My present situation, in three words: Scott awaiting Scot.
The semester after Syracuse lost 35 students aboard Pan Am 103, once the immediate grieving ended, the school looked for ways to establish longer-term memorials. Ultimately, it established two sets of scholarships, 35 Remembrance Scholarships and two Lockerbie Scholarships.
The school awards Remembrance Scholarships to rising seniors, who apply for the positions and spend a portion of their senior year planning that year’s Remembrance Week activities. Lockerbie Scholarships get awarded to two seniors each year from Lockerbie Academy, the Scottish town’s high school. The recipients spend a year studying at Syracuse, human embodiments of the ties between the towns.
Last year, during my first research trip here, the name of Syracuse administrator Judy O’Rourke kept popping up in documents. She helped organize the school’s immediate response to the bombing, and remained instrumental throughout the past two decades1.
These days, among her other duties on campus, Judy oversees both scholarship programs. I reached out to Judy to get her perspective while I’m in town, and also asked if either of this year’s Lockerbie Scholars would speak with me. She arranged for me to meet with one of them, a girl named Kirsty Liddon, in between classes.
Which is how I wound up here, standing outside a building in Syracuse’s quad, waiting for a girl I’ve never met before, hoping that she wasn’t part of the class that just walked right past me.
Fortunately, my fears are allayed when a tall, softly accented brunette greets me, and we walk a hundred feet and grab a seat in an area called the Orange Grove. Before I begin the interview, I’m already aware of one fact that will distinguish her from everyone else I speak to about the bombing of Pan Am 103: While I’m asking people for their memories of the attack, I know she has none. Kirsty wasn’t born yet.
When we start talking, though, a second quirk reveals itself: This Lockerbie scholar is not from Lockerbie. Back home, she lives in the countryside, right by Tundergarth Church, where the nose of the plane was found2, but her family only moved to Lockerbie from North Yorkshire in 2000, well after the wreckage was cleared and a memorial chapel was dedicated.
Still, she became aware of the town’s history almost as soon as she moved there.
“That year, it was the foot-and-mouth disease, but the last time somebody moved into our house, it was the year of Pan Am,” she tells me. “So every time somebody moves into the house, something bad happens. That’s what people said.”
Years passed before the learned how deeply the attack affected the town—she knew something bad had happened, something people referenced from time to time, but it took until 2004 for her to learn how much a plane crashing on the town had scarred the psyche of many who lived there.
“The owners of Tundergarth Mains, which is the farm by the church, had decided to sell the farm. My aunt and uncle went to try it, to see if they liked it, and just listening to them talk about it, it was like it was just yesterday.”
Kirsty recalls that she didn’t really understand the attack until she enrolled at Lockerbie Academy, a school of 800 students ages 12 to 18. In her sixth year3, Kirsty decided to apply for the scholarship to come to Syracuse, and became one of 12 students competing for two slots. She tells me that talking with previous Lockerbie Scholars about their experiences inspired the decision.
“They came back or they emailed me, ‘You have to apply for this.’ They loved it so much. You really promote it once you’ve been over here. Lauren and I went back at Christmas and had a meeting with all this year’s applicants and showed some pictures.”
The application process involved an essay and several rounds of interviews with the school’s headmaster, local counselors, and a webcam interview with Syracuse professors in London. Kirsty gained most of her understanding of the attack while she worked on the essay. “If you want to apply for the scholarship, you kind of have to. I wanted to learn about it. I wanted to see what actually happened. Nobody applies because they just want to go to America. They want to learn something about Lockerbie. It’s a huge eye-opener when you go and do research for your papers.”
While she worked on those papers, she interviewed people she knew around town, including teachers, neighbors, and the former owners of Tundergarth Mains.
“They can obviously remember it like it was yesterday,” she says. “It’s something huge in their minds that they’re trying to keep control of. They like to think of the positives that came out of it, like especially this link here.”
People in Lockerbie rarely talk about the day a plane fell out of the sky and onto their village, but Kirsty says they were quite helpful when she approached them.
“When they learned that we were applying for the scholarship, they were more than willing to help us. I guess they don’t want to it be forgotten in a generation. They want to keep the memory alive without overdoing it.”
A little over a year ago, in late March, Kirsty learned she won the scholarship. She deferred her acceptance to the University of Edinburgh for a year, and made a leap of faith by coming to Syracuse—at the time, all she knew about the school was that it had a connection to the bombing. Fortunately, the collected wisdom of previous Lockerbie scholars was available for her.
