Parents of TWA Flight 800 Crash Victim Get 2nd Chance at Parenthood

Kelsey Rogers reached impatiently beyond the Cookie Monster mobile in her playpen, her chubby fingers trying to grab the rays of sunlight streaming through the family’s living-room window.

On this bright July morning, against the backdrop of a periwinkle sky, the 4-month-old was growing increasingly fussy. But then her father, Will, picked her up, kissed the tuft of red hair on the top of her head, and she stopped crying. In an instant, all seemed right with with the world--for her parents too.

“Some people go their entire lives without someone to love,” said Rogers, whose daughter Kimberly, along with 229 others, died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 two years ago. “We’ve gotten two chances.”

In a period that has slowly evolved from one of melancholy to one of small miracles, Will and Kathy Rogers, both 45, had Kelsey in March, after three in vitro fertilization attempts and against almost 4-to-1 odds. The pregnancy came even as they were still reeling from losing Kim, one of 16 Montoursville high school students and five chaperons en route to Paris for a French Club trip when the plane exploded off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., on July 17, 1996.

The crash reverberated profoundly through this quiet Pennsylvania community, and the couple’s sense of loss is still deep. But because of the new baby, they’ve managed to have their moments of joy as well.

“There was a point where I just wanted to walk off the face of the Earth after the crash happened,” said Kathy Rogers, waving a pink gingham rag doll named Lolly in front of Kelsey. “Now, there’s a reason to get up in the morning.”

The last several months have mostly been about change for the couple. They moved from the home that had become sort of an unintended shrine to their first daughter, with Kimberly’s Barbie dolls and pictures of her everywhere. They now live in a bright new home in Fairfield, a few miles from Montoursville, but they still keep one smiling picture of Kimberly on their fireplace mantle and her junior-prom picture on a table nearby.

“We were in such an awful state after her death, and now we have the love to give again,” Will Rogers said. “We discovered that you can give your love in equal doses.”

Last year, because of her age and her husband’s progressive diabetes, fertility doctors gave Rogers a 25% chance of conceiving. That didn’t deter them.

“We couldn’t imagine living the rest of our lives without children,” Will Rogers said. So one cold spring morning in 1997, he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you think it’s time?” She said yes.

For parents like the Rogerses who have lost their children through tragic circumstances and for many other parents who aren’t able to conceive naturally, in vitro fertilization has increasingly become another option. While about 45,000 babies have been born since the late 1980s with the method, according to the Washington, D.C.-based American Society for Reproductive Medicine, fertility experts say about 20% of their clients are people looking for a second chance at parenthood after a child’s death.

For example, Edye Smith Stowe used the method after her two toddler sons were killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to conceive another child last year. And a few other TWA families who lost children in the crash are quietly trying the method.

The parents of these “miracle babies” say having another child is by no means an attempt to forget or replace the children they lost. It is simply a way to go on. “We’re celebrating Kim’s life by finding the strength to go on with ours. We know she would have wanted this,” Will Rogers said.

Two to three times a week, the Rogerses drove three hours to a hospital in Philadelphia to begin the process. The treatment involves removing a woman’s egg from her ovary and fertilizing it in a laboratory dish with her partner’s sperm. The fertilized egg, or eggs, are then implanted in the woman’s uterus. The process is expensive--about $8,000 an attempt--and isn’t always successful.

Will, a former electrician, and Kathy, a pharmacist for a drugstore, wondered how they would pay for the treatments, which would ultimately cost them $38,000. But they received an unexpected $50,000 life insurance policy payout from the tour company that arranged the Montoursville High School trip.

“In a sense, it was Kimberly’s last gift to us. It was her legacy, and we thought that was an appropriate way to use the money,” he said.

Kathy Rogers was pregnant through the five days of TWA hearings in Baltimore last December, telling few about it because it was such a risky pregnancy. She also said she didn’t want to hurt any of the other families by somehow flaunting the good news while they were still in the depths of their own sorrow.

At the hearings, she listened to the details of Kimberly’s death, and the hours of technical details about how the plane broke apart.

On March 7, after five hours of labor, she gave birth to a healthy 6-pound, 1-ounce, girl. Her hair is red like her father’s and her eyes are bright blue. Kelsey has her sister’s middle name, Marie, and the TWA families in Montoursville gave the family a baby shower in honor of the event.

Will Rogers used to get up at 5 a.m. to log onto the Internet to get any information he could glean from different aviation and conspiracy Web sites. Now he gets up that early to give his daughter her morning bottle.

He stays home to rear the baby, but he remains active in lobbying to change the Death on the High Seas Act, a law that limits liability of air carriers when crashes occur over international waters.

Kathy has gone back to work full time. They’re typical parents these days, complete with a minivan, car seat, baby swing and all the other trappings of parenthood.

And like most mothers and fathers, they’re just trying to rear their daughter right. But they know that even as they try to protect her from the evils of the world, all they can do is their best.

“I guess what amazes me is that from this tragedy sprang such innocence. . . . But Kelsey won’t be raised in Kim’s shadow,” Kathy Rogers said, though she acknowledges that the baby wouldn’t be here if not for the crash of Flight 800.

Her husband agrees. “She’ll need to know someday she had an older sister who was a good and kind person,” he added. “And someday, when the time is right, we’ll tell her that story.”