Family Members Grieve at Sea’s Edge

Grieving family members looked to the sea Monday for a measure of comfort that has eluded them since 230 people perished last week in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

Under somber, gray skies, nearly 1,000 people--brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--gathered for a memorial service on an oceanfront bluff at Smith Point Park, a place nearest the crash site off the southern shore of Long Island.

Disembarking from a caravan of buses that brought them here from the Ramada Inn at John F. Kennedy International Airport, they filed between two long, winding rows of uniformed police and rescue workers.

On the beach, they sat in white folding chairs facing the now-calm ocean where their relatives died. Some clutched roses in memory of the victims.

They listened as the New York Boys Choir sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” The song includes the line, “I can fly higher than an eagle.”

A minister, a rabbi and a priest offered prayers in English, Hebrew and French. It was a struggle for speakers to find words to ease the pain.

“There are no right answers when someone you love is gone,” said New York Gov. George Pataki, who arranged the service as a memorial to those who died Wednesday when Flight 800 exploded and crashed shortly after taking off from Kennedy Airport for Paris.

“Today, there is an emptiness in all our hearts. The world has lost 230 very special people,” Pataki said.

Like other speakers, he wore a white ribbon.

“We grieve for the innocents lost,” said Gov. Thomas J. Ridge of Pennsylvania, where the small town of Montoursville lost 16 members of its high school French club and five adult chaperones.

As the close of the nearly hourlong service, the mourners rose to the sound of sorrowful laments from a bagpipe band. The family members walked slowly to the water’s edge. Many stood silently, holding and stroking each other.

Some, trouser legs rolled up and skirts lifted, waded knee-high into the surf, tossing roses into the waves. Several left roses stuck in the sand, silent sentinels to grief.

While the families looked on, the crew of a lifeguard boat belonging to the Suffolk County Park Service loaded several large bouquets of white roses and carnations, then rowed out to a waiting Coast Guard boat. The Coast Guard then transported the flower arrangements to the approximate site of the crash, where they were tossed into the sea.

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As the families, who were off-limits to reporters, headed back to their hotel in a procession of buses accompanied by scores of police cars, ambulances and motorcycles, nearby residents lined the main road in tribute. Signs were displayed with such messages as “Our Prayers are with You” and “Love to You from Long Island.”

“My heart goes out to the families that have lost their loved ones and I hope to God they find their bodies,” said Lynn Drysdale of Shirley, N.Y., who stood with her dog in the center median watching the families go by.

“There were too many stories of people on that plane who had things to offer to the world,” said Humphrey Sutherland, a graphic designer who noted that planes from Kennedy Airport fly so close to his house he can read the airlines’ names on the tail. “It’s a devastating thing.”

Long after the service had ended, Stella Gaines sobbed on the shore with a friend. “I feel a tiny bit of what they’re feeling,” she said. “Out there, somewhere, are lost lives.”