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Charity Vogel: Flight 3407 widow finds knowledge unbearable
She couldn’t do it. Jennifer West knew others would. They would travel to Washington, sit and listen with ribbons pinned to their shirts and photographs of the dead clasped to their chests. They would want to hear.
But something deep in her heart told her she couldn’t.
She couldn’t bear the agony of knowing— any more than she already does— about what her husband Ernie’s last seconds had been like. And why.
On Tuesday, as federal hearings into Flight 3407’s crash in Clarence got under way, West turned off her TV and shut down the Internet. She ignored phone calls. When the newspaper came, she put it straight into the recycling bin.
It helped, but only a little. Her grief still feels like a thick cloak she must wear everywhere, at every moment. Sometimes it suffocates her.
“This morning, I started crying and I just couldn’t stop,” said West, 39, sounding exhausted and spent on the hearings’ second day. Her voice quavered, broke. “I try not to cry in front of my daughter, but . . .”
Here is the question that confronts us, in the immediate aftermath of the hearings.
We now know the full story of Flight 3407. What does that knowledge get us?
For some victims’ families, it has meant fresh anger.
Anger at the thought that their loved ones sat—in oblivion, until those final gut-twisting seconds—in the cabin of a plane that was piloted on Feb. 12 by a pilot who had failed three federal flying tests.
Anger at a carrier, Colgan, that used a 24-year-old co-pilot who had never seen icing, who was sick, and who had commuted from Seattle in order to work the Newark-based flight.
Anger at the actions of that crew in the final minutes of the trip—at the idle chatter while danger mounted, and at the wrong reaction with the plane’s stick that, experts later testified, sent the plane plummeting to earth instead of saving it.
“[The pilot] did the opposite of what should have been done,” said one widow, Robin Tolsma, admitting her anger to a reporter at the hearings.
Who can blame these enraged family members? The simulation of the final two minutes of the flight, shown at the hearings, was terrible to see, even for those of us who had no spouses, children or friends on board. Imagine what it was like for those who had.
That’s why some, like West, chose to avoid certain truths last week.
To be clear: She wants others to know what happened—that might bring meaningful change. She just doesn’t want to know herself. She has done the emotional calculus, and realizes that knowing more details about Ernie’s last seconds would only serve as torment.
“It’s too painful,” she said. “My imagination is already running wild. I know he was scared. What did he think? Was he crying?”
She began to weep, softly, despairingly.
“I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t make him—not scared.”
Swimming in this great tide of pain, West has hoarded up happy memories like driftwood. Memories of marrying Ernie in Maui. Of the birth of their daughter, Summer, now 2. Of Ernie working in the yard of their Clarence home, his place of peace.
This is what matters now. Even with all the attention on mistakes and failures, this is what counts.
Ernie recently planted 20 poplar trees in their yard. When she picked a casket for him, West chose poplar.
It may not sound like much to you. But to a widow struggling to make it through each new day without the man she loved, it’s a precious point of light in a world gone dark and cold.
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