“Each year, you get a book called A Rough Guide to Syracuse, and it’s made by the past scholars, so it has all their notes. It starts with a congratulations, and then has notes about where to go, places to eat, things to do. That’s one way of passing information down. We just recently put our parts of that in.”
When she arrived at Syracuse, Kirsty discovered the biggest adjustment she needed to make was conversational—many of her dorm-mates couldn’t understand her accent.
“We had all the getting-to-know-you type things, and they couldn’t understand what I was saying. Somebody said it had just been my accent. I don’t have a really strong accent. Otherwise, people are so welcoming.”
Kirsty speaks excitedly about her time in America so far. For Thanksgiving, she went with one of her friends to Washington, D.C., and visited the cairn in Arlington. She recalls that Syracuse’s Modern Studies department visited not long before her, and left a photo of Lockerbie’s Garden of Remembrance memorial.
During her time here in the States, Kristy also visited New Jersey and New York City before heading home for Christmas, and spent Spring Break in Houston with a teammate from water polo, a sport she picked up here. After this semester, she’s staying at a friend’s farm in New York before going back to Lockerbie, where she expects people to stay with her for a change.
“I have people coming to visit this summer that I’ve made friends here. They’re going to be friends for life.”
Her most rewarding experience, though, was participating in Syracuse’s Remembrance Week. While the school’s Remembrance Scholars organize the event, she and the other Lockerbie Scholar on campus made a point of helping however they could.
“We helped do ribbons and carnations, and we helped hand those out, which was kind of an eye-opener, because not everybody on campus knew about it. It was really good to help promote awareness of it.”
“I didn’t get to see the Wall of Remembrance until the end of the two days, after handing carnations out. Incredible. Everyone lays their carnations on the wall. I went and took photos, because it was really nice to see. We also had Dark Elegy4 here, the sculptures. That was really special, having that on campus. We were taking some people up to Hendricks to meet other professors, and we were showing them Dark Elegy, and then along comes the parents, the lady that made it. That was really cool, to speak to her. Meeting the parents of the victims was incredible. They’re amazing people.”
Remembrance Week deeply affected Kirsty, but she seems just as moved by seeing the response from fellow freshmen, who were born after the bombing, and likely unaware of it until that week.
“With freshmen, it’s not so big. But when you’re here, you learn about it. I think we’ve promoted it in our dorms, and then they’ve told their friends about it, so when they’re juniors, they’re going to apply for the Remembrance Scholarships.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pond, Kirsty’s friends are living their normal lives. Some are taking gap years, while others are already in college. Next year, she’ll join them, carrying the experience she had here with her. One of the benefits of being a Lockerbie Scholar is that she’s allowed to study whatever she wants at Syracuse.
“I’m going back to Edinburgh next year. I’m doing Environmental Geoscience, which will be good. So I’m taking a couple of classes related to that here, but I’m just taking classes that I wouldn’t usually get a chance to do. I love photography, so I’m doing a photography class here. I’m doing scuba diving with my friends. I’m taking riding, fencing. Biology this semester.”
Even though she’s leaving Syracuse next month, Kirsty hopes to remain involved for years to come, and aspires to expand the links between the communities of Lockerbie and Syracuse. She says she wants to return some time for Remembrance Week, and to raise awareness among her generation in Lockerbie.
“I know it’s something they don’t want to play up at home, but I think that more people should be made more aware of it. I know parents have come to visit Lockerbie, some of them more than 11 times, and I’ve never heard of this. I’ve never seen them there. If they want to come, I’m two minutes away from Tundergarth Church, where the nose cone landed. If people want to stay with us, they’re more than welcome.”
Half an hour after Kirsty dashes off to her next class, I arrive at the office of Judy O’Rourke, the woman who arranged that interview, for a chat of our own.
As we settle in, Judy fills me in on her background. She first came to Syracuse as a student from 1971 until 1975, which makes her virtually the same age as my father would be. After graduating, she moved to Boston while her husband got his master’s degree, but returned to Syracuse, where she got a job at the University in 1981. She started as a secretary in the Paleontology program, by 1988, had ascended to Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of the School of Undergraduate Studies, the office which oversaw Syracuse’s study abroad programs.
Judy remembers getting the news on December 21st like it was yesterday.
