The drive out of Atlanta begins on the proverbial heels of a Honda Accord from Shelby County, Tennessee, the county in which Memphis resides, and I wonder to myself if I’d know the owner of the car. It seems unlikely, but in my experience, that actually makes it probable.
Case in point: In addition to the whole Andrea/Sam thing I mentioned in Austin, it turned out that a different SPINtern, who worked in the research department, was sorority sisters at Northwestern with a girl I grew up with in Memphis1. And then, there’s the story of the woman I’m on my way to interview right now.
In a few hours, Kathy Tedeschi will tell me how her husband, like my father, changed flights onto Pan Am 103 to return early from a business trip. Afterwards, Kathy, who also lived in New Jersey at the time, befriended my mom in the months before we moved down to Memphis, and they catch up whenever they wind up at the same events. When I started reaching out to people for this project, she was one of the first to respond.
I didn’t have enough interested people, so I flew out to the 20th anniversary weekend in Arlington, Virginia, where I hoped to do some networking for once in my life. At the big dinner the night before the memorial, which Kathy organized, I spoke for a few minutes about what I hoped this project would become, and how people could reach me.
I attended that dinner alone, and Kathy, knowing that, put me at a table with her three children. That night, I learned the eldest of the three, Erin, attends grad school in Seattle.
At the college across the street from my condo.
I have no idea who’s driving that car ahead of me right now, but I’m sure they’re in my high school yearbook somewhere.
It’s early afternoon when I arrive in Columbia, South Carolina at Kathy’s lakeside home. Kathy greets me at the doors, introduces me to her husband Russ, shows me in, and begins the grand tour, all with the usual demeanor of a true Southern belle. The vaguely Roman-inspired house, which appears from the front to be a single story, features a sizable and well-furnished basement as well. From the basement, one can exit to the swimming pool, hot tub, and dock on Lake Murray in the backyard.
By any measure, this is a nice home—while I assume the local real estate market pales in comparison to that of Seattle, I feel pretty confident thinking that a place like this would cost several million dollars in the region that both Kathy’s eldest daughter and I call home. Based on my little interaction with him, Russ seems like a nice man.
Kathy and Russ married fourteen years ago, six years after her first husband, Bill Daniels, died on board Pan Am 103. And yet, two decades after Bill’s demise, she still speaks of him in the present tense, and still refers to his siblings as in-laws.
“He has an older brother and a younger sister,” she says. “His parents were both teachers. His father was a high school principal, and his mother was a first grade teacher. His older brother lives kind of near Dulles Airport. My sister-in-law lives out from Atlanta.”
Bill grew up in Ohio, but was raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Kathy grew up here in Columbia. The couple met at Emory University, where they both studied chemistry, and wed right after she graduated. They both attended graduate school at Penn State—he got a doctorate, while she got a master’s—the couple moved on to Bel-Mead, New Jersey, where Bill worked at a company called American Cyanamid.
“When chemists would come up with a product, a compound or something like that, his group would take it and make it on a bulk scale, make enough of it to really try it. Like there was a compound they put on railroad tracks and it kills all the weeds. His group would take it from the small scale to the larger scale.”
In December 1988, Cyanamid sent Bill to England to work on a business deal.
“When he was over in England, they were interviewing to use their pilot plant over in Newcastle-on-Tyne. About three years later, his company put up a pilot plant, and they named the building after him. After that, they didn’t have to go off-site to do it. But that’s what he was doing, he was negotiating a contract over there to use their facilities.”
I ask Kathy what she remembers about learning of her husband’s death.
“He had called me at around noon our time. I guess he was calling from London and he said he was about to get on that flight. He was coming back because they had finished up in Newcastle early. He was with five other people. Four of them were just going to come back the next day like they had planned, and one guy flew from Newcastle to London with him. The other guy took TWA, but Bill did not because TWA had had hijackings and stuff like that, and so he was afraid to fly TWA. Obviously, the other guy was smarter.”
