This isn’t the kind of pain, the kind of loss, that can be forgotten. The pain doesn’t leave.

Even now, it seems almost impossible to fathom. Almost.

On Dec. 21, 1988, an international flight crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 people onboard were killed. Thirty-five Syracuse University students, coming back from a semester abroad in London and Florence, Italy, were on the plane.

Your student. Your classmate. Your best friend. Your brother. Your sister. Your son.

Your daughter.

Gone.

That December day, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up by a bomb planted by Libyan terrorists. Back then, it was difficult to find anyone on campus who wasn’t connected in some way to one of the students onboard.

Twenty years later, these people still remember. Their minds travel back quickly to that December day, a date bookmarked with grief and pain.

Kelly Rodoski was studying for exams in Flint Hall. Kara Weipz was watching a soap opera. Claudia Wells was shopping for Christmas presents. John Sweeney watched a TV report in a London restaurant.

These memories don’t fade. Not to these people, who expected to see their friends, students and family again. And they want to make sure no one forgets. Because they always remember.

***

John Sweeney and his friends used to play pick-up football in front of London’s Kensington Palace on the weekends. They played one last game the weekend before they all headed home for Christmas.

When he got back to Syracuse for his final semester of college, Sweeney and one other student would be the only living players of both football teams.

‘That was a curious time, when I got back,’ said Sweeney, a 1989 graduate with a degree in management. ‘There’s a shock, and I was probably in shock for a day or two, and then you move onto rage and anger. Why did I make it and my friends didn’t?’

While he initially saw footage of Lockerbie while eating at a French restaurant that night, it wasn’t until he stopped at a liquor store across from his flat when the owner told him the news. His friends he saw that morning were gone.

Sweeney flew back to the United States the day after the bombing. He also originally had a ticket on Pan Am 103 but early in the semester had switched to the next day. He remembers standing in the lobby of Gatwick Airport, south of central London and seeing a newsstand with newspapers from all over the world. They all had the same photo, the same headline.

He was scared to get on that plane, terrified. But Sweeney climbed on that Virgin Atlantic flight and ordered himself a drink.

‘I just kind of hunkered down in my seat and counted down as the plane took off and flew across the Atlantic,’ Sweeney said. ‘Figured once I was 10 minutes in the air something was going to happen if it was going to. It didn’t happen. And I came back.’

***

It was four days before Christmas, and Claudia Wells went to the mall to find the perfect present for her best friend, Gretchen Dater. After all, Gretchen had spent four months in London, and her friends were planning a special Christmas Eve party for her homecoming. Wells had known her since sixth grade.

Unable to find something she liked, Wells decided to save shopping for another day. That day never came. She never bought a present for Gretchen. Her friends never had that Christmas Eve party.

Because Gretchen never came home.

‘It came out slow to us,’ Wells said. ‘One of our friends called the airport and we lied and said we were her cousin or whatever.’

Wells doesn’t remember much about the following days. They run together, a smeared stretch of sadness and shock. Wells does remember having constant streaks under her eyes. She thinks she cried for a month straight.

Gretchen went to the Maryland Institute of Art and loved drawing and painting. She was studying art through SU Abroad in London.

Gretchen and Wells did everything together. They liked to roller skate and go into town and shop. They liked classic rock and ’60s and ’70s music – Led Zeppelin, Lynard Skynard and Woodstock.

These days, Wells can only attend the Gretchen Dater Art Festival at a local elementary school in their hometown of Ramsey, N.J. Wells kept everything she had from Gretchen: letters, photographs, clothing, her artwork.

‘There’s so much I could tell you,’ Wells said, her voice distant. ‘I’m a little lost in it right now.’

***

The last week in London was hectic for the SU students. There were exams, last-minute travels and parties to attend. Liz Rathbourne went to one party a few days before she was scheduled to leave.

Everyone was scrambling, making last minute plans. SU had bought a swath of tickets on Pan Am 103. Airline security was more lax then. No I.D. was needed to board. Only a ticket.

Students were swapping plane tickets depending on their plans, exams and how quickly they wanted to get home. Rathbourne had a ticket for Pan Am 103.

Her parents lived in Italy, and Rathbourne, then 20, decided to see them for a bit before going home. Her Pan Am ticket was still in her bag on the train to Florence.

‘My dad came and picked me up from the train station and he was being really nice and really quiet and my mom told me what happened when I got home,’ said Rathbourne, who attended Denison University but went to London through SU Abroad. ‘It was the first time I remember feeling unsafe.’

After returning to the U.S., she attended memorial services. She remembered talking to students who swapped tickets. She remembered the guilt they felt. Rathbourne still thinks about why she wasn’t on that plane, and how grateful she was for that wake-up call.

‘I was such a little New England college student without a freaking care in the world,’ said Rathbourne, 40. ‘A lot of people had to die for it to snap me out of that, and that’s horrible but I’m grateful to them and their families.’

***

Kara Weipz was pissed off that a breaking news segment interrupted ‘General Hospital.’ Sonny and Brenda were in the middle of a really big scene and Weipz, then 15, wanted to get the most out of her sick day from school.

But the report told her that a plane was missing in the British Isles. Then she started calling people. First her father, then the girlfriend of her brother, Rick Monetti. The girlfriend was supposed to pick Rick up at the airport. No information. She was getting anxious, nervous.

‘I called a girl that I went to elementary school with who I wasn’t that friendly with but I called her anyway,’ said Weipz, now 35. ‘I said listen, I just need you to talk to me. I don’t care what you say, I just need you to talk to me.’

Finally Rick’s girlfriend called and said, yes, that missing plane was her brother’s plane.

