Chris Meek, a 1992 graduate of Syracuse University, is the co-founder of the national nonprofit, SoldierStrong, which helps injured military veterans take their next steps forward in life by connecting them with revolutionary military technology. He lives in Stamford, Connecticut.
For most Americans, the tragic events of Dec. 21, 1988, came as it normally did in those days with a somber Peter Jennings opening the ABC News evening broadcast with the fateful words, “Disaster at Christmas. PanAm 103 never makes it home.”
With images of a cottage burning in the background, Jennings continued, “The simple facts are these: PanAm Flight 103 had been in the air an hour. The 747 was on route from London to New York and then Detroit. According to Pan American, there were more than 240 passengers on board and a crew of 15. It was after dark. For reasons we do not understand yet, the plane, with 50,000 gallons of fuel on board, plunged into a small Scottish market town.”
Except for the time the flight had been aloft — it was actually only 38 minutes — the information that Jennings shared was accurate. The reason for the tragedy became known all too soon but, to this day, we still do not fully comprehend the reason why. PanAm 103 was taken down by a terrorist bomb at the order of Moammar Gadhafi, a brutal dictator killed years later by his fellow Libyans.
The disaster, which claimed all 259 souls aboard the plane and 11 others on the ground, hit me harder than most such stories because, as a Syracuse University student at the time, I knew that a number of fellow students would be flying home for Christmas. One was Steve Boland, a Delta Tau Delta fraternity brother.
Years later, I would find a connection with another Flight 103 victim. When my wife and I bought our first home in Stamford, Connecticut, we learned from our Realtor, Maddie Shapiro, that her daughter Amy was one of the 35 students on the flight who had participated in the Syracuse University’s Division of International Programs Abroad.
Steve Boland — a confident, engaging and likeable guy — was on his way home to New Hampshire for the holidays. He had graduated from Bishop Guertin High School two years earlier and was the recipient of the All-Guertin Award for the student who exemplifies the school’s academic, athletic and spiritual ideals.
Steve was an advertising major in Syracuse’s S.I. Newhouse School of Communications and, undoubtedly, would have done great things in his chosen profession. He never lived long enough to become an uncle to his sister Kelly’s daughter, Emma, or have his own family. Nor was he alive to spend more years with his parents, John and Jane, who remembered him at the time of his death as “God’s personal envoy of peace and brotherhood.” Steve’s dad passed away in 2011, no doubt still with a heavy heart from the loss of his only son.
Amy Shapiro was also 21 years old and a student in the Newhouse School of Communications. She was a photojournalism major who was working toward a career in magazines by combining her two favorite pastimes of photography and writing. Particularly touching was an account describing how Maddie Shapiro “went to England that fall because her daughter’s semester abroad was too long to go between hugs.”
Amy Shapiro, her mother said, “was like the sun, with all those who knew her moving towards her … seeking the comfort of her warmth, light and understanding.”
Like Steve Boland, Amy Shapiro and her loved ones missed out on so many of life’s milestones. Her dad, Richard, never walked her down the aisle at her wedding, and the Stamford High graduate never again wrote about the world she brightened so much with her warmth, light and understanding. She would never again capture images through the lens of her camera. Nor would she write poetry again as she did in her poem, “After the Storm,” which hauntingly concludes, “The snow turned to rain, And as the last crystal was washed away, the woman closed her eyes, and she too, was gone.”
The world is a small place, indeed. Years after the bombing, the Stamford Advocate hired another Syracuse graduate, Maggie Gordon. On the 25th anniversary of Flight 103′s downing, Gordon wrote about Amy Shapiro and how 35 Syracuse University seniors are chosen to receive remembrance scholarships, commemorating the students who died that day.
“Through the program, each scholar is tasked with taking up the charge of learning about and sharing memories of one of the victims. It’s a weighty task and being chosen to carry it out is considered the highest honor for students at the school,” Gordon wrote. “Scholars do outreach and education over the course of the year, becoming an ambassador for the deceased student, a process that creates a deep emotional bond between the scholar and the memory of their victim.”
Gordon, who is now a columnist in Houston, Texas, wrote in December 2013 that the bombing was “an act rooted in hatred. In darkness. But a quarter-century later, Shapiro’s memory and her connections to those who have served as her ambassador have pierced through the black night that fell upon the world that December, revealing constellations of bright light that continue to shine.”
There will always be evil that attempts to rob us of hope, joy, promise and potential. Yet, we must not allow the darkness to prevail. As I think of those lives lost on Dec. 21, 1988, I will always remember the “constellations of bright light that continue to shine.”