I was born on September 17th, 1983. I first crossed paths with death three days later.
I came into this world late—my original due date was Rosh Hashanah, but was born on Yom Kippur. At the time, my mother’s maternal grandfather, Honey, had been ill for some time, slipping in and out of consciousness for months. A day or two after my birth, Honey revived from his coma, and the first thing he asked was whether my mother, Meryl, had given birth yet. Someone told him that she had, along with my name, weight, and earned run average1—the sorts of things one tells a great-grandfather about the family’s new child—and he soon slipped back into a coma, never again to emerge. Three days after I entered the world, Honey left it.
My mother missed the funeral—she literally had her hands full with me.
His wife, who we called Grandma Marie even though she was my generation’s great-grandmother, lived on another four years. I have the vaguest of recollections of making cookies with her once in Memphis, and I remember understanding her death in that context. There would be no more cookies.
Sooner or later, everyone understands death in their own ways. I don’t remember exactly what terms I used to think of my father’s death—my mom always made the cookies—but my father’s death was not the first I’d experienced. Unlike some of the children of Pan Am 103, I had some idea what it meant.
Eleanor Bright lives southwest of Boston in a town called Dover, a suburb as manicured as can be. Bushes, trees, and long driveways obscure most of the houses I drive past, but the few catch peeks of seem stately, and when I pull into Eleanor’s driveway, her home strikes me as much the same. We make small talk as she shows me in—I mention how I’m still aching from the previous night’s Springsteen show, and she replies that she was in attendance as well, but she left early.
“That’s how I know I’m getting old,” she comments.
She’s really not, though. When she shows me a wedding photo of her husband, sister and brother-in-law, parents, and herself—musing over how everyone in it except her sister’s ex-husband has passed away—I can barely believe more than 25 years have elapsed. It appears as though almost no time has passed at all: Despite being north of 50, her face features only the slightest of wrinkles, and her hair remains brown.
Eleanor Bright does not look like a widow, much less one who spent the last two decades years as a single mother.
But that’s the most abridged version of her story. Much like my father and Bill Daniels, Eleanor’s husband, Nicholas Bright, wound up on Pan Am 103 because he was trying to get home early from a business trip.
When she tells this tale, Eleanor keeps mostly an even keel, but occasionally, her frustrations rise to the surface. Every so often, she punctuates a sentence with my name, placing “Scott” where I’d otherwise place a comma in the transcript.
“We met in 1979, and it was a situation where we met, and then we were really never apart. We were married in 1983, so we were married for just over five years, and together not quite ten.
“He went to Bowdoin College, and we were the same age. I was a little bit older, but he was the ninth of 10 children. Pretty shy, so he repeated Kindergarten. He was a late-August boy, so he was a year behind me in college. I went to the University of Vermont, and I was living in an apartment building, a triple-decker in Brighton, on the top floor. He graduated the year after I did, and moved into the second floor after I’d lived in this apartment for not quite a year. It was one of those things where I just knew he was the person for me immediately, and so that’s kind of the way it worked.”
After college, Nicholas got a job at a Boston-based consulting firm called Bain & Company, and with aside from a break for graduate studies at Harvard Business School, he worked there his whole adult life. Nicholas and Eleanor married in 1983, and he graduated from Harvard in 1984. By December of 1988, the couple had made a home for themselves in Brookline, Massachusetts, and had the first of what they hoped to eventually be three or four children, a boy also named Nicholas.
(Eleanor referred to her late husband exclusively as Nicholas, while she interchangeably called her son Nicholas or Nick. For the sake of clarity, all references to the elder Nicholas in this interview remain as Nicholas, while all references to their son were changed to Nick.)
Nicholas rose through the ranks at Bain to become a manager, and he concentrated on two clients. One was based in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, and the other was a service-industry laundry company based in London.
“Nicholas was the kind of guy who was always thinking about his job. If you went into a restaurant, he’d flip over the tablecloths to see the mark from the laundry, or he’d see, in a hospital, if they used paper gowns or cloth gowns, because if you were choosing paper products over the laundry products, that was something that you wanted to think about as a consultant. He did business strategy.