Bill called to ask Kathy to let his secretary know that he would be coming back early. Since Kathy was taking care of the couple’s three kids—Erin, Brice, and Melanie—she couldn’t pick him up at the airport, so the secretary was supposed to arrange a ride. Kathy went about her day, thinking nothing of the call.
“I never had the TV or radio on or anything. Brice was in the second grade and I was his room mother, so I had all these goodie bags that I was getting together for his class. I guess the next day must have been the last day of classes.”
After picking up Erin and Brice at school, she took them to Friendly’s, an East Coast chain diner/ice cream shop, and then on to their piano lessons.
“I dropped them both off at the lady’s house, and then I had Melanie in the car with me, and we delivered a couple of presents to people. Then, I was driving back home with Melanie in the back seat, and she was asleep in her car seat. She was two.
“As I was turning the corner, about maybe a mile from our house, I heard them say something about a bad accident over in England and it was a flight that was on its way from Heathrow to JFK and it’s crashed. I remember the announcer saying, ‘I just feel so sorry for anybody in my listening audience who’s affected by this.’ I never heard what airline it was or anything. He was saying a phone number to call if you needed information, so I kept saying the number over and over in my head, and I turned up the volume really high on the radio to try to hear it all.
“I just kept saying the number, and when I pulled in the garage, I left Melanie in the car. I ran in, called the number, and they said it was Pan Am. I said, ‘My husband was on Pan Am 103,’ so I must have known what the number was. I said, ‘Were there any survivors?’
“He says, ‘Lady, you know as much about it as I do.'”
Kathy next called her mother, who was watching the news on TV. The two had spoken earlier in the day, and Kathy mentioned then that Bill was due back the next day. Kathy’s mother hadn’t even considered the possibility that Bill was on the plane.
“As soon as she heard my voice, she started screaming. She said, ‘Kathy, get someone over there with you.’ So, I called my next-door neighbor, and Bill’s boss was over there at their house. They had been looking for me. It was a foggy night, and they hadn’t seen me come in. They came right over, and he already knew about it, because the secretary had known. In fact, his wife worked with a psychiatrist and she had brought Valium over for me.”
Her neighbors and Bill’s boss stayed at her house to take care of her for a while. One of the neighbors offered to pick up Erin and Brice from their lessons, but upset as she was, Kathy couldn’t even describe how to get to the teacher’s house. The woman assured Kathy that she’d figure it out, and that she’d take care of the kids for the night.
“Her son was about the same age as Brice, and Brice just thought it was great that he was going to get to spend the night at this boy’s house. He never thought anything about it. But Erin was old enough—she was ten, almost eleven—she thought that this was weird. She said she dreamed that (Bill) was killed in a plane crash that night, so I think she must have overheard something.”
Kathy’s mom flew from Columbia to New Jersey late that night, and another of Kathy’s neighbors picked her up at the airport. Meanwhile, Kathy worried about Melanie, who, at two years old, had no idea what was going on. Kathy slept beside Melanie that night.
The next morning, Bill’s brother Scott, who he’d been estranged from for three years, came down from Boston.
“He walked around my house looking at pictures of Bill coaching soccer and he said, ‘I didn’t know he liked that.’ And he looked at the piano and said, ‘Who played the piano?’ and I said, ‘Well, the kids did, but Bill was learning too.’ He said, ‘I never knew he was interested in music. I thought, You didn’t know him very well, did you?“
On December 23, Cyanamid flew Kathy, her mother and the three kids down to Columbia, where her parents lived, on the company’s private plane.
“I remember that Erin had holes in her socks, and I was so embarrassed. I thought, Oh, Jesus. The pilot’s going to turn around and look at her feet.“
Kathy and her children stayed with her parents for two weeks. After a week in Columbia, Kathy got a call that Bill’s body had been identified.
One of the iconic images of the Pan Am 103 bombing is that of the shattered cockpit section lying in a field, which is adjacent to a church outside of Lockerbie called Tundergarth. Bill’s body was found in this area.
