A Walk With A Friend I Can Never Meet
photo courtesy of library.syr.edu
I sat in the library and smiled while a girl I thought I could be great friends with told me stories of visits to the theatre, parties where she danced the night away, and boys she hoped would kiss her. I laughed at the artwork she made smudging paint with her fingers and the disproportionate hands on the drawings she did of her and her family in grade school. Her name is Sarah S.B. Philipps. Today I am older than she ever lived to be. She told me these stories through what survives her in the archives of Bird Library. As I write this I am sitting with a pin on my sweater that has a sketch of her face on it and the words “Look Back, Act Forward,” reminding me of the promise I made on October 25, 2019, to live the rest of my life in her honor. I wonder if she would like the playlist I chose for the journey.
Sarah went to the University of Colorado at Boulder to major in English and studied abroad in London with Syracuse University in the Fall of 1988. The students on that trip became great friends. They learned together and laughed together. They loved together. They took pictures, kept journals, and sent postcards to their families. On December 21, 1988, Sarah was one of the 35 students studying with Syracuse who boarded Pan Am 103, eagerly awaiting what should have been a longer flight heading homewards. 224 other passengers boarded with them. Miles away in Lockerbie, Scotland, families awaiting nothing but the approaching holidays went about their day.
With scorched hearts and a confused agenda, terrorists robbed all 259 passengers and 11 people in Lockerbie of their futures in an instant. A bomb planted in a suitcase took down the plane, killing everyone on board and 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. It was, and remains a tragic, devastating, and senseless act of terror that succeeded only in claiming the lives of 270 individuals who wanted nothing more than to get home.
Every year since the tragedy, 35 SU students and 2 from Lockerbie come together in honor of Remembrance. We sit and grieve the loss of friends we will never meet and take it upon ourselves to ensure that their names never cease to be spoken aloud. It’s a unique grief when you mourn someone who passed before you were born. The personal connections and archival material varies based on who each Remembrance Scholar is selected to represent, but we embrace them in mind, body and soul nonetheless. I now walk with Sarah wherever I go and exchange emails with her mother.
Sarah loved to do things that I love to do, and she loved to do things that I hate to do. I laugh when I wonder what she would say about my impressively slow mile time knowing how much she loved to run, and feel a warmth through my veins when I imagine how we could reminisce over our shared passion for summer camp. When I stood surrounded by my fellow Remembrance Scholars in front of students, faculty, friends, and families of the victims at the Rose Laying Ceremony this past weekend, I felt Sarah take a place in my heart that I did not know was there as I read aloud her senior quote by Emily Dickinson: “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet”. For me, pledging to act forward in her memory and laying a white rose on the Place of Remembrance meant a promise to Sarah that for every minute I live longer than she was able to, I must do so with love in my heart and knowledge that it can all be gone in an instant.
I cannot speak on behalf of all the scholars or anyone affected by Pan Am 103. What I can do is ask. I ask that anyone who reads this, anyone who walks along the Place of Remembrance or finds themselves in the archives, remember that life is short and the next moment is a gift and not a guarantee. Remember to love fiercely, live intentionally, and give to something bigger than yourself.
Sarah, the playlist I chose is called Reflection Songs. I’m listening to Old Pine by Ben Howard. I think you would like it.