Weipz broke the news to her mother as soon as she walked in the door. Her mother collapsed on the floor.

Weipz went to sleep that night hoping, praying, that somehow her brother was still alive. She even went to school the next day, trying to keep a normal routine. Trying. When she got home and saw her father crying, she knew.

Rick was gone.

Twenty years later, Weipz is the president of Victims of Pan Am 103, which connects all of the families affected by the tragedy and keeps them up-to-date on the latest news involving the trial with Libya and meeting times. The group will meet in Syracuse during Remembrance Week.

‘The most wonderful thing about it is those of us whose loved ones were a part of the Syracuse family always had a connection,’ Weipz said. ‘And by meeting here, those who didn’t can feel that, too.’

***

The first call came at about 3:30 p.m. Judy O’Rourke was in her office, finishing out her day’s work as the holidays neared, and the phone rang.

A plane crashed in Scotland. Our students might be onboard. We don’t know anything for sure yet.

From that point on, O’Rourke, then assistant to the vice president of undergraduate studies, went on autopilot. She called Pan Am airlines. She called the Federal State Department. Busy signal after busy signal. Still no information.

‘I would say it was controlled chaos, because you’re in the midst of what you know is a really bad thing, but you can’t figure out a whole lot about it,’ said O’Rourke, who is now director of undergraduate studies and in charge of planning Remembrance Week.

O’Rourke became the liaison between the university and the parents. It was her job to relay what she knew to parents who were suddenly realizing they lost a child. Other times she would call a home expecting to deliver horrible news, and the supposed missing student picked up the phone. The line between being a professional and being a parent blurred as the afternoon turned to night.

‘I remember getting home very, very late that night and just looking at my kids,’ O’Rourke said. ‘Because it was a very hard thing to do.’

Her voice trailed off as she spoke.

***

Back in 1988, exams ran right up until Christmas. The last day of exams was Thursday, Dec. 22. Kelly Rodoski was itching to finish her Thursday final and get home after her first college semester.

Rodoski was studying in her dormitory, Flint Hall, on Wednesday. A scream from one of her hallmates echoed through the hall, and the news spread. Studying became an afterthought.

‘Even for those of us who didn’t know anybody on the plane it was the most devastating thing you could think of,’ Rodoski said. ‘You don’t imagine at that point in your life that something like that is going to happen.’

Rodoski walked across campus the next day, a campus that seemed to stand still. She attended the memorial service with thousands of other students, even though she didn’t know any students onboard.

She now works for SU News Services, and headed up the Pan Am 20th anniversary committee. It seemed right to her colleagues: She lived it. She remembers it.

‘It’s hard when we bring the pictures of the victims out and hang them around campus,’ Rodoski said. ‘I look at these faces and that’s what I looked like 20 years ago. Those are the hairstyles and the clothes. That’s where I was, and now here I am, and they didn’t get the chance to be where I am.’

***

Doug Unger sat in an airplane a week after the crash, writing a speech to memorialize students he had seen and spoken with just short months ago. Alexia Tsaris, Nicole Boulanger. Christopher Jones. He wanted the campus to remember each of those who had died. He wanted their names to resonate.

Unger, a creative writing professor at SU from 1983 to 1991, took up the task of writing a piece from the faculty that would honor the students.

He delivered the speech to thousands of mourning students, faculty and family members on Jan. 18, 1989, in a memorial service at the Carrier Dome. Unger read the name of every student killed.

‘I felt all their names should be recognized,’ said Unger, now at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. ‘I tried to figure out what would be the appropriate way to eulogize these students and bring them home.’

While giving the speech, Unger was thinking about Christopher Jones, an English major who wrote satirical stories Unger read and edited. Jones wrote them one after the other, and Unger, ever the professor, said to concentrate on rewrites. But Jones didn’t.

‘He kept saying to me, ‘No, no, I don’t feel like I’ve got the time to rewrite.’ And I said well, you’re on a roll,’ Unger said. ‘I was looking forward to helping him perfect them when he got back. But his feeling was that he didn’t have time. And you know, he didn’t have time.’

***

Posters of news clippings, letters and poetry line the walls of the Syracuse University archives on the sixth floor of Bird Library. On a table in the middle of the cluttered room, there is a carefully packed box filled with an odd assortment of items that hold a monumental amount of meaning.

‘This is a pinewood derby car that we’ve had for many years,’ said Ed Galvin, director of the archives. He pulled a tag off the car that read, ‘Kenneth Bissett.’

‘These are baby booties, not from an SU family,’ Galvin said, and laid them flat in his palm. ‘But in talking to the women about what to donate, she said, ‘When my son was born the impact really hit me. My mom wasn’t there to see her grandson born.’

‘This is Gretchen Dater’s favorite shawl. Her mother said she just loved this shawl and wanted it in the archives,’ Galvin said, laying the worn blue and purple garment on the table.

‘This is a series of photographs that survived the crash from the Coker twins, there’s damage,’ Galvin said, flipping through the pictures. Burn marks mar the edges of scenes from England, taken by Eric and Jason Coker.

These items are currently on display in the Noble Room of Hendricks Chapel for Remembrance Week. Even just sitting in a display case, they tell stories. Stories that were cut short. But these items, and more stored in the archives, help keep those stories alive.

Because students today, they don’t remember. They were one or 2 years old when Pan Am 103 exploded in the sky. Their minds don’t reel back every December to a time of grief, anger and confusion.

These people, they can’t forget. They won’t let themselves forget their students, friends and family.

Twenty years later, they want everyone else to remember, too.

eaconnor@syr.edu

Published on October 19, 2008 at 12:00 pm