Lorraine Hanlon Comanor
“We in some measure shape the events that befall us just as surely as we are shaped by them.” —Mark Slouka, Arrow and Wound
I’m sitting in a theater—when or where I’m unsure—watching Nicholas and Alexandra, a film I thought to be in black and white, but since confirmed was in color. My fingers dig into the seat as the Romanov family files into a basement room to await transport from Yekaterinburg to their next destination. They settle into the straight-backed chairs in the otherwise empty room, and then sit still, the regulator wall clock marking time like a metronome. The minutes extend, the ticking becomes louder, the dreaded climax approaching. At the movie’s end, it’s not so much the family’s execution as the ticking clock that inexplicably stays with me.
It’s years before I connect that clock to a school visit decades in the past. Just before my fifteenth birthday, Olympic figure skating champion Tenley Albright told my mother that she’d found Boston’s Winsor School, which I was currently attending, too inflexible for her own schedule, and so had transferred to Manter Hall, a tutorial center in Cambridge. As I had just won the national junior championships, Mother, anticipating my further success and associated school difficulties, scheduled an interview there.
Meeting us in a classroom, Manter Hall’s head explained, “We have no other juniors. We give you your work, and you turn it in.” I wouldn’t recognize the man if I saw him today, but what remains vivid are his flat words and bleak classroom, populated only with a blank chalkboard, a handful of desks, and a regulator wall clock almost identical to the one from Nicholas and Alexandra.
Emotional arousal increases our ability to remember events just before and after a critical one. The Manter Hall visit came a couple of weeks before the 1961 crash of Sabena Flight 548 carrying the U.S. figure skating team to the world championships in Czechoslovakia. As a world team alternate scheduled for the subsequent exhibition tour, I’d had a ticket on the flight that departed Idlewild on Valentine’s Eve, with a planned stopover in Brussels en route to Prague. But the day before departure, there was a crisis. My school principal, stating I’d already taken a week off for competition, issued an ultimatum: go with the team and don’t return to Winsor.
While the time between the Manter Hall interview and the flight is gone, and the months after its crash a blur, some surrounding time periods remain sharp: the afternoon in my room prior to the flight’s departure wrestling with the do-I-stay-or-go decision, the hours following the disaster’s announcement, and, surprisingly, the earlier visit to Manter Hall accompanied by my visceral feeling of not wanting to be there. Only recently, when I’ve thought about my many classrooms—Winsor’s hardly warm and fuzzy—have I wondered, had it not been for the ticking clock like the one in the basement of the Yekaterinburg train station, would I have transferred to bleak Manter Hall and happily boarded Sabena Flight 548?
As the media extensively covered the crash and the decimation of the U.S. team, it’s hardly surprising that I stared repeatedly at the team’s last photo on the airstairs of Sabena’s Boeing 707, the clock starting to tick; that I relived multiple times the twenty-four hours following the disaster: the fiery dream that occurred within the hour, Mother coming screaming into my room, listening to the news on the radio, fragments of the school day, and the trip to the rink. But then things get abstract. Frozen inside, how I felt in the ensuing hours is hard to retrieve, as what we remember and how we feel when we remember are not identical.
Essayist Mark Slouka suggests there is no explanation for a dream that foreshadows an event, but simultaneously maintains that rather than being shaped by an event, our consciousness predates it. In my pre-dawn REM sleep of February 15, 1961, a wavy brown ribbon, which I later came to view as Thornton Wilder’s division between Our Town’s living and dead, separates me from the flames. The dream interrupted by Mother running into my room screaming. I’m baffled by her hysteria until she starts listing the Boston skaters. Recapturing now the moment I heard, “They’re dead, they’re all dead,” followed by, “our flight crashed in Brussels,” and being almost unable to react, the shock so great as to sever me from emotion, as twelve hours before I’d been moaning about the unfairness of the school’s ultimatum that kept me home. At what point, if at all, had I zeroed in on the drama, experienced what Slouka calls “the romance of almost dying”?