“Somewhere between 3:00 and 3:30 that afternoon5, we got a phone call from the travel agent saying that a plane with a number of our students on it was missing, and that was really what information they had. They didn’t really have much else. Things got pretty chaotic pretty fast. Everybody got an assignment to try to find out information in various ways, whether that was calling the media or talking to the media when they called us, keeping in touch with the travel agent, trying to contact the airlines, trying to contact the State Department, and all of it was pretty difficult to do. I’m sure anybody you’ve talked to about that day has said that the one thing you couldn’t do was get any information. That was where we were, except we had a large group of people trying to do it together. It didn’t work any better than individuals trying to do it.
“It was later that afternoon—I’m not really sure of the time, but the 5:00 news type of thing—where news reporters started reporting the story that a plane had crashed in Scotland. And then we started getting more information, but it was pretty disconnected. You didn’t have any logical, coherent story. It was all bits and pieces, many of which contradicted each other, but when they started being able to send live feeds, you could see the destruction. You knew how bad it was. At the time, it was a plane crash. That whole day, everyone was assuming it had crashed.”
The 21st was the next to last day of exams, so, by the time the news broke, campus had nearly emptied for winter break, which meant the administration could focus on the downed flight without worrying about what to do about class or other activities.
So they thought.
In the chaos of the moment, the administration forgot there was a basketball game against Western Michigan that night. By the time they remembered, people were already filing into the Carrier Dome.
“We honest to goodness didn’t think about the basketball game. It was the last thing on your mind until somebody said, ‘Oh, basketball game.'”
The game went on as scheduled, and the university received criticism for it in the following days. Judy feels many decisions at that time fared poorly, simply because the school never anticipated such a large-scale tragedy.
“We do this tradition that when something bad happens, we gather in Hendricks Chapel. And so that evening, somewhere around 7 or 8:00, they did open up the doors to the chapel and people just sort of gravitated there. And there was a really huge crowd.
“Everyone there was blitzed by the media. All of the bad things about the media, personified here. Microphones shoved in people’s faces, people crying and photographers climbing over them in order to take pictures up close. We were unprepared. We simply were unprepared for that.”
By 10pm that night, Syracuse still hadn’t received any confirmation from Pan Am or the State Department as to which of its students had been on board the plane, a factor complicated by the fact that, in 1988, people could trade airline tickets. While Syracuse awaited word from what it perceived as more official sources, many families, who were also being stonewalled by the authorities, began calling Syracuse.
“You had many of our students’ families calling here and saying, ‘What do you know? They won’t tell us anything.’ At that point, the vice president and director of SU Abroad—the vice president was Ronald Cavanagh, and the director of SU Abroad was Nirelle Galson—but they made the decision that they couldn’t go on saying ‘We don’t know either.’ We didn’t know. We had lists that were inaccurate, but we had good ideas about who was on the plane and who wasn’t.
“They started systematically calling everyone that Syracuse University thought was on the plane. It actually meant that they called a couple of people who were supposed to be on the plane but were not. In one case, they called a student who had gotten an earlier plane and lost his luggage, and he thought it was SU calling to say that they had found his suitcase. He hadn’t heard anything at 11:00 at night about Pan Am 103 going down, and he was totally shocked.”
That first night traumatized everyone involved. The next day, the school started making a list of ways to help.
“What do our students need? What do the families need? Whose students were on the plane? How do we deal with the personal crises that are happening individually, one on one? How do we control the media? What can we do? What sorts of things should we set up? How do we connect with the proper authorities in the State Department and the airlines? All of those things, just trying to organize what it is that needs to be done and figure out how to do it, who can do it.”
Judy feels that the attack happening as the campus was on the verge of winter break helped their planning immensely. If a student had an exam scheduled for the 22nd, it was at their discretion whether they wanted to take it or make alternate plans. After that, nearly a month would pass before campus was populated again, and she says that let them take time to get things right.
“If that had happened on a different day, at a different time, I think a lot of our responses would have been different, because you would have been dealing with a student right in front of you or a faculty member right in front of you who was hurting. But in effect, most of the people were not here, and so you had this period of time between semesters where we could, as staff and administrators, actually try and figure out what the best things to do were.”
The first, most obvious thing to do was hold a memorial service, as Syracuse does whenever a member of its community passes away. The administration realized immediately that this service would be unprecedented in its scope, and began planning immediately for a ceremony on January 18th, four weeks after the attack.
