I have a little secret to confess, and now seems like as good a time as any: I am going to die.
Oh, I am not going to die today, and I doubt I’m going to die tomorrow. In fact, I have no reason to believe that I am going to die any time in the foreseeable future: Life expectancy data would suggest I have twice as much time ahead of me as I do behind, and my doctor, during my last visit, informed me that aside from higher-than-preferable blood sugar, I am in perfect health.
That said, I know I am going to die.
Some future-thinking scientists would even argue that this is a lie, that medical technology is progressing at a rate such that immortality is within humanity’s grasp. Some experts claim that old age will be a thing of the past before I am, but they are wrong.
I am going to die, and this knowledge is never far from my mind.
Take now, for instance, as I zoom eastward on I-10. A day ago, I had never visited Arizona, and a couple hours from now, I will see New Mexico for the first time as well. Everything here marks uncharted territory for me, and I should be taking it in, even if the absorption occurs while driving 70 miles per hour. I’ve never before laid eyes on this terrain, and I don’t know that I ever will again, but this is not what is on my mind as I continue eastward.
All I am thinking about is how I am going to die.
The Sebring hugs the road as it speeds through the desert, and while its height would not seem that much lower than average in a typical urban area, this is anything but. Trucks, SUVs, and 18-wheelers dominate this interstate, and while the former two don’t concern me, the latter terrifies me. My car sits just low enough that its body runs parallel to the semis’ wheels, and therein lies the problem.
On these semis, the bolts on all of the rear wheels are recessed into the wheel itself, which means in the event of a collision, one would presumably hit rubber and not metal. The front wheels are a different beast, though: The center of the wheel protrudes from the rubber of the tire, such that the metal nuts and bolts could easily chew through another vehicle that was short enough and got too close.
Like mine, for example.
I tense up whenever I pass one of these trucks, when one of them passes me, or even if I just happen to find myself parallel to one. I imagine this being the moment the driver slips up, the one time he fails to check his blind spot, and I imagine the bolts on that front wheel chewing into my car, sucking it in, destroying the engine and ultimately me. I imagine those few seconds when I am acutely aware of what’s happening, yet helpless to stop it.
This is not the worst death I have imagined.
Far too often, I catch myself contemplating the many ways I could die at that exact moment. When I had a regular shift volunteering in 826’s retail storefront, I sometimes stared through the plate glass windows at the street outside, and wondered what I’d experience if the driver of a car waiting for the light at the end of the block fired a bullet that pierced my skull.
I have no reason to believe this would ever happen, but I have thought about it plenty anyway. Would it be too late by the time I heard the bang of the bullet, or would there be a split-second in which I could, in theory, react, just enough time for my reflexes to prove insufficient? Would I feel it, suffering as the life drained out of me, or would I die instantly? Would I be painfully aware of what had occurred in those final seconds, or would I, quite literally, never know what hit me?
Experts’ opinions differed as to the extent of the suffering endured by the 259 people who fell out of the sky on December 21, 1988. Some argued that those killed would have lost consciousness within three seconds, while others claimed that it would take longer for oxygen deprivation to take hold. Experts theorized about different possible symptoms—instantaneous frostbite, asphyxiation, and so on. The possibility of victims losing consciousness at higher altitudes only to regain it at lower ones was even suggested, but this is all theoretical: A lot can happen during a two-and-a-half minute, six mile fall, but only one thing can happen at its conclusion, and that thing makes it pretty difficult to find out what the people experienced during the fall.
A rumor has spread in the two decades since, a story of one Lockerbie resident discovering a victim who retained a pulse after impact, one person still alive after a 31,000-foot fall, but this was never officially confirmed. A couple of days ago, Maurice mentioned hearing this rumor.
“One of my dear friends is a physician, and I finally got up the guts to ask him a question that I wanted to know,” he told me. “We were talking about this, and I said, ‘Ken, I’m curious: At that altitude, were they aware?’ He said, ‘No, they would be dead almost instantly.’ Then I read somewhere that someone who hit the ground lived for a minute.”
Nobody truly knows how much, if at all, the people suffered in their final moments, but the possibility of their suffering played a key role in the lawsuit against Pan Am. Some surely would have suffered more than others, but we can’t know who. What we can know, however, is how much their families suffered afterwards.
