I lost my mother, tragically, in a plane crash
when I was only 3 years old.
The experience changed my relationship with
my father and fatherhood, forever.
When I was 8, maybe 9 years old, there was a day when students in my class could bring their parents to school. Students stood at the front of the room to say what they wanted to be when they grew up and why. In my dad’s telling, another widowed parent called him that evening to tell him about my ad-libbed speech. My speech, which left me in tears, began, “When I grow up, I want to be a dad.”
Far as I can recall, this was one of the few times during my childhood when I openly expressed myself in such a setting. I’ve no memory of this proclamation of my paternal dreams, but I know I’ve long perceived fatherhood as a noble pursuit. It now strikes me that I’d paid my dad one of the highest compliments a father could receive — I was a bereaved son honoring him and all dads. My father-figure admiration likely originated from watching my dad, flummoxed by grief, in the years after the plane crash in which my mother died at age 37.
My mom, Frances Lockwood Bailey, Francie for short, died when I was 3. She was aboard United Airlines Flight 232, when it crash landed in Sioux City, Iowa, on July 19, 1989, killing 112 of the 296 people aboard. My older brother, Brandon, age 6, and my identical twin, Spencer, were on the same plane sitting right beside her. Miraculously, they both survived, but with severe injuries that took years to heal and scars that will last a lifetime. (My dad and I happened to travel on a different plane the day before.) The cause of the crash, investigators determined, was a crack in the fan rotor disk that had gone undetected for 18 years. Somewhere above Iowa, an hour or so into the flight from Denver to Chicago, the crack reached its critical size – critical meaning the fan disk burst, ripping the engine apart, cutting off the plane’s hydraulic lines and fracturing many other internally complex systems, my family system included.
Twenty-seven years later, I gained special access to a newspaper archive, which allowed me to see an uncut version of the crash through the eyes of talented local photojournalists who were on the ground and in the air on that fateful day.
In the decade after Flight 232, I watched two Hollywood movies that infiltrated my imagination and placed the crash site and Iowa squarely within my memoryscape. The first was “A Thousand Heroes” (1992), a made-for-TV movie also released as “Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232” starring Charlton Heston as Capt. Al Haynes. The film fastidiously re-enacts the events of the plane crash and its immediate aftermath. At age 6, I watched the movie for the first time from the safety of home as it aired on live TV. I was transfixed, getting a sort of insider’s view from the cockpit and from the ground at Sioux Gateway Airport. In just a few hours — with commercial intermissions — I saw the day’s events unfold. Eerily, two young actors were cast as my brothers who survived and were in hospital beds grieving for their mother.
The movie has haunted me ever since. On one hand, it offered me a clear picture and a staged chronology of that fateful day, which at the time served as an antidote to the confusion of my grief. On the other hand, it instilled in me an overly dramatized account of what transpired. I now wonder how different Hollywood’s handling of the crash was from that of the journalists at that time and still today. As a photographer, I can see how the news media, especially when covering large-scale calamities, is liable to get stuck in the ethical quicksand of sensationalism.
The second film, “Field of Dreams” (1989), was released in theaters three months before the crash, but I didn’t see it until it was released on VHS. The movie is steeped in an earnest mysticism channeled by an Iowa farmer (played by Kevin Costner) who hears voices that tell him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. Once he builds it, ghosts appear as if out of thin air, but they’re only visible to those who believe in them. As a boy, I was taken by that idea and I remember thinking if my mom died in a cornfield in Iowa, surely she could be revived and reappear in one. The ethereal imagery and storyline just further instilled in me a version of Iowa as a site for hope, contemplation and magical thinking.
When I was a susceptible teenager, I asked my dad if I could borrow his Nikon F1. As I first brought the camera to my eye and my surroundings into focus, its viewfinder served as a portal to what seemed like a new dimension. Making photographs gave me an excuse to linger and be present, at my own speed, in a variety of situations, softening the unease within me. I began to see my surroundings more acutely, attentively and empathetically, moment by moment, and I found that I could get others to interact with me in surprising and intimate ways. These novelties, first enabled by my dad’s camera, have never worn off.
Most recently, I’ve looked to my mom’s prints, drawings and paintings as a guide for my photography. She made most of her art in the 1960s and ’70s before she became a parent. Her works on paper as well as her point-and-shoot snapshots from the 1980s are proof of her existence, a map of the things I don’t know about her. A handful of her works seem almost like premonitions of the day she died, such as “The Big Drop,” which she drew when she was 9. “FIRE, 1965,” a watercolor by my mom, is paired with my photograph of the tarmac in Iowa depicting a stretch of highway several miles south of the crash site at Sioux Gateway Airport.
It would be fair to compare my cumulative understanding of grief and fatherhood, which I’ve acquired intuitively, incrementally and in fragments, to a carefully constructed sequence of images. Visual shards, for me, hint at more than an artist’s intent by offering the viewer a basis for introspection and extrapolation. After all, we all cling to fragments from our pasts. It’s a challenge, but for me it’s also valuable, to maintain presence of mind and procure the spaciousness to dream up my own interior landscapes of wonder, loss and healing. It’s through these embodied places, both in the world and within me, that I’ve managed to maintain an affection for life and hope for the future.
Six years ago, when I first considered parenthood and thought about the ramifications of starting a family of my own, I realized I had to reckon with the tumult of my family’s past. Now that I’m a father to two children, I’m doing everything I can to adapt and accept the varied and unavoidable demands of grief on my nervous system. Part of my daily practice is to let each of these precarious feelings land inside me, to be present with them and approach them with curiosity. I used to instinctively hide or flee such pains and sorrows. These days, however, I’m learning to live with them.