“I’m one of those people who does things to keep busy, to deal with getting past the worst of the grief. I always feel better if there’s something to do. There are a lot of people like me. We managed to all find each other and start planning and preparing. It’s one of the things that really had to be done, because four weeks after this happened, 12,000 undergrads and 5,000 grads were coming back to campus to study, and they had a purpose. That was their job, to go to school, but they also had an awful lot to deal with emotionally. Loss of friends, loss of security, and you had to deal with that emotional basis too.”
Right away, the administration realized the only place large enough to hold all the people who would want to attend the memorial was the Carrier Dome, the school’s football and basketball stadium. Curtains were installed to divide the dome in half, making it a more intimate experience. They placed the stage against the curtain, with families seated on the field, and the rest of the crowd in the stands beyond. Judy remembers the best thing about this setup was that it allowed them to keep the media from intruding as they had at Hendricks.
“A month into this, we learned how to give the media a place where they could be gathered, they could get the good pictures they wanted, they could get the sound they wanted. We gave them opportunities to interview people who wanted to be interviewed, but prevented them from just popping up in unusual places when people weren’t expecting them.”
Throughout the planning stages of the memorial, the local community amazed Judy with its generosity. When the administration decided it would be inappropriate for families to sit on the field’s turf, a carpet store supplied enough red carpeting to cover the part of the field that was used. A bus company loaned buses to shuttle families around, hotels donated rooms, and the Syracuse Symphony offered to play free of charge.
“It really felt like it affected everyone very personally in the area. I think part of it is that our students were so young, and you think about the fact that a young person has died, been cut off in what really is the prime of their life, starting to go out and do something. An awful lot of people thought about it in terms of their own children. Everybody wanted to do something and help in some way.”
The memorial service turned into a epic affair. That morning’s classes were canceled, and more than 10,000 people attended to remember the 35 students who were lost.
“All the local politicians spoke, not because it was a political opportunity, but because they represented the people, and they were talking from that point. One of the best speeches actually is Doug Unger’s speech6. A number of the students that were on the plane, he had taught, and he spoke on behalf of the faculty. I still remember to this day what a beautiful job he did. The president of our student association, the student government body, spoke. So the service was a combination of remembering, celebrating, and of course, by January, it became clear to outsiders that this was a bombing, not a crash. Now you’ve got to combine mourning and outrage, and it’s very difficult. The purpose of that service was to allow people a place to remember, to gather, and to really voice their feelings about all of this.”
Even as Syracuse planned the memorial service, the idea of a permanent memorial was on administrators’ minds.
“By the 1st of January, people were thinking, Okay, how do we remember this forever? The first very logical thought was a scholarship. We’re an educational institution. We have a scholarship. What kind of scholarship? For who? Wait, how many? And so it took the better part of that spring semester, spring of ’89, to really start to get a handle on it. And at this point, now, communication between Syracuse and Lockerbie has really started. Very early on, that was not possible. They were in the throes of absolute horror, and any kind of communication was brief, to the point. There was no talking. There was something to be done. So once we got to the point where we just started talking, then there was a lot of dialogue back and forth, led on this end by the man who was then the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Samuel Gorovitz. From this end, Sam was one of the primary movers. From the Lockerbie end, Neil McIntosh, who was the head of the Dumfries and Galloway governmental offices. They were kind of the point people.”
As Syracuse and Lockerbie talked, they landed on what became the Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholarships. Amusingly, Judy tells me that the people of Lockerbie refer to the latter as Syracuse Scholarships.
I ask Judy if, in the last 20 years, any of the Lockerbie Scholars stayed at Syracuse, and she tells me two have Syracuse University degrees, but only one stayed at the school for undergraduate studies. As she says this, she stands up and points to a patchwork quilt hanging above her desk with a series of pictures on it. These photographs depict the first fifteen years of Lockerbie Scholars.
“This young woman, Erin McLaughlin, stayed here,” Judy says, pointing at a picture of a redhead with an awkward smile. “The scholarship is for one year, so she was extremely energetic in pursuing other scholarship activities, and through a variety of scholarships, she managed to actually do her undergrad degree at SU. She stayed here three more years. She was here as a Lockerbie Scholar in 2003-2004, and was a Remembrance Scholar in 2006-2007. So she was a Lockerbie Scholar at first, and then a Remembrance Scholar at the end. And then the other student to get a degree from Syracuse University was David Thomson. David went back to Scotland, finished his undergrad degree in Scotland, and then came here and got a Master’s degree in the Newhouse School, public communications.”
Judy mentions that Erin now lives in New York, where she attends grad school at NYU, and offers to give me Erin’s email address if I’m going that way. Intrigued, I accept, and then Judy continues.
