Beyond The Darkest Day:

How I survived the grief after Pan Am Flight 103

Recently, a New York Times headline read: Libyan Operative Charged In 1988 Bombing is in F.B.I. Custody. A friend messaged me the article, saying “this must stir some emotions”. My response was, “…This time of year, every year since 1988, I feel it.” There is something in the cold, damp air, that comes in December that makes my body remember that time 34 years ago. You know the saying: I feel it in my bones….that is what it is like for me, but instead of a premonition, it is a remembrance of the past.

A day later, another friend sent me a text: “Thinking of you today as Pam Am bomber is in the news.” I am grateful that I have people who understand how that terrible incident still lingers somewhere inside me. Thinking back from the time that I first heard the news and the days following, the question comes to me: Did I share my pain and sorrow with the good friends who I spent the holidays with, or during the time we traveled together? The answer is most likely no, I tried to keep my emotions hidden back then. Some people called me stoic.

Shortly after I was told of the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, I left my friend Deirdre (who I had been traveling with) and went to the airport in Brussels to fly back to London for the holidays. It was December 22, 1988, less than 24 hours after the fire in the sky. Getting close to my boarding gate, I went to a pay phone and called home; it was important to let my family know I was alive and well….both my mother and I were in tears as we spoke.

Still weeping,  I bought a newspaper to try and understand everything that I had learned just a few hours before; that is when my uncontrollable crying started. A young woman came to me and asked me in heavily accented English what was wrong. I pointed to the paper, unable to talk. She said “Don’t worry, that won’t happen to us.” There was no way for me to explain, nor did I have the energy to try…

When I arrived in London, I must have gone to the house where my friends, Mike and John, and I were staying for Christmas. My memory fails me. We were staying in a house that my cousin, who was studying at the London School of Economics, and some others were renting for the year. Had everyone who lived there left the house for the holidays, or was my cousin still in town? I can’t imagine that I went to an empty house, in a strange part of London, and stayed all alone….

What I do recall about the days and weeks following are fragments of memory:

Mike and I planning Christmas dinner:
Going into the shops asking strangers how to cook a turkey Neither of us, at age 20, had cooked a holiday feast before. That was a good day

Spending Christmas Eve at my local pub: The Ashes. Talking all night to Kevin, the Scottish man I had a crush on, about Lockerbie. He understood the heaviness I felt. His family home was near the town where the plane came down

Leaving London and traveling with the Christmas group: Mike, John, Meredith (John’s girlfriend), and Amy (Meredith’s) friend.

Arriving in the wee hours of the morning to Strasbourg, most of us falling asleep on our backpacks, while we waited for dawn in the train station.
Mike staying up while we slept to make sure the stranger near us didn’t steal anything .

New Year’s Eve near Munich: firecrackers going off in the crowd. Me feeling scared and upset…. all I could see was what the plane might have looked like in that darkest night in the sky

Saying goodbye to Meredith and Amy.

Venice in the winter with Mike and John
The three of us off to Padua to see Grazia, a friend from high school. My Italian friend telling me not to go to Milan- it was dangerous for a young woman traveling alone.

Leaving Mike and John as they headed south and I west

Arriving in Milan to find the youth hostel closed. Getting back on the train, arriving in Zurich after dark, not knowing where to go. Thankful for once for “Loud Americans” as I tried to figure out what to do. A group of young women, all students abroad, took me to the private hostel where they were staying

Checking into the International Youth Hostel the following day bumping into Deirdre while she was brushing her teeth. Catching up on the last few weeks

Heading different directions over the next few days.

Solace in Interlaken, as I hiked by myself on the land between two lakes

A train to Innsbruck, Walking down the corridor, passing compartments to find a seat.
I heard someone behind me: Sarah?!”, a voice called Looking over my shoulder, there was my friend, and roommate, once again

We traveled together the last days of our semester break. Munich: our last night on the European Continent. Running into a friend of Deirdre’s, The three of us spending the evening in the Hofbrau House. Late at night we boarded a train to take us to the ferry to England…. A 5:30 stop at a station, just long enough to purchase the best bratwurst ever!

Arriving back in London, without a place to live we headed to a hostel we knew A block away from the hostel, I stepped off the curb, twisted my ankle, and the full weight of my backpack came tumbling down…. My friend, laughing hard, asked if I was okay. No, not okay, I could barely walk Stumbling along beside Deirdre, as she carried both our packs to the hostel…

Had I gone home for Christmas 34 years ago, one of the students on Pan Am flight 103 might have been me. The young men and women on that plane, from Syracuse program in London, were the students on my flight to England earlier that year. Perhaps I would have been on the other plane that transported my fellow classmates home. I will never know; a different choice was made.

All these years later, the realization hits me with two scenarios of what could have happened if I went home for the holidays in 1988: I might no longer walk this earth or I would have sunk into a deep depression that would have been hard to climb out of. By deciding to stay in Europe, I lived. Traveling with old and new friends, helped me to focus most of my energy on something else. The trauma of that event lingers within me, however every Christmas Season I think of my friends and how they helped me make it through those awful days after Lockerbie.