“Scott flew over to accompany Bill’s body back. His father did not want him to go—he was spooked about the whole thing—but Scott wanted to go and I really appreciated it.”
While Scott flew to London and back to claim his brother’s body, Kathy went about making arrangements to have her late husband cremated and picked out a plot in a cemetery. Having him buried was not her first choice—she wanted to have his ashes scattered on the lake where she now lives.
“(Bill) loved Lake Murray, and he loved sailing, and I had wanted to have his ashes scattered on the lake. My father called somebody and asked if we could do it, and they wouldn’t give us permission. People afterwards said, ‘You should have just done it and nobody would have known.’ But we were trying to do it the right way, and so I had his ashes buried in another part of town, here in Columbia.”
Bill was laid to rest on January 4th2. A few days later, the family returned to New Jersey, where they held a memorial service on the 14th. A week after that—a month to the day after Bill was killed—his eldest daughter, Erin, turned 11.
When Kathy and her children returned to New Jersey, her father came along to help her out. One day, Melanie, still only two years old, asked a question that illustrated how little she understood.
“She said, ‘When’s he gonna come back?’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘He told me that he would bring back my rocking horse when he came, after Christmas, but he’s never brought it back up.’ I came home and I told my dad, and he said, ‘Where’s that rocking horse?’ He and I dragged it out of the basement. That was the thing with her, she wanted her horse. She didn’t understand at all that he wasn’t coming back.”
Kathy’s parents took turns staying with her for the first few months after Bill was killed. With their help, and that of her friends, she started putting her life back together.
“One of Bill’s cousins lived not too far from us. They helped me a lot. I said ‘I haven’t paid these bills, I don’t know how I’m going to pay.’ She paid bills for me and kept track, so that later on, I paid her back. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to pay anything, because I wasn’t working.”
Fortunately, Kathy learned fairly early on that her financial situation would be okay. She knew she would get some money from insurance, and Cyanamid gave her a paycheck or two to hold her over until that money arrived. Still, her finances had changed dramatically, and she needed help navigating it all.
“I had a friend who came over and he would help me do bookkeeping. I was always the one who wrote checks, so I knew how to do that, but he organized a budget and stuff like that.”
Soon after the attack, some relatives of people on the plane formed a group known as Victims of Pan Am Flight 103. Kathy got involved from the start, but her obligations to her children limited her participation.
“The first thing I went to was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Cardinal O’Connor invited all of the families, and I’m not Catholic, but I went. That’s where I met Jane Davis3 and a bunch of people, and I started getting names and phone numbers and all of that. Jane knew a whole lot. She was living in Connecticut at the time, and she’s like about ten years older than I am, but she was a big help to me. It was her daughter who died on the plane, but her husband had died the same year.”
Around this point in the conversation, Kathy’s daughter Melanie, who’s currently a senior at the University of South Carolina, returns home from a physical therapy appointment for a knee injury she suffered in a dance class.
Melanie and Kathy catch up, then Melanie rummages through the kitchen for a snack while Kathy discusses attending the civil trial against Pan Am in Brooklyn. She remembers having a hard time finding people to take care of her kids, but she went as often as she could. At one point, her mother visited for a week so Kathy could go to the trial.
“It would take me two hours each way to commute, but I did it. There was a woman, Lynn, who also lost her husband, and she and I would go together a lot of times. She had only been married for five months, and she didn’t have children. She just took time off from her job, and she and I would go.”
Meanwhile, Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 expanded its mission from simply a support group into an organization that lobbied Congress for stronger airline security regulations. The group held meetings almost monthly, sometimes in the New York/New Jersey area, sometimes in Washington, D.C. Kathy tried to attend as many of those as possible, even if it sometimes led to unintended adventures.
Once, Kathy arranged for her three children to stay at various friends’ houses, but Brice got sick after she had already dropped off Melanie and Erin. Kathy had planned to head down to D.C. that night and stay with some other Pan Am 103 people, but stayed to take care of her son instead. The next morning, he felt better, and insisted that they should go down to D.C. as planned. He came with her to the Congressional hearings.
