Two Parents Meet Amid the Weary Grief of Flight 800’s Loss

When he got home from New York, Joe Lychner went into Shannon’s room first. He saw the little wooden car he had helped his 10-year-old daughter carve and paint sitting on a shelf. Then he went into 8-year-old Katie’s room and sifted through her stuffed animals, remembering when she got them. When he went into the room he had shared with his wife, he saw Pam’s perfume and makeup. He couldn’t sit on the bed, as he had done in his daughters’ rooms. He went into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub.

Carol Ziemkiewicz hung her daughter’s pictures back on the walls of her old room and replaced her knickknacks on the shelves. She put all of Jill’s clothes back in the closet, except for a pair of shorts and a denim shirt. She couldn’t wash them. They were the last clothes she saw her 23-year-old daughter wearing.

Lychner had been away from his Houston home nearly a month. Ziemkiewicz had hardly left her house, set back from a quiet tree-lined street in Rutherford, N.J.

Last Sunday, they hugged. Lyncher had flown back to New York to attend a memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the victims of TWA Flight 800, a month after the plane exploded. Ziemkiewicz was there too. It was the first time they had seen each other in person. She had written him because she saw him representing the victims’ families on TV. He had responded to her letter with a phone call.

The Aug. 17 crash took the lives of 230 people. The shock, sorrow and anger of their families and friends captured world attention. Everyone saw their tears. Now everyone has moved on. But the families’ grief goes on. As anyone who has lost someone very close knows, getting through the day now is tougher than ever.

Lychner wakes up every morning with the feeling that somebody has just kicked him in the stomach. Ziemkiewicz’s heart races. By the end of the day, her body aches. They struggle for control over a situation that is completely out of their control.

As the federal investigators continue their frustrating search for clues to the cause of the crash, Lychner and Ziemkiewicz have come to symbolize the agony of the other open question: How will the families and friends of the victims move on?

Lychner, 38, became a public figure. Ziemkiewicz, so private that she declines to reveal her age, retreated to her home. The crash of Flight 800 changed both of them forever.

It began with a phone call.

Lychner had been alone at home, speaking to a business associate, when Pam’s mother clicked in on call-waiting and told him that TWA Flight 800 went down.

Despair and fear wrapped around him like a thick blanket.

He turned on CNN and saw pictures of fire in the water. Lychner said he knew instantly that his wife and two daughters were dead.

He ran to the house next door and saw panic on his neighbor’s face. His neighbor knew too. They ran back to Lychner’s house, which soon filled with friends. All the TVs in the house were on.

He called to make flight arrangements to New York. TWA representatives refused to give him a plane ticket until they verified his family had been on the plane. “If my wife didn’t make the flight,” he protested, “she would have called me.” But it did no good.

So he bought a ticket himself and flew out the next morning.

On the flight, Lychner sought information. He made calls. “I had a desire just to dial my home number.” He met a commercial pilot who was flying as a passenger. Lychner asked if his wife and daughter could have felt any pain or fear.

The pilot was blunt. “It depends on where they were sitting,” he told Lychner. “And what the cause was. If they survived the initial concussion, they would breathe and free fall.”

The descent would last one minute, the pilot said, and they would hit the water as if it were concrete.

Ziemkiewicz didn’t want to know anything so graphic.

“What’s the point?” she said. “No matter what they tell me, it’s not going to change my life.”

She didn’t go to the Ramada Inn in Queens, where Red Cross counselors and TWA representatives consoled the families and friends of the victims. She felt more comfortable in her house. Relatives and friends brought her food and flowers.

Soon reporters swirled about her house. Her family and friends told them to leave. But Ziemkiewicz said to stay. “I want them to know that Jill was somebody special.”

She invited the reporters in.

“I want them to know that they [whoever is responsible for the crash] not only killed those people, but they killed me.”

Three days after the crash, two TWA representatives came to her house and said that searchers had recovered her daughter’s body.

She arranged a funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Cardinal John J. O’Connor said Mass. “Baby,” she said to her daughter, “this is the best that I can do.”

Lychner hitched a ride on a television news helicopter out to the crash site. From a passenger seat, he looked down at a patch of the Atlantic Ocean that he believed still held his two daughters. He had a white closed rose for each of them. He also had a red rose, in full bloom, for his wife. Searchers had told him that her body had been recovered two days before. He dropped the roses onto the water.

He wanted to be near his loved ones. He wanted to understand what had happened to them. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to really say goodbye until he had all three of their bodies.

He stayed at the Ramada Inn for three weeks, waiting. And with each passing day, the knot in his stomach grew tighter. He found himself in a miasma of misinformation. Searchers said they only had Pam, but later he found out they also had Katie in the first group of bodies. When New York Gov. George Pataki said that about a hundred bodies had been recovered, federal investigators corrected him.

Lychner grew frustrated. Like many of the residents at the Ramada Inn, he complained to reporters. He took another helicopter ride to inspect the crash site. He was disappointed with the number of searchers.

“I expected to see a tent city out on the water,” he said.

President Clinton announced that he would pay a visit. The night before Clinton arrived, Lychner organized the Ramada Inn residents and compiled a list of demands.

Eventually they found Shannon. By then, Lychner was in a daze. At one point, he woke up and found himself sitting up in bed, with the telephone to his ear. “It was like I was reliving that first night on the phone, trying to get ahold of somebody.”

Ziemkiewicz feels that the authorities will never figure out what happened to TWA Flight 800. Lychner believes that they have known for some time. When the information is released he plans to help in the process of bringing whoever did this to justice.

His boss at TransGas, a computer software company in Houston, says that Lychner is an inspiration. “The way that he has carried himself through this process is amazing,” Cleve Hogarth says. “It shows strength of character.”

Jill’s close friend, Suzanne Banagan, wonders if Jill’s mother will ever be at peace again. “Jill was her whole life,” Banagan says, “and if someone takes away your whole life, I don’t think you ever bring closure to that.”

Carol Ziemkiewicz does little things now. She washes clothes and opens mail. She keeps baskets of letters from people who knew Jill. She separates the letters into categories. She carries some of them with her. One moment she feels fine, the next she is in tears.

Joe Lychner doesn’t know if he will return to his job in software sales. Earning and saving money is not important to him anymore.

“Your entire life centers around your family,” he says. “All of a sudden, in just a second, all you said and did for the past 12 years will only for the rest of your life give you pain.”

Both of them keep busy. Both do it for the same reason.

“Because if you stop,” Lychner says, “you die.”