“Bain was, and I think still is, really unique. They only wanted one client per industry, because if they had more than one client per industry, they would be competing against themselves, because their advice was so good. They weren’t really selling consulting services, they were selling profits at a discount. They were very secretive about who their clients were. They used to be called the KGB of consulting. His best friends would always say, ‘Now, who’s that client?’ He wasn’t allowed to tell them, I guess because if you knew that Dun and Bradstreet was a client, then you could go and take an equity position in that firm, because you knew that they were going to get such great advice that they’d be that much more profitable.”
Eleanor still remembers the details of what would be her husband’s final business trip.
“He left on Monday to go to Canada. We had a calendar in our kitchen, and he called me later that day and I said, ‘What are you doing? It sounds like you’re at an airport.'”
“He said, ‘I’m going to London.'”
“I said, ‘You’re not going to London tonight.'”
“And he said, ‘Go look at the calendar.'”
“So I looked at the calendar, and he had written ‘London.’ His plans would change often enough so that I didn’t necessarily pay attention to where he was, and so he flew from Canada to London Monday, he got there Tuesday morning, and he was coming home Wednesday. I didn’t realize he was going to London. But, as I said, that was not uncommon.”
A week or two before Nicholas’s business trip, Eleanor’s sister—who had recently gone through a bad divorce—pulled a muscle in her shoulder while carrying her three-year-old daughter. After a few days, when she didn’t feel any better, Eleanor’s sister went to the doctor, who sent her to the emergency room.
She had mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer. A terminal diagnosis.
Eleanor was trying to spend as much time as she could with her sister, so the two of them took their children to go Christmas shopping in Harvard Square. She remembers buying pâté, anchovies, and black licorice for Nicholas, plus a particular pair of khaki pants—she remembers he only wore one kind, and never had more than one pair. When they ripped, he bought new ones.
“My sister and I went back to her house, and she said, ‘Would you like to see a videotape of (Eleanor’s niece) Kate when she was Nick’s age?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be great,’ thinking I just want to get out of here. I’ve got to get out of here. This is really depressing. She put this videotape on—you could see her, and you could see her husband, when they were happy, and their daughter when she was younger. My son toddled over to the VCR and pushed the stop button, and there was a newscaster talking about this plane that had gone down.
“If I knew Nicholas was out of town and something happened, like if there was a big crash in the Underground in London, and I knew he never took the Underground, I would call anyway. So I had the sort of obligatory, Okay, I’ve got to pay attention for a second. Where’s the plane? Where was it going to? Where was it from? They talked about Scotland, and of course, I didn’t think about the curvature and the way a plane would leave London and go over Scotland, and for some reason, I had this idea that it was a military plane. I don’t know why, but I did. So I stopped, listened, thought, Okay, nothing to worry about. I’m going to go home.
“I went home, and I was going to make dinner for my son, and the phone rang. It was his partner from Bain. I said, ‘Dwight, Nicholas isn’t here.’
“He said, ‘No. I know that. There’s been a plane crash, and we’re not sure where Nicholas is.’
“It was weird, because I said, ‘Dwight, do you know my sister is sick?’ Like that would protect me. If my sister was sick, then nothing else could happen.
“He said, ‘I know that.'”
“I said, ‘Just stop. Don’t say anything. I can’t talk to you right now.'”
“He said, ‘Okay.'”
“I waited on the phone for a minute or two, and I said, ‘All right. What is it that you have to tell me?'”
“He said, ‘We’ve called the airline and they won’t tell us anything, so here’s the number. Will you call?’ I just remember, I had the pen in my hand, and I would go to write, and it would slip through my fingers, like I couldn’t grip it. The other thing I remember is being really suddenly very cold. Like freezing cold, like all the air and warmth had been sucked out of the room.