“It was transportation hearings,” she remembers. “We went to Washington, and he was seven, maybe eight at that point. He brought his little cars with him. He was sending his cars under the chairs of all the people sitting there, just sitting on the floor there, playing.
“There was a two-story McDonald’s, and he was so excited about that, that he had gotten to go to this huge McDonald’s.”
Kathy contemplated moving away from New Jersey, but her kinship with other Pan Am 103 families led her to stay.
“I was pretty active with what was going on for the first year or so. In fact, I thought about moving away, but I couldn’t leave the other Pan Am families. I was too involved. I felt like they were family to me by then—certain ones more than others. I had too many people that I couldn’t leave, but I stopped going as often to things.”
Kathy’s involvement with the group waned after the first year, but she remained in New Jersey, where her life changed once again.
“I decided after 14 months that I wasn’t going to wear my wedding band anymore. I thought, I’m not married anymore.”
A little while later, the night after Melanie’s fourth birthday party, Kathy had Erin babysit while she went out to what she describes as “a singles kind of place,” which she had heard about from a friend who had divorced and remarried. That night, she met Russ Tedeschi.
Dating Russ was difficult and strange at first for Kathy. She compared him to Bill, worrying about how little the two men had in common. In time, she discovered she wasn’t the same person she had once been, either—experience had changed her, and she had three children to worry about as well.
“When you’ve got your children, you don’t want to get their hopes up, to meet somebody. You’ve got to be careful about running them around.”
After dating for a while, Kathy and Russ took Melanie and Russ’ daughter, Elizabeth, to a picnic. That day, a group of guys playfully grabbed Russ and threw him into the water, a playful gesture that terrified Melanie.
“She started screaming. Elizabeth knew they weren’t going to kill him, but Melanie didn’t. She was very attached to him right then.”
Kathy and Russ dated for more than four years before getting married, out of an abundance of caution. As they prepared to tie the knot in the summer of 1995, her lawyers suggested they hold off until the Pan Am lawsuit wrapped up.
“I let the attorneys know that I was getting married. They said, ‘Can you wait just a little bit? We’re real close to the settlement.’ I got the settlement money in July, and we got married in August.”
Kathy never expected lawyers to be such a huge presence in her life, nor that it would take nearly seven years for Pan Am to compensate her for its role in Bill’s death.
“I was really naive about it all. I went with my father to his attorney in South Carolina in the very beginning. I think it was before Bill had even been found, but they started knowing that it was terrorism back within a couple of days of the bombing. I would never have known how to find an aviation attorney. I had Mitch Baumeister, and actually, the lawyers in Columbia found him for me.”
My family was represented by a different law firm called Kreindler and Kreindler, and I mention how, when I was younger, I had thought they represented all the families. Melanie, now sitting on the couch beside her mom and listening in on the conversation, laughs and says that she always thought all of the families were represented by Baumeister.
Kathy remembers seeing all the lawyers in action at the trial in Brooklyn.
“Going to that trial in Brooklyn, you could see them. You could see Lee Kreindler4, when he was still pretty good. He had his style, and Mitch was like a fireball. He was the one that cross-examined the head of Pan Am, and Mitch really ripped him to shreds. Lee wasn’t a ripper like that. But they had their different styles, and I think they all knew each other well and got along. It was truly amazing that they were able to do all of this.”
Even more amazing was that a criminal trial happened. The two Libyan suspects weren’t turned over to Scottish authorities until a decade after the attack, and Kathy, like many, doubted it would ever happen. By the time the trial began in May of 2000, Erin and Brice had left the nest and Melanie was old enough to stay home alone, so Kathy got more involved again. She frequently took the train into New York to view the trial at the CCTV site in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan. Kathy was particularly impressed by how things were handled in New York.