In the days after the attack, the Morristown Police Department came to our house. There, they took fingerprints from my mother1, then went into my parents’ bathroom to pull prints off objects. In those days, before DNA was a plot point on half of TV’s prime-time dramas, the simplest way authorities could identify a potentially mangled, unrecognizable body was through fingerprint or dental recognition, so they operated under the assumption that any adult fingerprints that weren’t my mom’s would be my dad’s. This turned out to be unnecessary—the police in Scotland identified him visually.
Many families were less fortunate. While we received his body swiftly, others had to wait weeks, if not months, for what remained of their loved ones to be returned. Some bodies were never recovered at all.
It’s strange to think that we were lucky in some way.
The plan for today was to stop in El Paso, and make the nearly 600-mile drive to Austin tomorrow. But when I arrive in the former city, it’s still early enough in the day to keep going and save myself some driving tomorrow, so I fill my car with gas and push onwards, racing away from the sun.
While nightfall approaches Van Horn, Texas from the east, I arrive from the west, pulling into the parking lot of the town’s Dairy Queen for dinner as dusk nears its conclusion. The town appeared as a simple dot on Google Maps when I looked for a stopping point earlier, and it’s not much bigger in reality—as far as I can tell, its economy relies on being a place on the side of the highway.
This will suffice.
As I stare at the Dairy Queen’s menu, I’m struck by the offerings. They’re generally the same foods one expects at such an establishment, but this place seems remarkably obsessed with its location. Instead of large-size or super-sized combos, theirs are Texas-sized, which means, if I’m reading the menu correctly, I could theoretically order a Texas-sized Texas burger combo made with real Texas beef.
I order a regular-sized chicken strips meal.
With my soda in hand, I sit a table over from a pack of teenagers whose t-shirts identify them as the local high school’s cheer squad. As I unintentionally eavesdrop, I wonder what it’s like to be the cheerleading team for the high school of a town that has only 2,500 residents, especially considering my high school had 2,000 students. Then, my next thought is a far more morbid one.
Van Horn could just as well be Lockerbie.
My mom took my sister and me to Lockerbie in 2000, the third of four stops on what was either a grand European vacation or a two-and-a-half week educational deep dive into the source of all our misery, depending on how we looked at it.
We all remember it as the misery tour.
A little over a year earlier, after years of international negotiations, Libya handed over the two men accused of bombing Pan Am Flight 103, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah for a trial set to begin the following year.
The scheme was complex: A former U.S. Air Force base in the Netherlands, Camp Zeist, which had been returned to the Dutch government, would undergo renovation and become temporary Scottish territory for the purposes of the trial. Since the parties involved believed finding an unbiased jury would be nearly impossible, a panel of three judges (and one alternate) would both preside over the trial and render its verdict under Scottish law, which, among other things, meant there was no possible death penalty. At worst, Megrahi and Fhimah would receive life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Here in the States, the Office for Victims of Crime set up CCTV sites in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. for families to watch the trial as it happened. In addition, an act of Congress authorized the OVC to liquidate seized Libyan assets to pay for two round-trip tickets and hotel accomodations for the families of the American victims to attend the trial in Zeist.
My mom thought it was important for us to go, for my sister and me to see the trial first-hand.
None of us knew what we were in for.
By the time we arrived in Zeist, the first month of what was ultimately a nine-month proceeding had passed. The trial’s inaugural day had been a blockbuster, with international news coverage and throngs of crowds, but when we got there, we were greeted by a lone photographer who said he would be there every single day. The stands erected to house all the news crews were noticeably barren.
Scottish police officers from the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary—the Scottish equivalent of a county which includes Lockerbie—took two-week shifts at Zeist for the trial. We saw them everywhere, holding military-style guns and looking extremely serious, at least until my mom struck up a conversation with one. He smiled broadly upon hearing we came from the same town as Elvis.
We were one of four or five families present that week, and my sister and I were two of the three teenagers in attendance. At the trial, the three years between us created a massive gulf.
Scottish custom disallows anybody under the age of fourteen in the viewing gallery of a trial, even in a case like this, where security required six-inch-thick bulletproof glass separating the courtroom from the gallery. At age sixteen, I was allowed in. My sister, then thirteen, was banished to the auxiliary viewing room, where she could watch on TV, alone. Occasionally, our mom joined her in there.
Never mind that, in the main viewing gallery, we watched on TV and listened through headphones as well. The thick glass blocked all sound, and the layout of the room was such that we couldn’t see the faces of the physics expert2 or electronics shop owner3 who testified that week. Evidence was displayed on the monitors mounted in the corners of the room—all of it, that is, except for the baggage container which had held the bomb, which sat reconstructed on steel scaffolding in the near corner of the courtroom.
