Surviving the Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103

Twenty-three years ago—on the 10th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103—I was invited to write a personal remembrance of the event for the scholarly Journal of Personal & Interpersonal Loss through the psychology department at the University of Iowa. As I sifted through my research and artifacts and memories and emotions, I found I had a lot to say—and the essay ended up being over 2,000 words. I was just hitting my stride as a confident professional writer, and though my emotions and penchant to express myself in extremes have mellowed over the past two decades, I’m still quite proud of what I wrote and how I wrote it. If you care to read a sample, here’s the preamble:

On December 21, 1988, a terrorist bomb blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, 54 minutes after it took off from London's Heathrow Airport. The explosion sent 259 passengers and crew members tumbling 6 miles to their deaths, killed 11 people on the ground, and created waves of shock and grief that continue to reverberate across the globe. My friend Miriam Wolfe, one of 35 students returning from a semester in London under the auspices of Syracuse University, was on that flight. Her death was the final, jarring event in a traumatic year that had brought me the accidental deaths of four other friends in an Easter plane crash and the breast cancer that would force my mother to endure a mastectomy and painful years of chemotherapy and drug treatments. While it is tempting to canonize the victims of violent disaster, Miriam was different—and inarguably deserving of such hagiography. A tribute written for one of three memorial scholarships established in her honor calls her ‘a rare and gifted young woman who lived life to the fullest; actively worked to change the world for the better; and gave a great deal of love, joy and wisdom to all who knew her.’ Her death yanked me from the comfortable naiveté of my youth and forced me to confront the pain and confusion of the adult world. It destroyed my faith in the inherent good of mankind but showed me how disaster can bring out the best in people. It gave me a nihilistic view of life but forced me to make the most of every moment I have. It made me appreciate the people around me but gave me little tolerance for anyone who wastes my time. And it instilled in me a knee-jerk animus toward religion and nearly all things Middle Eastern. Ultimately, though, Miriam's life and death taught me how to live and love and survive in ways I never thought necessary—or possible.

Excerpted from "Surviving the Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103: The Loss of Innocence and a Dear Friend in an International Tragedy." Journal of Personal & Interpersonal Loss, Vol. 3, No. 1, January–March 1998. Pages 117–134. Publisher: Taylor & Francis.

Oh nose!

Bitch Kitty is sick! She left barf bombs all over the house last night and today she's sneezing all over things we're now reluctant to touch. But kitty sneezes are adorably cute, even if they're coming from a kitty who's hemorrhaging profusely out of every orifice and in the spastic throes of death. A whimsical little sneeze is like a final gift of adorableness to the people standing helplessly around her watching her die.

But back to Bitch Kitty. According to the accredited scholarly journal Everyone Has Syphilis, Bitch Kitty's barfing and adorable sneezing and open hostility toward adult gay men who have so much love to give but no one to give it to are classic symptoms of Profoundly Embarrassing Feline Syphilis That Brings Mortal Shame Upon The Entire Family.

But! There is a cure: Value Size Ultra Mega Hairball Formula Premium Formula Gel. I swear I'm not making that up. It comes in a toothpaste tube and you squirt it on your cat's paw and she fastidiously licks it off and through the wonders of magic and witchcraft—because all cats are witches who are openly hostile toward adult gay men who have so much love to give but no one to give it to—she stops leaving barf bombs all over the house. And it comes in malt flavor, because everyone knows cats prefer malts and drive-in movies over tuna and chicken.

As for the adorable sneezing, we read on the internet—and I swear I'm not making this up either—that you should fill an eye dropper with a gently warmed saline solution and squirt a few drops up the cat's nose while the cat sits calmly and cooperatively as she's basically being waterboarded. Take a moment to look at this picture:

It's a rare and extremely collectible photo of Bitch Kitty hissing and running away but still for one brief nanosecond keeping her hiss aimed in the general direction of my camera, which she does at bag-of-pudding speed (because she's too zaftig to move at lightning speed) every time I enter her field of vision. So guess who in my family would be a lacerated failure at squirting salty water anywhere in the vicinity of Bitch Kitty, much less up her adorably sneezy nose. Just guess. Bitch Kitty LOOOOOOVES my dad, but waterboarding is still waterboarding and my dad is 500 years old and starting to get feeble and Bitch Kitty would open every vein in his body if he tried to waterboard her—even coming from a place of love—and I bet he wouldn't even give us an adorable final sneeze as we stood around helplessly watching him die.

But! The guy at the pet store said there is an alternate solution: Buy a humidifier. Which we did. Let me type that again slowly to make sure you understand it: WE JUST BOUGHT A HUMIDIFIER TO GENTLY MOISTEN THE AIR IN OUR HOME FOR OUR SNEEZY BARFY BITCHY CAT.
In other news, we found proof at the pet store that our country is officially out of plausible, relevant product names. Because we found a product called Stop That!, which I assume is designed to stop kitties from doing whatever "that" is: collapsing the soufflé, ordering too many shoes online, staring at Melania's classy titty pictures ... who knows?

Then! (And I promise I'll end this endless post after this paragraph.) We found the BEST worst name for a product in the whole entire universe: ThunderShirt! Which could be used for superheroes or bodybuilder clothes or storm chasers. But no. It's just for cat anxiety. CAT ANXIETY. The ThunderShirt for Cat Anxiety. Say it 16 times and it's STILL the dumbest use of the coolest name ever to fix an imaginary first-world problem. Like bipolar disorder. Or plain Oreos. Or That.