Chosen To Live by Jerry Schemmel
Excerpts
The sound seemed to come from behind me – not an unusual loud pop, or a bang or a boom, but an explosion. Short but thunderous, it echoed through the cabin with a shock, both physical and emotional, that caused me to sit bolt upright in my seat.
Almost simultaneously, the plane seemed to drop slightly. It was not the sudden drop that sometimes tosses a plane in choppy air, but an easing drop, a drop that seemed to have more to do with suddenly diminished capabilities of the aircraft than any influence of weather or even clear-air turbulence. These suppositions raced through my mind and yielded a frightening conclusion: We were going down.
Knocking my empty coffee cup over my tray table in front of me, I grabbed the armrests of my seat. It was probably more of an emotional brace than a physical one, as simple logic would have revealed the futility of trying to secure myself at 36,000 feet for a virtual nose-dive. The slow drop continued and my vision of impending doom became more and more vivid.
Although we were not free-falling but more or less easing downward, I imagined us easing right into the farmland below. News coverage of Pan Am Flight 103, downed by a terrorist bomb over Scotland, just three months earlier, flashed before my eyes. So did Diane’s face. I don’t know if I actually spoke these words or formed them silently with my lips, but in my mind I was talking directly to her. “I’ll miss you, sweetheart. I love you.”
My grip on the armrests remained fierce when suddenly the downward movement of the airplane seemed to change just slightly. We were banking to the right. Oh no, I thought, we’re going into a spin.
I heard a woman scream, giving voice to a fear that remained caught in my own throat. My heart pounded so hard that it seemed my entire body throbbed. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t breathed in the several seconds since the explosion and downward pitch of the DC-10. But my efforts to find a breath were unsuccessful. My coffee cup, already knocked on its side, rolled with the right-hand bank of the plane until it plunged off my tray-table and into the aisle. Somewhere behind me, a child cried out for the first time since we’d boarded the plane.
It might have been another few seconds – time seemed suddenly irrelevant and impossible to gauge – before the idea hit me that not only was I going to die, but all of us in this aircraft were tumbling toward the end of our lives. Curiously, I found myself trying to figure exactly how many people were on board. But more screams interrupted the calculation.
What had it been, 30 seconds since the explosion? My hands were still glued to the armrests and the pounding in my chest was unrelenting. My mind, whose circuits went haywire in the immediate wake of the explosion, returned to thoughts of Diane and gave shape to the notion that I would never see her again. Those thoughts, too, were interrupted – not by more screams but the physical sensation that we were coming out of our drop. Indeed, we were leveling off.
My grip on the armrests finally started to relax, though my heart was not so easily convinced. Pain shot through my chest while my breath in quick bursts, that slowly, gradually, grew deeper until they almost felt like sighs. The throbbing that started in my heart and spread to the farthest extremities of my body finally began to subside, but the adrenaline rush had been only slightly slowed down by these vaguely comforting developments. We were not dropping. The feel of the movement of the aircraft seemed normal again. But I was not convinced. Something was still wrong. We were banking to the right.
Still taking the deep breathes in an effort to relax, I became sensitive to every pitch and shudder of the aircraft as I tried to understand what was happening and where we were headed. I listened for more clues, trying to remember what the plane sounded like a minute earlier, before the explosion. My ears strained to hear the engines through the sobbing that now replaced the screams of seconds before. The engines sounded different, I could not describe exactly how. Intermittently, the plane would shake as we continued to bank to the right. Something was clearly wrong, yet we were still flying.
I’d never been a terribly religious person. The Catholic mass I’d attended as a kid always seemed the longest hour of the week and, even after marrying a decidedly more spiritual person in Diane, my own spiritual side usually remained in the closet, where it could, on occasion, be retrieved for emergencies. Now though, I prayed.
Strangely, the first of many prayers that day was not a prayer of deliverance. It was a prayer of thanks. I would repeat it several times over the next 44 minuets. I thanked God that Diane was not with me. I thanked God that my wife did not have to share this terror.
