Thursday, February 06, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Backstory: Waking up and seeing the light

By Michael Green

It was a wake-up call.

For some reason, a ringing phone rarely awakens you with good news. Little more than 500 days before, it brought news of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

This time, it was a friend and colleague of my wife from UNLV's hotel college. The space shuttle Columbia had disintegrated as it crossed Texas en route to its landing strip in Florida. The captain was William McCool.

His mother, Audrey, is a professor and assistant dean at the hotel college, a small, quiet woman with a wry smile and a knowing face. His father, Barry, teaches for the same school, once took my Nevada history class and is working on his doctorate in education, a hale, hearty man with a big voice, a big laugh and the erect gait of the military man he was.

When Audrey spoke to the media, she was strong. She was stoic about what happened to her son but not about her son. No one except the families of the seven astronauts can know what is going through their minds. Nor can it be possible to prepare for what happened, although the families have to prepare for the unthinkable.

That is what makes comparisons between the tragedy of Saturday morning and the tragedy of Sept. 11 useless. Yes, in both cases innocent people died in horrible ways. Yes, both events made us all stop and think, and may have promoted the kind of unity that only the greatest happiness and greatest sadness can create.

But those who died on Sept. 11 were victims in a way that the seven astronauts were not. One group was the victim of a terrorist attack. Sadly, it was hard not to think first that the shuttle had been the target of another attack, even if that proved to be impossible.

Captain McCool and his mates are being called heroes. So they are, although we have been known to use the word too casually. Heroism takes many shapes and forms, but it involves accepting or facing a challenge. The astronauts accepted one of the greatest of all challenges--a challenge that too many of us had taken for granted.

The seven who died were victims of bad luck, possibly the overconfidence of others. We cannot know until the studies are complete, and may not know then. Whatever we learn will be used, as the seven surely would hope, not to destroy the space program but to improve it.

That, in a sense, is the only good that may be found--that we have to find--in the wake-up call these events have given us. As his mother made clear, Willie McCool chose to be a pilot and an astronaut, and he was doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

Many of us have the chance to pursue our dreams. Some are even fortunate enough to realize those dreams. But how many do what they should do instead of what they want to do, and do it by half-measures? The McCools have pursued careers in the military and education, and approached both with zest. To see their son reveling in being in outer space, in doing backflips in zero gravity, was to feel his joy and wonder. Now we feel their sorrow.

All of us lose loved ones, sometimes as suddenly and incomprehensibly as Audrey and Barry McCool lost their son. Rarely is the loss so public, where a nation mourns with them. That may help them through the difficulties of the present, but it will be just as important, if not more so, to help them through the difficulties of the future.

And I think of two men. One, who is easy to think of any time we seek solace and understanding, is Abraham Lincoln, who said at Gettysburg that "from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion." Lincoln was talking about a different cause than the one in which the astronauts died, but their cause, too, was different than you may think. It was to go beyond the stars, but it also was to challenge life with gusto and grace.

The other man, who would deny having the Lincolnesque qualities he has, is a friend, Ralph Denton. He and his wife, Sara, lost a child who never had the chance to pursue his dreams as Willie McCool pursued his. After their boy died, Ralph and Sara were, he said, "looking across the valley at the mountains, and there was a little star that we had never particularly noticed before."

When Captain McCool spoke to NPR on Friday, he offered greetings from "the dark side of the earth." On Saturday morning, we saw a flash of light that darkened our day. He and the others are lights that will always shine above us.