The Pilot's Daughter

I quietly closed the door of my freshman dorm room behind me at Boston College, but not before I glanced back at the photo of Dad and me. The one of me as a girl sitting on his lap in the cockpit of a 767.

I wish you were here, Dad, I thought as I walked down the hall from my room. I wish you were here to help me figure all this out.

I was glad my new roommate was still asleep. “I’m going to be gone tomorrow, at a family event,” I’d told her the night before, and she’d thankfully been totally disinterested.

It was as if September 11 wasn’t even on her mind. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even the front page of the newspaper was focused on Hurricane Katrina.

How quickly we forget, I thought. It seemed too soon. But I’d been glad to delay the inevitable talk with my roommate. I wasn’t ready to see the shock in her eyes, to hear how sorry she felt for me, to be the victim—again.

How do you tell someone that your dad was the pilot on Flight 11, the first plane that terrorists flew into the World Trade Center?

For four years now I’d prayed that I’d be able to figure out where 9/11 fit into my life. But as a freshman starting high school on that terrible day I never got a chance to introduce myself before everyone thought they knew who I was.

I watched as kids furtively glanced at me and then quickly looked away. The “9/11 girl.”

I didn’t want to be defined by a tragedy, yet I wanted to honor Dad. He too was more than just the person he was on that terrible day. I wanted to be my own person.

I hoped to find my identity starting college. Isn’t that what kids are meant to do in college? Find themselves? But once again the date loomed: September 11. Now, if I was going to make a clean start, I had to get to the memorial service without anyone on campus making a big deal about it.

Outside my dorm I spotted the car with my mother and two sisters. I jumped in so we could make the short drive to Boston’s Public Garden.

Slouched in the backseat, I thought about the memorial services I’d attended in the last four years. There had been so many that they were starting to fade into one another.

“We will always remember,” politicians often said. But each year there was more I couldn’t recall. The pain was less, but even that seemed sad, in a different kind of way. How am I supposed to feel? What would Dad want me to remember?

Two years ago on 9/11 we had come to BC to dedicate a labyrinth in memory of the 22 alumni killed. Mom graduated from BC, class of ’76, so a portion of the memorial honored Dad.