“The really weird thing, Scott, is that one of my sister-in-laws had a travel business at the time. I’d be driving around in my car, and I would think, Okay. What would happen if a plane I knew Nicholas was on went down? What would I do? And I thought, I’ll call Elfrida. So I put down the phone from this guy from Bain, and I picked up and dialed my sister-in-law from memory. She had heard about the Pan American plane, heard that I was on the phone, and knew why I was calling. She said that she would try to find out where he was, and she was ultimately the one who found out that he was on, that his name was on the manifest.
“After I called Frida, I called my sister, and then after I called my sister, I called my doctor and I got prescriptions for something, because I felt like I was really coming unhinged. Then, one of my husband’s brothers called, because we were supposed to go to his parents’ house the next day for Christmas. I thought, I can’t tell Larry this, because it’s not true. There’s no way this could be true. If I tell him, I’m just going to get him all upset, and then he’s just going to be angry with me, because he’s been worried for nothing. But at one point, I said, ‘Listen, Larry, there’s something I really think I need to tell you.’ I think he’s the one who called my brother-in-law who lived close enough to my mother- and father-in-law, so he’s the one who went over to their house.
“Frida called. See, he never had flown Pan Am, because he said that the flight attendants were really bitchy, and so he didn’t like Pan Am. He always flew British Air. He had a meeting that was supposed to be earlier, and then the client changed it to later, and then they changed it to earlier, so he went back and forth a few times with his reservations. By the time the time of the meeting was settled, the British Air flight was sold out, and he had to take the Pan American flight. There was a British Air flight that left at virtually the same time, so Frida called British Air and got some guy. I don’t think she told him that it was her brother, but she got some guy to tell her that his name was not on the manifest. She probably called around, I think it was around 9:30, and the airline didn’t call until around 10:30.
“That’s what was so weird, though, Scott, because I thought that’s who I would call. If something happened, if I was worried or afraid or concerned, I knew she was the person I would call. And that’s the person I called. It was like, okay, this was my plan, and now I have to execute it. It was really weird.”
The next morning, Eleanor called a handful of friends: Three of Nicholas’s—one from high school, one from college, and one from grad school—and one of her college friends, as well. She asked them to spread the word, because she didn’t want people to find out about Nicholas’s death through the news.
“People just started arriving. My mother- and father-in-law arrived at some point, and that was a Thursday, so Christmas would have been Sunday. At some point, I think it was Friday, they just sort of took me to Maine, which is where my mother- and father-in-law were living at the time. It was like they kidnapped me. We flew to Bangor, I guess, and drove from Bangor to Northeast Harbor, and I really don’t remember a lot.”
Weeks earlier, Nicholas asked Eleanor to put a copy of her favorite picture of Nick on his desk, no questions asked. Ever since, he claimed he hadn’t bought Eleanor any Christmas presents yet, but she suspected something was up.
“My mother-in-law and I went out for a walk, and I said, ‘Did Nicholas have Christmas presents sent here for me?’ She said yes, and I asked if I could have it. It was a paperweight with our son’s photograph in it, and I always felt that what he left me wasn’t just this paperweight, but was kind of the responsibility for our son’s upbringing and education and everything that goes along with raising a child.”
A week and a half after Nicholas was killed, Eleanor went to Lockerbie. She tells me that when she first spoke with Pan Am, they said she didn’t have to go there, and she didn’t ever want to visit, but a friend talked her into the trip, thinking it might help her wrap her mind around what happened.
Eleanor and her sister-in-law Elfrida flew to London, where they met up with a friend named Kevin, a pilot for Northwest. The three of them went to Lockerbie together, where they discovered how raw the town’s wound was.
“We went to Sherwood Crescent, where the big crater was, and I said, I was sort of making stupid conversation, ‘Boy, it must have rained around here. Look at all the water down in the bottom of that.'”
“Kevin said, ‘That’s not water. That’s jet fuel. Can’t you smell it?'”
“They kept people separate. They didn’t want the Americans to meet the people from the town, and they didn’t want the people from the town to meet the Americans. I think that was the airline’s doing, because I met someone I actually still keep in touch with. I was the first American that he met. He’s the reason I know that they wanted to keep people separate.”
