It pains me to write this. I had just put down my pen from writing about an engine failure where the flight made it safely back to the airport, and heard the news of this. Bhoja Air Flight 213 down in Pakistan after losing contact with ATC. Another flight down in stormy weather. The loss is unique, but it happened too many times.
Again a plane, or pilot, or airline failed to bring its passengers safely home. That’s all we want – for the families to be reunited, for the father who just lost his daughters to have them back, for this to be a nightmare that will just go away. But the Bhoja crash is one of the nightmares that don’t go away. Soon the whole world will hear the names, see the faces, hear the stories behind the tragedy. Maybe it is the stories that make a disaster like this so hard to take for the rest of us.
The stories bring life to the loss, take our imaginations from black and white to living colour, carry us from the place where statistics rest on paper to where they mingle in our hearts with our own memories of love and loss.
Soon we will hear the mourning of the families, the fathers, mothers, siblings, spouses, friends. The investigation will begin, and the experts will find whatever they find, but there’s always the one truth that remains.
It is the families who will bear this, who will hereafter live their lives like shattered china pieced back together. And what is the glue? The chemistry will be different for every parent, every child, every sibling, but its ingredients are memories woven with grief and resilience, bitterness, hope, faith – and the support of friends.
You will get through this. You already know that time will ease the pain, but for now, true as it is, it is only words. To the families, we can only say we grieve with you. Your loss is our loss.
It is as true now as it was in 1624 when John Donne wrote it: “No man is an island… All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language…” Your loss is our loss. To the families, we can only say we grieve with you and wish you peace.
GEORGE HATCHER
USA