“Even though you were watching it on a TV, it was run like a trial. They still wanted to keep the decorum the way it would be. I respected that. They had a little metal detector set up and all. You had to go through that to get into the room. I got to be friends with a Syracuse law professor, Donna Arzt, who’s just in the last few months passed on. She would be there day in and day out. She was so good for us, because she was a professor of international law, so she could tell us what was going to happen and what her thoughts were.”
In addition to her trips to New York, Kathy went to the Netherlands four times—twice for the original trial, twice for the appeal—and brought her kids along at different times. Between jet lag and the technical nature of much of the testimony, Kathy sometimes struggled to follow along.
“One time I went with Erin, and she had so much jet lag from flying from Seattle that we got there, and she fell asleep in the lower room that you could wait in, and so I left her. I thought, I’m not going to miss a minute of this. Somehow, it would be boring. The only way I could keep awake was to take notes.”
On that trip, after leaving the Netherlands, Kathy and Erin flew to London. From there, Kathy went to the hangar where British investigators had reassembled the plane and was given a tour by one of the lead investigators.
“I was really impressed with the amount of work that they had done to try to figure this out,” she says. “For instance, he told me that within three seconds, they would have lost consciousness, and so he really thought that they never knew what happened, it happened so fast. I could see where Bill had sat. He was above the bomb, but he was in the top deck, and so there was somebody sitting below him, and then the bomb was underneath that.”
Kathy confesses that at the start of the trial, she didn’t entirely believe that the Libyans were guilty, but over the course of the proceedings, her opinion changed.
“I took notes, and I was convinced after listening to all of it that the Libyans were guilty. I personally thought they both were.”
While she greatly respected the Scottish legal system at the time of the trial, that respect waned in recent years as Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who was convicted in January of 20015, worked his way through the appeals process. One quirk of Scottish law makes Kathy worry how the conviction is perceived.
“People in Scotland don’t know anything but what they hear in the press, and so they only get one side of the whole issue, which is too bad. They get the defense side, the Libyan side, but the Scottish prosecutors, even now, can’t talk to the press and tell them anything because he’s appealing.”
After the trial concluded, Kathy thought things would end there. The families still had a pending lawsuit against Libya, but were skeptical anything would ever come of it. The fight seemed over.
Eight months later, four airplanes were hijacked on September 11th, and Kathy found herself called back into action against terrorism yet again.
“When 9/11 happened, I got even more involved again, because there was a (Victims of Pan Am Flight 103) meeting that next weekend, and I went to that,” she says. “I had not planned on going, but I felt like I had to go. Russ said he would go with me.”
Involvement in VPAF103 had waned over the years, but the 9/11 attacks jarred a lot of people back into action. Kathy says the meeting was so packed that they could only get a hotel room for one of the two nights. Emotions ran high that day.
“I talked to people, and we cried together and all. We felt like 13 years, we had done all of this, and nothing had come of it it.”
Like many affected by Pan Am 103, myself included, Kathy felt guilty that 9/11 had happened. She wrote a letter about her experience to the editor of her local newspaper, the Princeton Packet. The editor highlighted the letter in print, and Kathy started receiving calls from residents of the Princeton area who had lost people in the attack. She was most surprised by a call from a psychologist, who explained that she was treating a woman who had lost her husband, and asked that Kathy attend the patient’s next session.
“During the course of that hour-long session, she’s saying that she’d really like to meet other people that were in the same position, and I said how important that had been for me. We decided right then that we were going to start a group. She didn’t really do anything, she was just talking about it. The psychologist said she would find a place, and we met in the synagogue in Princeton. I went on the New Jersey State Police website, and there was a list of all the victims by county, and so I called all of them I could find a phone number for in three counties.”
On October 10th, 2001, the group met for the first of what would become two years of weekly sessions. Bob and Eileen Monetti, who what lost their son Richard on Pan Am 103, and were key members in the victims’ group for many years, also put in appearances.
“They used to drive up from the Cherry Hill area,” Kathy remembers. “They had lost their child, and I had lost my husband, so we could have two different ways of handling it.”