“I wanted Nicholas’s body to be on the plane with me, and I was going to leave Lockerbie and go back to London, because I wanted to stay in the hotel where he had stayed when he was there, and perhaps even stay in the same room that he had occupied. I was told that his body had already been removed to go back to Heathrow, and I got really angry.”
“So they said, ‘Mrs. Bright, come to this office and we’re going to get this straightened out for you. Just wait in this office.’ And then this guy whose office it was came in, and he was on the town council. He had been working in a mortuary since the night the plane went down, and he hadn’t been home one night since it happened. That was how we met. He wrote me letters, and we started keeping in touch. His name was Donald Bogie. His daughter was one of the Syracuse scholars.”
Eleanor still marvels at how she managed to keep it all together between her sister’s cancer diagnosis and her husband’s murder.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. It was also really complicated. My parents were really incapable of dealing with it. When my sister’s husband left, they were devastated by that, and then, when she became ill, that was just unbearable. And then, to have this happen, it was too much for them. They just couldn’t manage. It was a little bit like my sister and I were on our own. My sister was really supportive of me. She really was. The other person who really was such a huge source of strength for me was my mother-in-law. I think she’s the reason that I was okay.
“I used to, I would cry about the thought of my son going to Kindergarten and not having his father there. And then I realized I couldn’t think that far ahead. In the morning, I would get up and I would think until lunchtime. And then, at lunchtime, I would think until dinnertime. Slowly, my horizon got a little longer. I wouldn’t think about the next month or the next year, I would just kind of do it in a way that was manageable for me. But it was difficult. I would sort of look at the world as though I was standing on a sidewalk, and everything was on the other side of a big window.”
“I still feel like that sometimes, but it’s a little easier, because I was young and my friends were all having babies. Second children, third children, first children. Their husbands were all around, so I really did feel like an outsider, because I really, suddenly, I didn’t have anything in common with these women anymore. I really didn’t. You just kind of get through it because you don’t have any other choice. I think had I not been a parent, I honestly don’t think I would be here right now. If I didn’t have a son to take care of, I don’t think I would be here.”
For years, Eleanor focused solely on Nick, while she wondered if he even understood what had happened.
“The morning of the day Nick’s dad was killed, I brought him into bed with me, because he woke up early and I thought maybe if I bring him to bed with me, he’ll go back to sleep. I put him in the bed, and he went, ‘Daddy!’ like he was looking for his dad. I told him the next day, because he was asleep by the time I found out for sure, and I remember before I knew for sure going into his room and looking at him and thinking, Is your life going to be the same, or is this that moment when everything will never be the same? The next morning, I could have said anything and he didn’t know. After the memorial service, a lot of people came back to our house, and he was walking around looking for his dad, because all these men were there wearing suits. He was walking around saying, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’
“My father used to always say, ‘Six is the age of reason.’ I think that is about the time when he said to me, ‘Mom, I’m just starting to think Dad’s never coming home.’ He was about six, so I think for those four years or so, he never really understood what it meant. He would say to people, ‘My daddy died.’ I think it didn’t have any meaning for him. He didn’t know what it meant.”
At the groundbreaking for the cairn in Arlington, it was Nick whose hands President Clinton held as they shoveled the first load of dirt. I remember sitting in the front row, thinking Why does he get to do that, and not me? Eleanor says the whole situation was unenviable.
“It actually was a huge controversy among some of family members, particularly Aphrodite Tsairis2 and her family. Here’s the thing: Ted Kennedy is my senator. My late husband’s cousin, a guy named Carey Parker, has worked for Ted Kennedy for 35 years. He’s kind of the man behind the man. I had become very good friends with a woman named Trina Vargo in Senator Kennedy’s office3, to the point where I think we even stayed with Trina when we were down there. We got there the night before, and Trina said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. What do you think if Nick were to help President Clinton break ground?'”
“I said, ‘Sure. I don’t care.'”
