In November, I drove to Zucker Hillside Hospital in Queens, where I was scheduled to meet Astrid López, a Colombian citizen who narrowly survived a plane crash on Long Island in 1990. There I was to interview Ms. López, her older sister, Liliana Donlon, and several others who had provided her care in the 35 years since that devastating accident.
I’ve been a reporter covering the New York City region for years, and I’m used to asking people about difficult, even dark moments of their lives. But this story presented challenges from the very first interview.
I already knew the basics going in: On Jan. 25, 1990, Avianca Flight 52 took off from Bogotá, Colombia, stopped in Medellín, where Ms. López and others boarded, then headed to John F. Kennedy Airport. But bad weather, the need for a series of holding patterns and poor communication between the flight crew and air traffic controllers caused the plane to run out of fuel. It crashed into a wooded hillside in Cove Neck, on Long Island.
Of the 158 people aboard, 73 died.
Ms. López, who was traveling to New York to board a flight bound for Disney World, was 17. Her body was so badly mangled that emergency medical workers believed she was dead. They carried her to a temporary morgue near the crash site, where her moans alerted them that she was, incredibly, alive.
In the years that followed, she would need more than 70 surgeries. It created a pattern that continues to this day: Each surgery is followed by months of pain, and then, when she is healed enough, she undergoes another one.
“I am always in pain,” Ms. López told me during that first interview.
Then she said something I’ve rarely heard anyone admit: Sometimes, she said, she wishes she had died in the crash. The pain, and her fear of it, have prevented her from pursuing her goals, of becoming a lawyer, and a mother.
Cue the tension between Ms. López and her sister, Ms. Donlon. Ms. Donlon has worked for years, from her home on Long Island, to arrange health care for Ms. López, who lives in Colombia. An upbeat and determined person by nature, Ms. Donlon bristled at her sister’s disheartened words.
Her sister needed to stay positive, Ms. Donlon said. She also needed to do more physical therapy, eat healthier food, take all her prescribed medicines and continue to pray.
As the litany of shoulds continued, Ms. López, I noticed, sat up straighter in her wheelchair. She folded her arms across her chest and laughed hard, from her belly.
I asked: Have you two had this argument before?
Both sisters laughed.
“At least once a week,” Ms. Donlon said, still laughing.
Some positive things did result from the accident: Air travel got safer. And the psychiatric care that Ms. López and others received helped to establish art therapy as an effective treatment for child survivors of mass tragedies.
But the dynamic I saw between the sisters made me realize this was not a simple story of triumph over tragedy. And 35 years after the crash, Ms. López’s life remains almost unbearably hard.
Rather than look away from this difficult fact, I had to grapple with dark subjects that most stories about survivors manage to elide: Ms. López’s continued suffering, her anger at how the crash had foreclosed the successful future she’d envisioned, and the clashes between a sister desperate for a normal life and the sister whose life would never be normal again.
Then there was the question of Ms. López’s memory. During our first interview, Ms. López and her sister were adamant: Ms. López had remembered nothing of her life before the accident.
In subsequent phone conversations, however, they discussed Ms. Lopez’s dreams of having children and a career, dreams she said she had held since she was a girl.
I was confused: Did Ms. López remember her childhood or not? Or were her perceived memories shaped by accounts she had heard from friends and family members over the years?
Ms. López’s memory loss made writing and editing this article tricky. How do we describe her return to the crash site, which she had hoped would jar her memory, without oversimplifying the fact that her memory itself remains a mystery?
And when it was time to check to see that every fact in the article was correct, how could I, in good conscience, request a conversation with a woman in so much pain she could barely pick up the phone?
In the end, these questions were answered, in part, thanks to lots of phone calls and email exchanges with Ms. López’s sister and her caregivers. Ms. López’s most recent surgery, a replacement of her left knee, had rendered her barely capable of communicating in Spanish, let alone English. So Ms. Donlon set up a conference call between the three of us, so she could translate for her sister.
Even still, it was not so much what Ms. López said, but her body language in our first conversation back in November — growing stiff, clearing her throat, eyes gleaming with some mixture of humor and rage — which betrayed her pain, her anger and even, as she admitted, her ambivalence about living.
By noticing that, and by slowing the interview down to give her time and space, we managed to help Ms. López gradually feel comfortable enough to put those difficult feelings into words.
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