While Kathy was glad to help the 9/11 families through the grieving process however she could, she felt conflicted about the political climate in America after the attack. The whole country was waging the War on Terror that Pan Am families tried to fight for so long. She, like many, believes that 9/11 wouldn’t have happened had lawmakers followed through on new security recommendations that came out of Pan Am 103.
“Yeah, I felt that way,” she says. “The things that we had wanted were, we wanted the screening to be done not by the airlines themselves. That did not happen until after 9/11. We wanted positive bag checks, so that there wouldn’t be a piece of luggage on the plane and no passenger6. I don’t know whether that was truly done until after 9/11. I think they just kind of appeased us a lot.”
“I felt like everything we had done hadn’t done a darn thing. We hadn’t made a big enough impact, and I felt responsible for that.”
One place she found solace over the years was her church, which provided solace at the times she needed it most. Before the bombing, she mainly attended for her children’s sake.
“After Bill died, the church and people in the community, they brought me meals for six months. I really felt a debt of gratitude to the church, so I started teaching Sunday school and being very active in the church. It’s been a much bigger part of my life since 1988 than it was before.”
I hadn’t planned on interviewing Melanie, but since she’s here, I decide to get her perspective on Pan Am 103, starting with when she first became aware of her father’s death.
“Honestly, it’s just always been,” she says. “I don’t remember him or anything. This has always been my life, as it was. I’m not even sure when I realized that it was really different from other people’s.”
No single moment revealed how strange her life has been, but she remembers having a hard time understanding things as a child.
“When I was growing up, it wasn’t that I was uncomfortable talking about it, but I was afraid of making Mom or Brice or Erin uncomfortable, so I never asked them anything. A lot of my judgments about how we were supposed to explain this or think about it came from stuff I saw on TV, and so a lot of times when I was telling other people about it, I wasn’t really sure if what I was displaying was actually real or just the way people act on TV. It was a really big concern for me growing up, that I was doing it wrong somehow.”
Melanie grew up with a lot of questions about what had happened, but didn’t know how to approach her family to discuss the topic. Eventually, when she was in the fourth grade, she told Kathy that she had to write an autobiography for a school project. It was a lie.
“I asked her all these things for this little book that we didn’t have to write, and that was the first time that I found out a whole lot of things.”
As a child, I was completely unaware of the legal proceedings. I ask if Melanie was any more aware than I was.
“I was very aware, because Mom would be going every day, but I really didn’t know that much about what was actually going on in the trial.”
By the time the criminal trial happened in the Netherlands, Melanie was a teenager. Kathy and Melanie flew there to see the verdict in person, but Melanie didn’t understand what was happening.
“I really had no idea what was going on,” Melanie says. “I would try. When we went to the verdict, they gave me a copy of the stack of papers they were giving to everybody, the evidence and everything, and I kind of flipped through it, but I had no clue what it was saying. It was all pretty much over my head at that point.”
Around the time Libya began negotiating a settlement with the families, Melanie started to understand.
“The first time I can remember actually starting to pay attention to it was when they were talking about the requirements for the money, because I didn’t like the idea of them being taken off the terrorism watch list. And that was the first substantial conversation I had with (Kathy) was about that.”
After the trial ended with a conviction for al-Megrahi, the victims’ lawyers spent the next two years negotiating a settlement in the civil suit against Libya7. Many of the families were skeptical a deal would ever come together.
“When it was first being talked about, I stayed with Mitch,” Kathy says. “A fair amount of people switched over to different attorneys, but I liked him. I didn’t believe that we would get anything. You know, it was like pie in the sky. But I thought, What have I got to lose? Then, when the first part happened, I thought that maybe we might get $5 million. Because I think that was the way it was, if it never got further than the U.N. sanctions being lifted, then after a certain amount of time they would give an extra $1 million.”
“When we got $8 million, I didn’t think we’d ever get the rest of it. I didn’t know that I would want them off of the terrorism list. It wasn’t worth it to me to have the money. The money was less important than having Libya pay.”
When Libya paid, Kathy and Russ put the money to good use. For starters, she finally moved back to South Carolina, like she’d considered for so long.