“And she said, ‘Let me make a phone call.’ That’s how it happened. It wasn’t like this big thing that we orchestrated. So she said, ‘Okay, you need to be there at 8:30, 9:00 in the morning.’ So we had to go and sit there for two or three hours before. Nick was six, and it was raining and it was cold. It was December4.”
“So, we’re sitting there, and she said, ‘You have to sit in the front row.’ If you look at the pictures, not that I would have dressed my son differently, but we didn’t go there planning. He had red rubber boots on, you know? The Tsairises sat down behind me, and Peter Tsairis said, ‘I don’t know who these people are who think that they can do no work, do nothing, and then show up here and sit in the front row. Do you hear me, Eleanor Bright? Because I’m talking to you.’ I’m sitting in the front row with my six-year-old child, and this guy, this adult, this doctor is giving me, is talking to me like this?
“How was my relationship with the family group? Not great. There was a lot of fighting about control. There was a lot of fighting about who got their face in front of a camera. There was a lot of discussion about whose loss was greater. And I, at a certain point, just wanted nothing to do with it anymore. It was ridiculous. It was too much.”
Eleanor fiercely protected Nick in the wake of his father’s death, and still does to a degree. Now, though, she wonders about the ways he deals with his loss.
“Nick is funny about his dad. I mean, there have been times when even people he knows well don’t know what happened. Don’t know his father is dead, or don’t know the circumstances. Sometimes I worry about that, because I think it would be better for him to talk about it more.”
Nick’s conflicted feelings about his father stretched to the Libya trial. He asked to go for Nicholas’s birthday, August 29th, but the first morning they went to the trial, Nick felt ill.
“I had gone over the night before and checked everything out, so I knew where it was, I knew the lay of the land. And the next morning, we went in, and they had the mirror on a dolly and they slide it under your car and they’ve got the German shepherd and the guys are there with their earpieces and their big Uzis.”
“Nick said, ‘Mom, I don’t feel very well.'”
“And one of the guards said, ‘I think your son is ill.’ He was sick to his stomach. He was nervous. He will tell you to this day that it was nothing to do with that, but as soon as he got in the courtroom, and as soon as he saw everything, he was hungry. And after that, he was fine.”
Eleanor always worried about Nicholas’s death getting into Nick’s head. When her lawyer first presented her with the possible structures for his share of the Pan Am settlement money, she grew furious.
“One of the things I remember getting really angry about was the money, because there was a percentage of it that had to go to the children. It wasn’t that I wanted it, and I didn’t want my son to have it, but I’ve seen what money does to people over time. It’s not necessarily a good thing, and I thought, Here’s my child who’s had this devastating loss that will change the course of who he is and everything about his life and his children’s lives. It just will. And then you’re throwing money on top of it too? It’s like you’re throwing gasoline on a fire. Now, the other thing, Scott, is I had no say in it. It’s like you’re throwing all this money at my child, and I’m his mother, and I can’t say no.”
Eleanor managed to negotiate with the judge a little bit, as Nick’s grandparents from both sides had already left him some money. Still, she worried about the effect it would have on him: What would happen when a 21-year-old got that much money? Would it go to his head? Would he blow it all right away?
It turns out, no.
“He does not want to spend that money. He doesn’t want to touch it—it’s like he doesn’t want to know about it. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. What’s so interesting, for me, is he’s 21 and he’s touched none of it. He’s had a summer job since he was 13 or 14. He uses that money to supplement the little allowance that I give him, and the deal is that I give him some allowance for school, and if he goes over it, then he uses his own money.
“He’s talked to me a little about going to business school and/or law school, and I could actually see him either doing something maybe in the foreign service, or doing law work for disadvantaged, disenfranchised people. That’s the thing that’s nice about having that, is you have the luxury, if you need to buy a house or do something, that you’ve got the freedom, the financial freedom to do that.”
I wonder aloud if it was better for Nick to have been as young as he was when his father was killed, and Eleanor agrees.