My mom and I tended to sit on one side of the viewing gallery with other family members who were there. On the other side sat a group of Muslims, who I assumed to be relatives of the accused. Across the glass from them, the accused themselves: Fhimah and Megrahi.
The men who killed my father.
I wish I could claim I had some sort of visceral reaction upon seeing those two men, but in my memory, I was mostly numb, probably due to the circumstances. Calling that week surreal feels like an understatement, but the next adjective that comes to mind is miserable. My sister was miserable because she couldn’t be in the room. I was miserable because I was in the room, instead of spending the early days of summer vacation playing Magic with my friends. My mom was miserable because she had two ungrateful kids complaining constantly. All three of us were bored out of our minds, awaiting some dramatic moment that never came, and jet-lagged to boot.
So, our European vacation was off to a great start.
After a week in Zeist, we went to Amsterdam for a couple days4, which I could generously describe as less unenjoyable. From there, we flew to Glasgow, rented a car, and made the 90-minute drive to Lockerbie. My mom, having visited the area a decade earlier with her older sister, knew a bed and breakfast outside of town, and booked two nights there.
We could have seen everything in two hours.
At the time of the attack, Lockerbie had roughly 3,000 residents, but in the time since, the population had boomed to more than 4,000. It’s a small town that serves a mostly agricultural community—my standard joke when telling people about the area is that it probably has more sheep than people. Dozens, if not hundreds, of towns exist in Scotland just like Lockerbie that nobody has ever heard of, and Lockerbie would still be one of them had a plane not fallen on it.
Tiny as it is, seeing Lockerbie’s sights takes remarkably little time or effort. My mom drove us to Tundergarth, the church outside of town, which was the closest structure to where the plane’s nose cone struck, and we spent a few minutes in the memorial chapel. From there, we drove to the neighborhood where my father and many others were found, and saw a plaque noting the site. We considered going to the neighborhood where the plane’s wing section exploded—destroying several houses, killing 11 people, and incinerating several of the never-recovered bodies—but my mom couldn’t remember how to get there and, as we believed the area had been rebuilt5, she didn’t feel like it was worth asking for directions.
It was all very low-key. That night, lacking anything else to do, we drove for 45 minutes to find the nearest bowling alley. The next day, my mom and I visited a medieval castle a few towns over while my sister stayed in the car. The day after that, we left.
To be fair, our trip could have gone quite differently. To this day, the police of the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary will arrange VIP tours for any family member visiting, but we decided against that, and I’m pretty sure we never mentioned to anyone the purpose of our presence in Lockerbie. At the time, I thought it amazing that nobody figured out why we were there—I imagined that not many single-parent American tourist families visit the town—but a couple of years ago, while talking with another 826 volunteer, my visit to Lockerbie came up. The conversation went something like this:
“So, after the trial, we visited Lockerbie,” I said. “It’s this tiny town that probably has more sheep than people.”
“I know,” she replied. “I’ve been there.”
“Wait, you’ve been to Lockerbie? Nobody’s been to Lockerbie.”
“I know.”
“What in the world were you doing in Lockerbie?”
“I don’t know. I was visiting the United Kingdom with my aunt and uncle, and we just stopped there one night.”
I had never imagined such a possibility. Lockerbie never seemed like a place that actually existed for anyone but us, a place that was home to 3,000 people and one hell of a tragedy. I didn’t think you could stop there for the night.
So now, I sit here in a Dairy Queen in Van Horn, Texas, awaiting my chicken strips. Once I’ve eaten them, I’ll cross the highway and check into a hotel. Maybe, if the universe proves as unjust as I’ve always suspected, one day I’ll speak to someone who knew someone who died in a tragedy that occurred in Van Horn. When he describes it as a town with more cattle than people, I’ll nod and tell him that I’ve been there, that I spent a night there.
He will be as baffled as I.
- Every few years, my mom reminds me the Morristown Police have her fingerprints on file in case we ever need them. Considering I was in elementary school the first time she told me this, I don’t expect I’ll ever forget it.
- Who explained how they figured out where the bomb was located in the plane based on the debris pattern.
- Who built the circuit board used in the timer on the bomb.
- The highlights of these two days were 1) Nearly getting mugged while walking by myself, and 2) Getting in an argument with my mom after she suggested I have a beer, since it was legal.
- I later learned that the destroyed houses weren’t rebuilt, and instead were replaced with a memorial park.