At the end of the reunion, I thanked them all for coming. “I think today was as much, and as good, for me and my crew as it was for you,” I said. “We will be joined forever because of the events of January fifteenth, in our hearts and in our minds.”
I had received a letter a few days earlier from a passenger named David Sontag. A seventy-four-year-old writer, film producer, and former studio executive, David is now a professor in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was on Flight 1549 returning from his older brother’s funeral. From his seat, 23F, he saw flames in the engine. He decided to say a prayer as we descended: “God, my family does not need two deaths in one week.”
He sent letters thanking me and the crew, and shared words that he had delivered at his brother’s memorial service: “We leave a little bit of ourselves with everybody we come in contact with.” He also told me that the crew would live on “as a part of all of us who were on board the flight—and everybody we touch with our lives.”
I was humbled to think of the connections I now have to each passenger on that plane, to their spouses and their children. It was my honor to spend time with all of them.
So many people came into my life because of Flight 1549—ferry-boat captains, police officers, investigators, journalists, bystanders, witnesses.
Again and again, I return to thoughts of Herman Bomze, the eighty-four-year-old Holocaust survivor who sat in his high-rise overlooking the Hudson River, believing in his heart that saving one life can save the world. And then I think of those on the plane itself; passengers, such as David Sontag, who have now vowed to wrap that lovely thought into the rest of their lives.
David’s letter to me was haunting and moving, and I later wrote back to thank him for his kind words. I told him: “As I will live on in your life, you will live on in mine.”
18. HOME
IT’S TRUE FOR all of us.
Everyone we’ve ever known and loved, every experience we’ve had, every decision we’ve made, every regret we have had to deal with and accept—these are what make us who we are. I’ve known this all my adult life. Living through Flight 1549 has only reinforced my understanding of what defines our lives.
In the wake of that flight, I have thought about all of my major relationships—my mom, my dad, my sister, Lorrie, the kids, close friends, colleagues.
My father, especially, remains in my mind.
I learned a great many things from him about the importance of being a man of your word, about serving your community, about valuing family and the precious time spent with your children. I smile at my warmest memories of him, including those days when he would close down his dental office for the day so he could lead us on a hooky-playing pirate adventure in Dallas.
I am grateful for the faith he had in me. From the time I was about twelve years old, he’d let me take a rifle and go out in the woods for target practice. He knew the best way to learn responsibility was to be given the opportunity to be responsible, and at as young an age as possible.
In his own life, my dad was content on a lot of fronts. He was content with his modest income, content with living a provincial life in Texas, content with a house that was far from perfect but pleased him because we built it with our own hands. I think of my father when I hear Sheryl Crow sing “Soak Up the Sun.” He lived a line from that song: “It’s not having what you want/It’s wanting what you’ve got.”
But there are darker memories, too, when I think of my father. He wouldn’t talk much about his depression—what he lightly called his “blue funk”—and my family never knew the depths to which his inner demons took him.
In the mid-1990s, my father began having gallbladder problems, but he didn’t go to the doctor until the pain was fairly acute. Then his gallbladder burst and he needed surgery. He spent weeks in intensive care and was put on a strong course of antibiotics. Some of his organs began to fail. My dad was in pain, and he knew it would take many months to regain his strength, but he was expected to make a complete recovery.
When he was finally sent home from the hospital on December 7, 1995, my mom got him settled in their bedroom. Then she went into the kitchen at the other end of the house to get him some juice, leaving him alone in their room. She heard a noise, a muffled pop. She thought she might have recognized the noise, and then she thought she knew exactly what it was. She dropped the glass of juice, letting it shatter on the floor, and ran across the house back toward the bedroom.
As she was running, she was hoping and wishing that she was wrong about that noise. She entered the bedroom, shouting, “Oh no! Oh no!” It was too late.
My dad had shot himself with a handgun.
He was seventy-eight years old, and he had given no indication that he was planning to do this. He left no note.
It was so distressing that my mom had to be the one who found him and called 911. She had to be the one who washed the bedspread, who got the stain out of the carpet, who called the handyman to fix the glass which the bullet had cracked.
I can’t begin to fathom my father’s pain, or why he made the decision he did. I assume that like so many suffering from depression, he couldn’t help but become inwardly focused. His view of the world was skewed and he probably had tunnel vision, seeing only his problems, unable to have a wider perspective. I think my father just felt so much psychic pain that he couldn’t stand it.
He may have believed that he was protecting my mother from having to look after an aging man who likely would need long-term care. Maybe he thought he was acting nobly by saving her from that responsibility. He was also a proud man. It was hard for him to imagine not being self-sufficient.
At the time of his suicide, I was forty-three years old. Naturally, I was distraught, angry, and upset with myself. I thought that I should have been paying closer attention to him. Intellectually, my mom, my sister, and I knew better. As with so many suicides, I don’t think any of us who loved him could have prevented him from doing what he did.
My mother chose not to have a memorial service for my dad. She was probably worried about what their friends and neighbors would think, and was ashamed of what he had done. I tried to gently talk her out of her decision, but I recognized that it was hers to make. And so Lorrie and I, my sister and her husband, along with my mom and a young minister, gathered after his death to scatter his ashes across our property in front of Lake Texoma.
It was a cold, bleak, gray day. In Texas, in the winter, the grass is dormant and brown. It all felt so lonely.
I said a few words. My sister said something. So did the minister, who had driven up from Waples Memorial United Methodist Church in Denison. When it was my mom’s turn, her words were simple: “I had a chance to say everything I needed to say to him when he was alive. There was nothing left unsaid.” My mother was outwardly OK, strong and stoic.
None of us spoke too long. I guess we were just shocked standing there, and angry that my father had made that choice. I was especially upset that he would choose to remove himself from my daughters’ lives. I couldn’t believe he would do that.
After Flight 1549, people wrote to tell me that they could sense how much I valued life. Quite frankly, one of the reasons I think I’ve placed such a high value on life is that my father took his.
I didn’t think about my father’s suicide when I was in the cockpit of Flight 1549. He wasn’t anywhere in my thoughts. But his death did have an effect on how I’ve lived, and on how I view the world. It made me more committed to preserving life. I exercise more care in my professional responsibilities. I am willing to work very hard to protect people’s lives, to be a good Samaritan, and to not be a bystander, in part because I couldn’t save my father.
After my father died, and my mom was able to come to terms with her grief and guilt, she reinvented herself. I was very proud of her. She traveled, and after a few years, she even met a nice man and began dating him seriously. She really blossomed.
