Remembering Pan Am Flight 103 and my loss

It was December 21, 1988. School was out for winter break and my friend and I were planning to drive from Port Jervis to Middletown, New York to do some last-minute Christmas shopping and to visit, El Banditos’, a Mexican restaurant that we recently discovered.

The mood in her house was somber when I arrived to pick her up and as we walked out the door she said, “My mother thinks that Theo may have been on that plane that crashed in Scotland.”

I couldn’t fathom it. The thought of someone who we went to high school with dying that way was incomprehensible. Things like this don’t happen to people who live in sleepy little towns like this one.

We made our snowy twenty-mile trek and did our best to not let the possibly ruin our night. There weren’t any cell phones in eighty-eight so we wouldn’t get an update until we got back home. Still, each time the thought crossed my mind I pushed it away thinking, no, not Theo. It just can’t be.

We returned home late that night and as I dropped my friend off her mother confirmed it. Theodora Cohen, Syracuse University student and Port Jervis resident was one of the victims of the bombing of Pan…