Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [105]
People had been losing their jobs in large numbers. Home foreclosures were up. Life savings had been decimated. A lot of people felt like they had been hit by a double bird strike in their own lives. But Flight 1549 had shown people that there are always further actions you can take. There are ways out of the tightest spots. We as individuals, and as a society, can find them.
So at that performance of South Pacific, Lorrie thought the audience was standing as a tribute not to Flight 1549, but to what it represented. It represented hope.
I waved at the crowd while Lorrie dabbed at her eyes. Then I hugged her and waved again.
NOT LONG after the Hudson landing, Jeff, Doreen, Donna, Sheila, and I met with dozens of Flight 1549 passengers and their families at a reunion in Charlotte. It was, as you can imagine, a day filled with great emotion for all who were there—the crew, the passengers, and the family members who accompanied them. “Thank you for not making me a widow,” one woman told me. Another said: “Thank you for allowing my three-year-old son to have a father.” And a young woman who had been on the plane came up to me and said, “Now I get to have children.”
Some passengers took the time to introduce me to everyone they had brought with them. “This is my mother, this is my father, this is my brother, my sister…”
It went on like that for close to two hours.
In the abstract, 155 is just a number. But looking into the faces of all of those passengers—and then the faces of all their loved ones—it brought home to me how profoundly wonderful it was that we had such a good outcome on Flight 1549.
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.”
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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