“Russ retired, and he always said he’d leave New Jersey, and I said, ‘Okay, I want to go.’ Melanie was in school in North Carolina, and she ended up switching so she’s in school here.”
So now, Kathy’s family, albeit in a form she could never have imagined before Bill’s murder, is united here in Columbia. Her mom lives across town, and Kathy’s first husband is buried here as well.
Kathy’s two husbands, the two loves of her life, both live with her on the shores of Lake Murray—one in spirit, the other in person.
Our interview concluded, Kathy repeats an offer she’s made twice already, telling me that I’m welcome to spend the night here tonight. I’m genuinely grateful for this, and would gladly take her up on her offer, but I have a few hours of daylight left, and I need to reach Washington, D.C., nearly 500 miles north, by tomorrow night. Any driving I do today means that much less tomorrow, so I thank her profusely and take my leave.
Stuck in traffic en route to I-20, I realize that, despite how little Melanie said, she might have said the most important thing of the whole interview when she mentioned how much she took her cues from television growing up. I can relate.
A friend of mine likes to play a game when she introduces me to people, asking them guess where I grew up—as of yet, nobody has come within 200 miles of being correct. Inevitably, when I reveal the answer, they say something about how I don’t have a Southern accent, and I respond with my default joke about I avoided getting one by watching a lot of TV growing up.
In hindsight, I took far more than auditory cues from mass media—I worry that my whole idea of normalcy came from one screen or another, because I always knew that my life was anything but normal. As such, my idea of how families interact came from ABC’s Friday night TGIF lineup, where everyone always has a quip handy, and my idea of how to express affection comes from movies, where the music is always ever-so-perfect for the situation at hand8. Things that come naturally to everyone else—things that everyone learns through osmosis—eluded me. It’s not just that I never had a father, it’s that I never had parents. Sometimes, losing the half is the same as losing the whole.
Or maybe I would have been this way anyway, and Libya’s not at fault for this particular problem.
I’ll never know for sure how much of my life I can blame on a bomb.
Darkness sets in before I reach Fayetteville, North Carolina, so I find a hotel off the interstate and check in. The area presents a number of fast food dining options, but I decide to head down the road a bit and eat dinner at yet another Waffle House. I eat swiftly and try to pay by credit card, but a puzzled look appears on the face of the deeply accented woman who’s working the register when she swipes my card. She swipes it again, the look of confusion recurs, and she glares towards the back of the restaurant.
“Is somebody on the phone?” she yells, and a voice from the back confirms her suspicion.
“It don’t work if somebody’s on the phone,” she tells me. I shrug and smile awkwardly, and she continues glaring at the back until the phone call ends. The next swipe, my card goes through.
On my way back to my hotel, I think about all the functions my iPhone possesses, and how I use it for phone calls less with each passing day. Talking on the phone feels obsolete these days—people9 only call for emergencies or other time-sensitive issues. And then, I think of Kathy, of the phone call she made to her mother, who was watching live footage of flaming wreckage as she learned her son-in-law was dead amongst that scene.
It don’t ever work if somebody’s on the phone.
- Again, thanks, Facebook.
- My mom was also initially told my dad’s body could be returned in time for a funeral on January 4th, which happened to be my sister’s second birthday. My mom told them not to rush.
- Jane Davis lost her daughter, Shannon Davis, a junior at Syracuse returning from a semester abroad.
- Lee Kreindler passed away in 2003 at the age of 78. In his obituary, the New York Times said he was “considered the founder of air disaster law.”
- Lamin Khalifah Fhimah was acquitted. Much like with the later settlement with Libya, nobody was happy with the outcome of this trial.
- The bomb that felled Pan Am 103 was placed in the airline system in Malta, and traveled from Malta to Frankfurt to London without a passenger accompanying it.
- See Chapter 10 for the structure of this settlement.
- I’m going to go ahead and blame this for my dating woes.
- By which I mean “anyone other than my mom.”