all those little clips and stuff from Phil Donahue’s show to CNN. One day, when I really feel like I’m able to, I’m going to watch it.”
While Teresa and one of her sisters, Vanessa, had grown up and moved out of the house, but their two younger sisters, Lavette and Ruby, lived at home with their mother. Lavette was twelve years old, and Ruby was eight. Teresa remembers caring for her younger sisters as though they were her children.
“Whatever we could do to help them,” she says. “The person I think it was very hard on was my mom, because it was really hard for them around that time. They had moved into some very low, low, low income houses back then, and she was working midnights. Pam would help when she would come home, she would help her with that. It was really hard for her to deal with that part, that you’ve lost your daughter and then you have two more younger ones at home to deal with. It was just really hard. But my mother, she always, she went to work. She was working sometimes two jobs to get out of that.”
Pamela’s funeral was held in January, about three weeks after the attack, but one funeral proved insufficient to remember her.
“She actually had five memorial services. She had one in Maine at her church, and one at the school. And she had two in Detroit and one in Battle Creek.
“I had never been on a plane before this happened. The first time I’d been on a plane, we were going to one of her memorial services, and I was scared to death. Since then, I’ve been on a plane maybe five or six times, and this last time, when we went to the 20th anniversary, was the first time I was not afraid.”
In the wake of the attack, Teresa, who worshipped at the Church of God in Christ, struggled in many ways. Before Pamela left for England, Teresa frequently called her just to talk. After Pamela died, the desire to catch up with Pamela repeatedly struck Teresa. Even today, she still struggles to reconcile what happened—Teresa mentions that, had she lived, Pam would have turned 40 just a few weeks ago.
“I think, because of how we believe, it’s difficult to understand. We just believe that it was for the best. We knew that she had a purpose and she accomplished so much more in her nineteen years than a whole lot of other people had. We hurt, of course, but I think we all are dealing with it and have dealt with it in different ways. I used to write, and I couldn’t write any more. I just picked it up in the last probably four or five years. It affected me that much.”
The attack even shook Teresa’s strong faith.
“I questioned it for a little while, but just didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand why. I didn’t get less involved, it just made me wonder. I guess I felt I had to take care of me first before I did anything else, but my mind didn’t change. I didn’t stray out or anything like that.”
“I believe that how all of us believe, you just have understand why it happened and why He took her. A matter of fact, we got her things back when they sent all her stuff back, her Bible was opened up to, I can’t even remember the scripture, but it was open. Like maybe that’s what she’d been reading at that time.”
Teresa’s life finally began to move forward again the following year, when she gave birth to her second child.
“Nine months, almost to the day after she died, Tamara was born. So her name’s Tamara Elaine, named after Pam.”
At the time, Teresa worked in a kitchen at Western Michigan University, but she bounced between jobs over the years. Last July, she started working at a local funeral home, which she finds rewarding.
“That has helped me tremendously. I love my job. I work in an office, but also I work out on the services as well, just helping the families, talking to them, and getting help getting arrangements made and all that stuff. It’s a job I never would have thought I’d be doing.”
Over the years, she tried to follow the various legal developments on the case, but with so much of the action taking place on the East Coast and a family to take care of here, she couldn’t get all that involved. Part of that also stems from a desire to focus on her sister instead of the big picture.
I ask Teresa if she’s in touch with the other family from Michigan, who lived in Detroit. She says she isn’t, but thinks one of her sisters might be. To Teresa, privacy was more important than any sense of community that might have developed.
“It’s one of those things where, you didn’t want anyone to know, but then, because of the person she was, you wanted everyone to know. We’re private people.”
An article I read from the early days of the investigation mentioned that other family. The family was of Arab descent, and an early theory suggested that the boy who was killed may have smuggled the bomb aboard the plane, knowingly or not.
“I remember that,” Teresa says. “After it happened, I think it was the first year after, we had a meeting at the airport, and the guy that they accused then, his little brother stood up. He was eight or nine, and he cried and said, ‘They’re saying my brother did it, and I know he didn’t do it.’ It was so sad. But I don’t think at that time, they hadn’t even suspected Libya.”
Pamela and Teresa’s father passed away from diabetes and heart disease, at the age of 52 in 1992, several years before the lawsuit against Pan Am ended. For her mother, the money from the lawsuit was enough to make drastic life changes.