“I guess I feel two ways about it. As a parent, when your child is born, you want everything to be perfect for them. You want them to have every opportunity and for their lives to be without pain. I remember traveling with Nick when his dad was alive, and there was a little boy who was probably three. Nick was probably nine months old or something. This boy would come close to him and try to engage him and get him to laugh, and then the little boy would walk away, and he would be let down a little bit. My late husband said, ‘I just am not going to be able to deal with disappointments in his life. It’s going to be so heartbreaking for me.'”
“As a parent, to know that your child’s life is not what it was supposed to be, and that all of these things that should have been so wonderful were taken away. But as a person, I think of myself now as being more understanding and my priorities, I think, are better because this happened. I think I agree with you, you have to look at the way your life is and consider the important things that have come out of it.”
“The thing that worries me is, I think that there is an undercurrent of anger that is always there with him. I’ve really seen it only once, and it was really distressing to me. We’ve kept in touch with a group of his father’s friends, and we were with them on a vacation this year, and you could tell that he was really angry about seeing these guys and knowing what could have been.”
For most of the last 20 years, Nick was Eleanor’s life, occasionally to her detriment.
After several years, Eleanor tried dating again. For a while, she dated a widower who had lost his wife to lung cancer, but it didn’t work out.
“I think one of the big issues was that he knew I was still in love with my husband, and I was. It wasn’t fair to him. Then, a woman that I had become friends with and still am friends with, a writer for the Boston Globe, wanted to do an article ten years later, and I never mentioned this other person in the article. In fact, I didn’t want him mentioned, because I wanted the article to not be about, you know, ‘Of course, she’s moved on.'”
“I think that’s what people expect you to do. There was this feeling among the family members that if you lost a child, that was completely worse, completely different. If you lost your husband, well, you could get married again. You could have more children with this other person. I didn’t want this person mentioned in the article, because I didn’t want it to seem like my husband was replaceable. That was kind of the last straw for him, I think.”
With Nick grown up and out of the house, Eleanor wonders what she wants to do next. While many Pan Am 103 families championed various causes over the years, she cared more about riding horses and raising her son. While she admires people’s efforts, she’s too exhausted to get involved herself.
“What I find really inspirational is somebody like John Walsh5. I think he is someone who took a tragic experience and has made so many good things come out of it. I mean, I could have been part of the solution with all this terrorism stuff and with airline security and everything, and I haven’t because, honestly, I feel worn out by it. I feel like the last 20 years have worn me out, in terms of being a parent trying to be the best I could be for my child. It’s exhausting. I’m disillusioned. I’m worn out by it.”
For almost the entirety her child’s lifetime, she strove to be the best mother she could. Now, it’s time for Eleanor to take a break.
Perhaps, as I leave Eleanor’s house, I should be thinking about how Nick’s attitude towards the money seems so different from my own, how thoroughly he’s rejected it while I’ve slowly come to accept it, but that’s not what’s on my mind as I climb back into the Pacifica. I was taught that money is a private thing—I feel uncomfortable disclosing my net worth to even my investment advisors6—and, knowing how my sister and I differ on the matter, it doesn’t surprise me to hear how Nick feels.
I’ve embraced the money as much as I can. I accept that it’s there for my betterment, and use it as such. That’s why I’m not working, and that’s why I’m trying, in my own uniquely cynical way, to make the world a slightly better place. But that’s also why I’m so uncomfortable with my mom’s constant generosity. She frequently offers to take my sister and I on vacations, and while my sister usually takes her up on these offers, I have yet to do so. In my mind, I don’t need my mom paying for my vacations, because I have my own money for that. I’m so frugal with my mother’s money that, when she offered to pay for a rug as a housewarming present for my condo, I bought one so cheap that she suggested I go out and buy a second to put somewhere else. I refused.
My sister, meanwhile, hasn’t quite accepted the money to the degree I have—as recently as a few years ago, she said she hoped to never touch it, even though she ultimately bought a house before her 20th birthday. She aspires to be a teacher, a notoriously underpaid profession, and I wonder if she’d feel that way if she didn’t have a safety net to fall back on. But, as uncomfortable as she is with her share of the money, she’s perfectly content to accept our mother’s various offers.
I think the difference here lies in our ages.