I do recall months of anxious white nights reading The Bridge of San Louis Rey, Ethan Frome, and Our Town, strangely aptbooks recently assigned in English class, into the wee hours of the morning. Rereading Wilder, I contemplated whether “we live by plan and die by plan” or “live by accident and die by accident.” Intellectualization of the crash may have kept me from lingering over newspaper images of the fractured plane and Wilder’s philosophical questions—death was supposed to be large—that encouraged bypassing loss to consider its greater meaning. Meaning that was supposed to be converted to wisdom during sleep. Scarce, following the crash.
During those endless nights I replayed fragments, searched for parallels, and formulated unanswerable questions from my trio of books: Why was Wilder’s Brother Juniper burned at the stake for daring to search for a common thread in the tortured lives of the five on the San Louis Rey Bridge? Was there a similar one among the U.S. team members? The skater who occasionally vomited blood over the boards, was she the only stressed one, or were there others? Why did I continually visualize Ethan’s sled catapulting towards the big elm or bright stars, Laurence, our new national champion, and Wilder’s Emily, sitting in their cemeteries? Snaking through my mental space, snippets, subliminal particles that hissed and bit.
Oddly, my first memories were not thoughts of the close call or faces of lost friends, but of tilting bedroom fireplace andirons, a slightly-out-of-focus, snow-covered branch outside my window. Words floated among the mundane images: Mother’s initial nonstop blurt, the radio announcer’s delivery of passenger names, Edi Scholdan’s the biggest shock. Edi, the coach who hadn’t planned to go. Why his last-minute change in the opposite direction of mine? Unanswered questions as I sat warming my hands around the teacup Mother delivered, her firm voice telling me to get dressed. “You stayed home for school, so to school you will go.”
The surreal school day: a silent assistant principal who made no eye contact when I passed her on the staircase. No mention of the top story on the morning news, only the P.E. teacher’s end-of-day acknowledgement: “This must be a difficult day for you.”
Fifty years later a classmate would recall the coatroom that morning: “You were bent over, as if about to vomit.” No memory of the coatroom.
But a clear recollection of riding from school in the backseat of our Plymouth, the world tipping further off its axis as the Fenway came into view and I realized Mother was headed not home, but to the skating club. The see-saw of emotions—from realizing that I was now one of America’s few remaining elite skaters, to learning that Kendall Kelley, the head of the United States Figure Skating Association, was on his way to Brussels to identify the bodies. Arriving at the Club’s vacant parking lot. Pushing open its double red doors to an empty, fog-blanketed rink. Sitting in the first row of the bleachers, pulling on one boot, then the other. Habitually lacing first the left, then the right. Noting the eerie parallelogram of light center-ice and imagining it as the spot saved for Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, only to later view it as the one reserved for Wilder’s stage manager. Getting heady from the funeral parlor scent of the carnation wreath at the ice entrance. Walking a few steps, sitting down again, taking off my skates.
Evenings in my Danish chair, feet propped on a space heater, a blanket on my knees, conjugating French verbs. The comfort of heat, the hypnosis of conjugation. Literature saved for the white nights.
Mother’s anger when she caught me flashlight-reading at 2 a.m.: how could I go to school and train if I spent nights with my face in a book? Not asking what else I should be doing besides considering the fleeting nature of life. In my own version of Groundhog Day,I wasstuck swaying on the suspension bridge, heading towards the big elm, or sitting in the cemetery. Years later, when I came across my dog-eared books, I wondered if I’d used them as a vehicle to shape the disaster, their key events to form my version of Slouka’s “romance of almost dying”. The idea eclipsed, at the time, by my mother’s quiet message: time was marching towards the next competition.
Disciples of New England reserve, my parents kept me from the funerals, offering the excuse that seeing me brought others to tears. Today I wish I would have pushed back more, attended the funerals against their better judgment. The closest I came to a goodbye was the day Mother and I drove to the Kelley’s after Greg and Nathalie’s bodies arrived from Brussels, a day so sharp in memory it could have been yesterday. Quivering in the living room corner, Mrs. Kelley, a statue in black, pearls at her throat, opened her mouth to greet us, but no sound emerged. Hardly able to look at her, I focused on the floral motifs in the Sarouk rug underfoot, avoiding the center of the room where the two caskets stood on folding metal stands. Eventually, I approached them as I might a wild animal, tentatively letting my hand run over the smooth walnut of each, trying not to think about their contents. Only breathing again when back in our car on the way to the rink.
