Flight 232

When I went through my time of parenting two-year-olds, I thought that was difficult. Exhilarating, exhausting, maddening at times: but yes, difficult. Oh, how young I was.

To parent a teenager is in some ways like walking through a ring of fire. Going forward, I will doubtless be scorched, and my emergence is not guaranteed. Last night, my daughter asked me with genuine anguish, But why do people suffer? When I was sixteen, I asked this question, and I’ve continued to ask this question, in a multiplicity of ways, through decades. I can spew off varieties of answers, but ultimately, to my daughter, with her honest face, I come up short.

Late in the night, with my children sleeping, a solitary light burning, the windows open to the crickets with their sound of tiny shaking bells, I read a passage from a chaplain who had been at the scene of a horrific plane crash. When I finished the book, in those quiet, dark hours, I thought of my child. Just as she fought in her birth to be free of my body, I see this girl thrusting her way from the tatters of her childhood, striding so urgently toward what she believes is the golden realm of womanhood. Here I am again, ready to catch my daughter, wanting only to be here.

“… I don’t know why that young child was killed. This is a true mystery. And so I enter into it with you. I cry with you if you allow me into that space. I’ll walk with you. And this is something that a lot of chaplains I know that were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan–talking with their soldiers–they’ll say, Look, I’m gonna journey with you on this. I’m not here to explain it. I’m gonna journey with you. There’s a sense of humility there that I think connects with people, because I think in their heart of hearts we know, Oh, I don’t have an answer. So let’s walk into that mystery together.”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

In Laurence Gonzales’ Flight 232, he writes about a flight attendant who realized the plane she was flying on was going to crash. She was in charge of the cabin, and she determined not to allow the passengers to see her fear, so no one would panic. She stepped out of the cockpit with that fresh, horrific news, and thought, Oh please, God, let me be somewhere else.

My ten-year-old daughter can be fearless at times, but I don’t think that’s courage, per se. This woman in the plane had knowledge, coupled with steely nerves. When we most need to draw on our courage, I think, is often where we least want to. It’s one thing to dive into a creative or athletic adventure with aplomb and spunk, but a whole other circumstance to override terror and uncertainty, to push through a scenario with grace, when every instinct in your body longs to run.

I think of my young daughter as practicing and cultivating that force of courage. Surely such action as this woman’s didn’t arise unexpectedly. I can’t help but wonder if the way she lived her whole life primed her for that moment.

She walked down the aisle, pale and shaken and almost in a stupor of fear and grief. She felt grief, she later said, for all the people, the children. “I couldn’t look at anybody,” she said. “It’s like I just withdrew into myself, because I was working a plan, and I didn’t want anybody to read the absolute terror in my eyes….”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232

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