“The first scholars, Lockerbie and Remembrance Scholars, were inducted in the fall of 1990. At that time, the people who were Scholars were very well-versed in what Pan Am 103 was. They lived it. They knew people. As time went on, that sort of changed. And probably four or five years after the disaster, the Scholars came to me and said that they felt something more needed to be done to make sure we didn’t forget.
“The Remembrance Scholars began to realize that they were not here when the disaster happened. This was becoming a historical event as opposed to a personal event, and so they came forward with a proposal to do something meaningful to make sure that people knew why we had Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars, and that was the beginning of what we call Remembrance Week at Syracuse. So now, each year, the Scholars, both the Remembrance and the Lockerbies, form a very large committee that meets quite frequently in the fall semester, and they plan a series of activities of their choice to remember Pan Am 103.”
Soon after they settled on the idea of a Remembrance Week, the school realized that having a memorial on the anniversary wouldn’t work—because of the academic calendar, campus would be as empty as it was on the day of the attack. Instead, they scheduled Remembrance Week for the middle of the Fall semester, floating between late October and early November.
“It’s evolved,” Judy says. “It’s a remembrance, yes. We are definitely remembering, and there are activities designed to do that. There’s a rose-laying at the Wall of Remembrance. There’s a convocation where each current student represents someone who was on the plane. They have buttons that they wear with students’ names on them. Different remembrance activities. But there are also educational activities, where the idea is to get people thinking, talking, learning about terrorism. Pan Am 103, but also other acts of terrorism. What our goal, as citizens, as students is in trying to prevent that. So the activities change from year to year. There are some staples that people tend to do, but we have the two prongs of Remembrance Week: Remember and learn.
“The change is that there’s more of a global awareness of terrorism and cruelty. Pan Am was the first major incident to directly affect Americans, but certainly not the first incident of terrorism in the modern world. And so part of it is a very, very direct connection. These were students who lived in the dorms you are living in, went to class in the buildings you went to class in, who took some of the same classes you do. This could be you. Globally, this could happen to anyone, and does. And what are you going to do about it? That’s the message.”
Judy tells me the Remembrance Scholars do heavy amounts of research as part of their task7. While there’s one scholarship per lost student, the scholars don’t decide who they will represent during Remembrance Week until later in the process.
“They do this research when they’re applying in a much broader sense. They may focus in on one or two people, but it’s a very broad sense on the incident itself as a whole. As far as who represents who, the students, once they are selected as Remembrance Scholars, then they choose which particular student who was on the plane they will represent. Some of them have very, very specific reasons for representing a particular person, others don’t have a tremendously strong reason, and so they kind of negotiate who’s going to represent whom.”
Because students plan Remembrance Week, it remains dynamic. I ask if they’ve thought of long-term planning, if they’ve created a framework to ensure the week retains meaning even after everyone who was directly affected by Pan Am 103 has passed away.
“I can’t predict the future,” she replies. “I can see where things would change 20 years out, 25 years out, 50 years out. I really believe that in some way, somehow, we always will remember here. It’s a really important part of the university, but it’s also a really important part of the world. I think things have to change. You always have to change to keep things relevant, do the best job with what you have. And so I think things will change in the next 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years. I think that’s appropriate, but I can’t tell you how I think things will change.
“The world around us has not changed all that much. We’re still not all that nice to one another in so many ways, and there’s still such a need for people to come together, to have dialogue.When I go back to December 21, 1988, we had informal methods at Syracuse to cope with tragedy on a very small scale. We had no clue how to deal with something this size. Unfortunately, big bad things continue to happen. And so the people who unfortunately have experience in dealing with big bad things will still have a role in helping others who come after them.”
The silver lining to the devastation Pan Am 103 visited upon Syracuse was that, when 9/11 happened, the administration knew what to do. In fact, Judy tells me the school had formed a crisis management group by then, and 75 people took part in a two-day workshop on dealing with the aftermath of a tragedy in July of 2001. While nobody was ready for an event like 9/11, the school at least had guidelines in place as to what to do about classes or exams, and had staff at the ready to speak with people who were most affected.
“Amazingly enough, very, very few people lost a loved one that day. We had a faculty member whose daughter was killed in the towers, and there was an alumni of Le Moyne College, which is another institution in Syracuse, a very prominent alumni, who was killed in one the planes. And there were, I believe it was six or seven, I’m really not sure of the exact number, students who lost a close relative. Not necessarily a parent, could have been an aunt or uncle. But considering the percent of people who actually live, work and deal in New York City and have associations with this campus, it was a very small number.”