The ensuing weeks are now lost to me, partly because within ten days of Kendall Kelley’s phone call to my mother telling me to prepare to go to Prague, the 1961 world championships were cancelled out of respect for the lost American team. Gradually, skaters returned to the club’s afternoon practice, but so did the crash victims, sitting in the bleachers like Wilder’s dead in their cemetery.In lieu of the spring Ice Chips gala in the Boston Gardens, the Club planned a memorial show. I was to do Shubert’s “Ave Maria” in sleeveless white chiffon. Vague memories of practicing a layback spin with hands lifted in prayer, but none of performing it in the show. Only the rink’s chill.
A physician now, I sometimes find it easier to think about the mechanics of memory formation and retention rather than the memories themselves. I can name the involved structures: amygdala, nucleus accumbens, neocortical areas, and of course, the hippocampus, tightly linked to all of them. It’s that sea-horse-shaped organ that gives us context and ability to travel back in time, supposedly working in tandem with the neighboring amygdala, that lights up in post-traumatic stress-associated emotion. Which explains my ability to remember the tutorial center classroom and the feeling that I didn’t want to be there, but fails when it comes to retrieving what I felt imagining myself in a nosediving plane hurtling towards the earth.
In response to trauma, the amygdala can also trigger numbness or a shut-down response, both a normal part of grief and a protection against overwhelming emotion. While numbness can also be a component of survivor’s guilt, mine would come later when I began to wonder how many of my subsequent opportunities were an indirect result of the disaster. But in its immediate wake, my mind gravitated to the traumatic images.
Not static representations of the past, traumatic memories are capable of eclipsing emotion, and are likely subjected to distortion, especially as we relive the events multiple times, often with countless people, sometimes cementing false renditions. But in the sixties, stoic New Englanders didn’t revisit their traumas with the multitudes; they put one foot in front of the other and kept silent about the unpleasant past; mine shared only decades later with a journalist covering the fortieth anniversary of the crash.
* * *
Ten years or so after the accident, when deciding on a medical specialty, anesthesia had seemed a good choice, offering a chance to retain the intensivist skills developed in neonatology rotations, not to mention the better hours. I spent a quarter of a century shepherding people through their surgical trauma, rendering them oblivious to their surroundings. Silent hours sandwiched between a brief pre-op interview, asking the necessary questions, explaining the procedure and calming jittery nerves, and a post-op visit, determining there were no untoward effects.
It wasn’t until years later that I read Harry Mulisch’s The Assault, a novelabout a boy who witnessed his family’s murder and went on to become an anesthesiologist, and wondered if the field attracted the already numb, if the cryptobiotic state that followed the Sabena disaster had contributed to me ending up in such a specialty. Over time I’d become like one of those microscopic animals that can withstand extreme conditions by entering a frozen or desiccated state. Perhaps I’d had to. Trauma seemed to follow me. Since the crash, I’d experienced an explosion in our endocrinology lab that killed the technician who trained me, a murder of my former intern at Stanford’s department of medicine’s Christmas party, and the relatively sudden cancer deaths of three previously healthy friends in their thirties. Shocked and saddened by each event, I’d nevertheless carried on the next day, making rounds, completing surgical lists, picking up children, preparing dinner, and supervising homework as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Anesthesiologists are at times separated by an imperceptible barrier between life and disaster, and, like Our Town characters, straddle the world of the living and the dead. But unlike Wilder’s dead, who were weaned from the living, I had been gradually weaned from the dead, rescued from cryptobiosis. For years I pushed the crash under the proverbial rug, only confronting it again when interviewed for its fortieth anniversary, writing an article for the fiftieth, and reading an essay at the memorial of the sixtieth. Between the last two events, I’d transitioned from producing scientific articles to crafting personal essays, forcing myself for the first time to examine what I remembered of the disaster.
Two events eventually brought it more sharply into focus: a flight landing close to the Brussels crash site and a walk with a struggling vet returning from twenty years of war in the Middle East. Only then did I begin to explore the lingering emotions of Flight 548’s aftermath, still avoiding much of what I’d felt. Perhaps because I didn’t know. Perhaps because narrating what happened is different from experiencing it. Perhaps because I still relied on the limited tools of the science writer, charged only with delivering a clear explanation of events, and not until recently linking the memories to both emotion and science. But neuroscience, I would learn, is not always able to explain what is retained and what is lost. There’s a mystery to memory, as there is to anesthesia: both involve lost time.