“It seems like it was a small amount, but it was enough to get her out of the project where she was. She ended up getting a car, and she worked her way up from there. That was a godsend at the time, but I have to give her props for just doing what she does. She makes sure all her grandchildren, she’s provided ways for them to finish their education. Pass on the legacy.”
Understandably, Teresa feels conflicted about it.
“You’re happy because your life and your children’s can possibly be made better, but the reason you got it is she’s not here. It’s bittersweet. It doesn’t erase anything. It doesn’t erase the fact that this happened. Then again, money is just money. It’s nice to have, but you’ve done without it, so you know that you can do it.”
Some of that money funded various memorials. Syracuse honored Pamela with one of its 35 Remembrance Scholarships, but in addition, Bowdoin set up a fund, which gave money to three students this year. Bowdoin also posthumously awarded Pamela a degree, which the school gave to her mother.
More importantly, though, Pamela lives on in her nieces and nephews, most of whom she never met.
“They know quite a bit. They know what happened, and through pictures and stuff, they always are saying, ‘We wish we had known her.’ She had only had two nephews when she left, and by the time she got back, she might have had four nieces and nephews by then. It’s just one of the things we always said, we were always going to be sure to tell our kids about Pam. Let them know how special she was, how smart she was, her dedication, her, you know. All of our kids have some trait of that.”
Teresa wonders what might have been if Pamela had lived.
“We just knew she wanted to help the homeless, because even while she was in England, she was touched by so much homelessness over there. And she was just a giving person, so it would’ve been something giving back.
“I think that she’d be some professional, somewhere. I know she would. Possibly married, but I think her career would have come first. And I do believe she would be around here, she wouldn’t be out on the East Coast or West Coast or South or something like that. I think she’d be closer to the family, because she’d been gone for so long. I think she’d be a valuable asset to society.”
And as for Teresa?
“I had wanted to write a book for children about how to deal with grief, but I never got to it. Eventually, I may do that.”
There’s one thing she won’t do, though, which might be a sign that she hasn’t completely dealt with her grief yet.
“I can’t go to the cemetery. I can’t go back.”
Teresa didn’t elaborate on why she couldn’t return to the cemetery, but I felt pretty certain that I understood. I suspect it’s a combination between Maurice’s long delay in visit my father’s gravesite, born out of a refusal to accept the finality of his demise, and my reluctance to return there, which exists more because of the understanding that the site my mom chose for his body to decompose bore little relevance to the life he lived.
Most likely, this is Teresa’s last little coping mechanism: She keeps her sister alive through memory, but visiting Pamela’s grave would only acknowledge that, no matter how many stories Teresa tells, Pamela will never return from her trip abroad.
I stop for the night in Dearborn, Michigan, because for once, I have greater needs than driving. I need to do more laundry after last night’s dryer malfunction, I need to work on a project for 826 back home, and I should probably eat dinner at some point, too.
What a waste of a Saturday night.
I won’t pretend I’m a particularly dynamic individual for my age—I spent the ten Friday nights preceding this trip watching the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica instead of being out and about. I won’t pretend that I have never spent a Saturday night at home, doing nothing. And I realize that I am far from home, far from my friends and our bars.
But this night, though, this night spent in the suburbs of a city that’s a shadow of its former self, I expect to be particularly wasteful.
Before I head to the mall down the street from my hotel in search of food, I update my Facebook status. While I wander the mall, I get a response from a friend back home who lived in the area before we met last year:
“GET OUT OF SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN
DON’T ASK WHY JUST GET OUT OF SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN I AM TELLING YOU THIS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY.
… no, seriously, no one should spend any time in southeast michigan.”
I respond, assuring him that I’m only here for a night, and he replies, “Hopefully you can get out before the generalized despair soaks all the way in…”
After a mediocre food court dinner, I return to my room and revise a short story while my clothes are in the laundry. Tonight, Zac Efron is hosting SNL, which I decide to put up with.
Sometimes, these things need to be done. My clothes need to be folded so my bags can be packed. Zac Efron must be tolerated so that I can watch the Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform. Detroit must exist, because if it didn’t, we’d have to invent it as a warning of the dangers of building a whole city’s economy around a single industry.
Sometimes, we endure things because we hope they’ll get us to a better place. We respond to failures by trying again, or by helping others weather the same storm. Sometimes, we write about our losses, hoping someone will find some inspiration. But the important thing is to acknowledge that every journey has two points, the beginning and the end, and these are equally essential.
For anyone to get anywhere, they must have somewhere to leave.