Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [107]
It was a cold, bleak, gray day. In Texas, in the winter, the grass is dormant and brown. It all felt so lonely.
I said a few words. My sister said something. So did the minister, who had driven up from Waples Memorial United Methodist Church in Denison. When it was my mom’s turn, her words were simple: “I had a chance to say everything I needed to say to him when he was alive. There was nothing left unsaid.” My mother was outwardly OK, strong and stoic.
None of us spoke too long. I guess we were just shocked standing there, and angry that my father had made that choice. I was especially upset that he would choose to remove himself from my daughters’ lives. I couldn’t believe he would do that.
After Flight 1549, people wrote to tell me that they could sense how much I valued life. Quite frankly, one of the reasons I think I’ve placed such a high value on life is that my father took his.
I didn’t think about my father’s suicide when I was in the cockpit of Flight 1549. He wasn’t anywhere in my thoughts. But his death did have an effect on how I’ve lived, and on how I view the world. It made me more committed to preserving life. I exercise more care in my professional responsibilities. I am willing to work very hard to protect people’s lives, to be a good Samaritan, and to not be a bystander, in part because I couldn’t save my father.
After my father died, and my mom was able to come to terms with her grief and guilt, she reinvented herself. I was very proud of her. She traveled, and after a few years, she even met a nice man and began dating him seriously. She really blossomed.
I think my mother would have continued to live a rich and busy life if she hadn’t been diagnosed with colon cancer in December 1998.
The day I got the news of her cancer, I was finishing a trip on the MD-80 in Pittsburgh, and I immediately got on a flight to Dallas. My mother knew she was terminal, and said so. It was shocking for us. She was only 71 years old and had never been seriously ill in her life. She came from a line of long-lived people. Her father lived until age 94 and her mother until 102.
But we accepted the hand she’d been dealt, and in my mother’s final weeks, I had a chance to have many talks with her about our lives, about her wishes for Kate and Kelly. She said she had few regrets. Unlike with my dad, I was able to say good-bye. My mom lived just one month after her diagnosis. And so for the second time in just a few years, we experienced a heartbreaking loss. This time, I felt all the things I had felt after my father’s death, except anger.
There have been lessons for me.
In the three years between my father’s suicide and my mom’s death, my mother was severely tested. But the former schoolteacher taught herself how to get the most out of life and how to be as happy as possible. I admired her even more for how she lived as a widow.
I didn’t think of her when I was in the cockpit of Flight 1549, but her will to live had already served as an inspiration to me.
LORRIE AND I wish my parents could have lived to witness what has happened as a result of Flight 1549. The incident would have been frightening for my mother, and very emotional. She’d be overjoyed at the outcome, of course. My mother would have cried. My father would have been proud.
When I first became a pilot, my mother was always telling me to stay safe. “Fly low and slow,” she’d say. I’d roll my eyes. It was like a comedy routine between us.
I’d remind her that flying low and slow isn’t as safe as flying higher and at an appropriate speed. She understood that. But the line “fly low and slow” became her way of encouraging me to be careful. It was her handy little admonition.
We were certainly flying low over the Hudson on January 15. Without engines, we were slowing