How much time had I lost first going around in circles on the ice, later recording the alphabet of the anesthetic record—x’s, o’s, and check marks—on graph paper? There’s a mind-numbing aspect both to carving endless circles and to ticking off the minutes of others’ lives. Yet I don’t consider the hours spent mastering school figures or the art of anesthesia as wasted. There were lessons learned, experiences gained that ultimately also shaped me.
Cecilia, the coach who oversaw my first circles, taught me at ten to go on “even if the roof was falling down,” as she had done when the bombs rained on London. Best time of her life, driving an ambulance, she’d said; for the first time she’d been able to talk to people. Attending a small private school, I’d had more social interaction than privately-tutored Cecilia, but less than most children. Now, in the brief period before I rendered my patients oblivious, I’d become acquainted with all manner of frightened people—from saints to criminals—folks I would otherwise never have known. Those minimal encounters made up, partially, for the limited social education I’d received as a child on the ice, and most likely helped me thaw from my frozen state.
Still, there’s a difference between time wasted and time lost. Lost time wraps us in a cocoon, protects us from our own thoughts and feelings. If the past is time we do not wish to revisit, and Faulkner is right that it is never over, then lost time is a blessing—albeit, a mixed one that doesn’t permit emotional development, at least not at the moment. Had examining my response to the crash started the thaw, letting me leave behind those frozen years of lost time?
The nagging question was put to the test on January 29, 2025, three weeks shy of the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Brussels crash, when history cruelly repeated itself. Turning on the evening news, I was confronted with a video clip of a plane coming into final at Washington National Airport. About 300 feet short of the runway, its flight path was interrupted by a brilliant flash of light, followed by the plane plummeting into the Potomac. My reflex response: visions of Sabena Flight 548 nosediving into a Belgian chicory field.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when a friend emailed, that I learned the downed plane had been carrying young skaters and coaches. Shock and loss, to be sure, but not of the riptide kind that followed Brussels. I wasn’t a ticketed passenger on the Washington D.C. flight, didn’t know anyone on board. The initial impact of the news was to challenge my silly belief that it was not my karma, or that of current skaters, to die in a plane crash. Despite my awareness that the slim probability of dying in one is independent for each flight, that belief had allowed me to fly with relative equanimity for sixty-four years. I’m embarrassed to say that in my usual detached fashion, I processed this new loss as one to a community.
At the same time, I found myself wondering, in the aftermath of the Brussels crash, what could have softened the clock’s ticking, kept me from my frozen, severed fate? Someone to talk to? From early on I’d internalized Cecilia’s lesson: “You go to the rink to do your work, not to socialize.” Still, in our early skating years, a few of us Boston skaters ran to the nearby race track between sessions, heel-toed it across the top of the fence railing’s wiggly board, wolf downed ice cream cones at Ho Jo’s before the Club’s Friday night supper, giggled at the Berkeley Nationals as we rolled toilet paper down from the hotel window. But as teens, much of the fun stopped, our lives increasingly dedicated to performance, our communication increasingly perfunctory, providing an easy transition to my post-crash cryptobiotic state.
Did it explain why I hadn’t reached out more to those left behind, shared memories, grieved together, eventually relearned, as Wilder’s Emily would say, to enjoy “every, every minute” of even life’s most inconsequential events? To answer that question, I’d have to fess up to my incompletely-resolved numbness. I started searching for the words.
Lorraine Hanlon Comanor is a former U.S. figure skating champion, U.S. team member, and board-certified anesthesiologist. A graduate of Harvard University (BA), Stanford Medical School (M.D.), and Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA), she is a co-holder of a medical patent and author/co-author of 35 medical publications. Her personal essays (2 notables in Best American Essays, 3 nominated for the Pushcart Prize, 1 for Best of the Net) have appeared in the New England Review, Boulevard, New Letters, Little Patuxtent Review, Consequence, Joyland, LitMag, The Rumpus, and Newsweek, among 22 others. Her memoir is in press.