Chosen To Live by Jerry Schemmel
Excerpts
Recovery had been a long and continuous process, a succession of incremental gains and sudden setbacks. And it is surely not over. We can come to grips with fear, intense introspection and regret we felt during the 45-minuet gap between the time the rear engine exploded, severing the hydraulic system that steered the plane, and the moment we started our fiery slide along the runway in Sioux City. But – and here I must speak strictly for myself – not one day passes that I don’t consider the experience, if only for a moment in the morning while looking into the bathroom mirror, and feel its reverberations. Guilt and anger recede into depression and self-pity, only to emerge as a different kind of anger that becomes transformed, many times, into determination. For me and many others who survived United 232, backslides into depression have ended with the soul emerging somehow intact, even energized. The process is sometimes deceptively subtle, but always relentless, never-ending.
Surviving Untied 232 made us feel different, both not necessarily diminished. There is the feeling of being baptized into a sort of communion of unlikely survivors, survivors whose reason for living takes the shape of day-to-day revelations that can be alarming in their complexity, or disarming in their simplicity.
Recovery had been a long and continuous process, a succession of incremental gains and sudden setbacks. And it is surely not over. We can come to grips with fear, intense introspection and regret we felt during the 45-minuet gap between the time the rear engine exploded, severing the hydraulic system that steered the plane, and the moment we started our fiery slide along the runway in Sioux City. But – and here I must speak strictly for myself – not one day passes that I don’t consider the experience, if only for a moment in the morning while looking into the bathroom mirror, and feel its reverberations. Guilt and anger recede into depression and self-pity, only to emerge as a different kind of anger that becomes transformed, many times, into determination. For me and many others who survived United 232, backslides into depression have ended with the soul emerging somehow intact, even energized. The process is sometimes deceptively subtle, but always relentless, never-ending.
Surviving Untied 232 made us feel different, both not necessarily diminished. There is the feeling of being baptized into a sort of communion of unlikely survivors, survivors whose reason for living takes the shape of day-to-day revelations that can be alarming in their complexity, or disarming in their simplicity.