Almost as remarkable as how few Syracuse students were directly affected by 9/11 is this fact shared with me by Kathy last week: Judy didn’t know any of the 35 students on board Pan Am 103, but she did know someone else.
“As I said, it’s a big campus. I actually didn’t know any of the students, our students who were on the plane. But Patricia Klein, Patty Klein and I went to high school together in New Jersey, and she was on the plane. She was on vacation and coming back that day. It’s just one of those quirks of fate, that that’s who was there. And she’s buried in Lockerbie. I’ve gone to Lockerbie a number of times, and I always visit her grave.”
Despite not knowing any of the students then, she feels as though she’s gotten to know them since.
“In 1988 we all had different jobs—we all focused on something. My job was to be the liaison between our students’ families and the university, so that they could call me and tell me what they found out, what they knew, and I would make sure that the people who needed to know that here did. If we found out some new information, I would call the families and make sure they knew. So I didn’t know any of the 35 when they died, but I got to know them very, very intimately afterwards. And those have been marvelous friendships. It’s one of the positive things for me that’s come out of the tragedy, is that I’ve met some really, really wonderful people that way.”
I mention how extraordinary it seems to me that Judy never knew any of these students, but her work in their memory defined much of her career at Syracuse.
“I think that’s probably a true statement. It’s taught me a lot of things, one of which is the importance of individual action. I’m a very, very big proponent of both experiential education and volunteer work, and I really encourage students to do that, to think about what they’re learning and how it will be useful or impact what you do the rest of your life. What sort of things are you doing, are you interested in that will have a positive impact on people? In that sense, yes, it really has been a defining moment of my life, and not the least of which because I deal with some of the best and brightest students at Syracuse now. I meet some interesting people, and enjoy watching them as they leave and go out to do good things.”
On my way back to my hotel, I stop at the Wall of Remembrance, a memorial half-circle at the north entrance to Syracuse’s campus, which features the names of the 35 students lost on board Pan Am 103. As I take it in, students walk by. Perhaps they know what this wall means, perhaps they don’t—the first two times I walked by this place, I was oblivious to its significance. It looked like just another short wall to sit on, not unlike the one Kirsty and I occupied two hours ago, its solemn significance easily unknowable to anyone who doesn’t stop and read the plaque. Still, there is a plaque, and a ring of flowers in the middle. There is this memorial, at least, this wall that remembers for those too young to do so.
After a trip back to Funk ‘n’ Waffles, I decide to go see a movie, my first in a month. On the schedule is Adventureland, a teen dramedy set in the ’80s starring a guy I’ve never heard of who seems to have taken acting lessons from Michael Cera, and that girl from Twilight who constantly looks stoned.
I came here to escape, to feel a bit more at home. I’m one of the few people who has no qualms about seeing a movie by myself, and hoped that sitting in a dark room alone might distract me from the fact that I’ve been away from Seattle for nearly three weeks and expect it to be that long before I return.
This does not work as planned.
By the time the credits roll, I’ve been struck with a virulent case of homesickness. The film, yet another entry in the the-best-times-of-your-life-are-your-early-20’s genre, leaves me unable to escape the possibility that this whole trip might go down as one of the most expensive mistakes of my life. I’ve learned some things, I’ve met some interesting people, and maybe this will ultimately make some sort of difference, but all I can think of are the things I know I’ve missed while out here on the road. Today, Team Thursday’s leader emailed from 826, telling me he’s struggling with the double-duty my absence has thrust upon him. The Ting Tings played the Crocodile two nights ago, and I, of course, was not there. Life in Seattle goes on without me, even as it seems that my life does not go on without it.
As I drive back to my hotel, all I really want is to go home.
Tomorrow, I will.
Sort of.
- In fact, some of the first documents donated to the library collection were Judy’s handwritten notes from the immediate aftermath.
- As well as Kathy’s husband’s body. See Chapter 13.
- The equivalent of senior year of high school in America.
- Dark Elegy is a series of sculptures created by a woman named Suse Lowenstein, who lost her son Alexander on the flight. More on this to come.
- The plane broke apart at 2:02pm Syracuse time.
- At the time, Unger was a creative writing professor at Syracuse.
- Last year, when I was here doing research, a librarian asked if I was one of the scholars. When I told her my actual connection to the bombing, she comped the rest of my photocopies.