While I graduated college nearly five years ago, my sister is in her final year, and this alone probably explains a fair amount of our attitudes. My sister’s peers still borrow money from their parents, while most of mine are self-sufficient. To take it a step further, the age differences become even more significant the further back in time one goes: I remember my father, if just barely, and believe he would want me to do what’s best for myself. My sister has no memory of him, and probably considers the money his final gift to her.
Perhaps more notably, I remember not only the birthday when I got a Super Nintendo, but the four years of birthdays and Hanukkahs that I didn’t get one—Pan Am’s appeal reached the Supreme Court on the eve of my 11th birthday, when my sister was seven. That’s the real difference, I think: When we got those matching boomboxes7, I was 12 and she was almost nine. I remember all the years when I never got what I wanted for my birthday, and, with the exceptions of a pony and a puppy, my sister’s wishes were almost always granted. She doesn’t remember a time when our mother couldn’t get her what she wanted, while the years when I didn’t get what I want remain more vivid than all the years I did.
As for my mom, I think she understands. She had plenty of mental discomfort to deal with in the years after we moved to Memphis as well.
The first few years after we moved to Memphis, despite being involved in various volunteer and social organizations, my mom rarely took nights off to herself. Occasionally, she’d leave us with her parents for a night or get a babysitter, but for the most part, she stayed home.
Every time my mom went out, she worried. She felt like she was abandoning us, that she was all that my sister and I had left, and whenever she left us in the care of someone else, she feared that this might be the time that she didn’t come back, either. Combined with the strain of a babysitter on our family’s tight finances, every night out left her with an overwhelming feeling of guilt that she didn’t overcome until she realized that taking time to relax and enjoy herself was key to her mental health, as important to our well-being as anything else.
Eleanor might have learned that lesson more swiftly than my mother did, but it sounds like she ended up with the same set of worries anyway.
Not long after I return to the Boston city limits, I notice an awful lot of signage for Northeastern University.
It appears I’m driving through the campus of my father’s alma mater.
My mom and sister took the guided tour here several years ago—my sister considered applying to the school, but her early acceptance to NYU meant that she never filled out an application. Still, the tour provided one piece of curious trivia: While visiting the gift shop, they discovered that the college’s mascot was the same as my school’s. My father and I were both Huskies, 30 years and 3,000 miles apart.
The temptation to stop and look around strikes me, but it’s surpassed by another, stronger desire to get out of the area, and the latter one wins for two reasons. First, I have no feel for the campus whatsoever, and no way of knowing what may or may not have been significant to my father.
The second, and more important reason, is that there are two people here at Northeastern—two, in a campus of thousands, in city of millions—whom I very much do not want to see. Avoiding them should, theoretically, not be difficult, but I know that, if I stop this car here and now, there exists a 40% chance I will encounter one of them, 20% chance I will run into both, and a 10% chance they will be dating.
The world is much smaller than anyone wants to acknowledge.
I retreat further into the Hub, back to my hotel. There, I find the hometown nine on TV, concluding a rain-induced day-night doubleheader, against the amusingly-named-considering-the-schedule-situation Twins. After the game, I will spend far too much time watching MLB Network, which the hotel’s satellite dish gets but my basic cable package back home does not.
Maybe I missed something by not stopping at Northeastern—maybe there’s something there I would have really liked to see. But as much as I often suffer from a fear of missing out, I’ve learned that trying to do it all has consequences as well, and I try to trust my gut.
Nicholas Bright, Bill Daniels, and Saul Rosen all strove for just a little bit more, to get home to their families a day earlier or make it to that meeting the next day. They all had plans that didn’t involve Pan Am 103, right up until they did.
They all made the same final mistake, one that cost all our families dearly.
Sometimes, it’s better to miss something than it is to catch it.
- A pristine 0.00.
- Mentioned last chapter.
- As Elizabeth Philipps noted yesterday, Kennedy knew someone on the plane.
- Yep.
- Host of America’s Most Wanted.
- Although not as uncomfortable as I feel about having investment advisors.
- See Chapter Two.