A Search for Answers

We were strangers sharing sadness together.

I’d called Karen Baria of Costa Mesa by mistake. I was trying to track down any Barias who might have known a victim of that name on EgyptAir Flight 990, which crashed off Nantucket Island in Massachusetts early Sunday, killing all 217 aboard.

Ten were from Orange County.

“When have we ever seen such a week for tragedy?” Karen Baria wondered aloud. “It’s so very sad.”

Neither of us knew any of those killed, but she and I spent several moments sharing a grief we felt.

When you’ve worked for newspapers for 30 years, you do your best to be sensitive to people’s losses, you report the news of a tragedy, but then you move on, often to the next tragedy. But talking with Karen Baria, who works for the Costa Mesa Police Department, I knew this time was different. And after our conversation, I was left to try to pinpoint why.

Maybe because the victims had so much in common.

All 10--three couples and four women traveling together--had raised their families, lived in good homes, led successful lives. The trip for all was a long-planned, highly anticipated adventure.

Virginia and Effat Mansour of Irvine were en route to Cairo, then elsewhere in Africa.

Two Dana Point couples, Barbara and Art Peever and Dotti and Rick Foth, had been best friends for 40 years.

The four women together--Judy Bowman and Sheila Jaffee of Huntington Beach, Tobey Seidman of Irvine and Beverly Grant of Santa Ana--had been planning their trip to Egypt and Israel for a year.

All 10 were in their late 50s or older. It was as if this trip was a reward to themselves for their hard work.

Maybe it was the card game.

For years, the four women traveling together had played bridge every Thursday night.

It was their bridge game that leaped out at me when I first heard the news about this tragedy.

I’ve been playing in the same card group for 20 years. I know how such a standard ritual can enrich its players’ lives and cement friendships. The game becomes a friend you can rely on, because you know that for one evening, the travails of the week can be set aside and you can indulge yourself in your love for one another.

That these bridge partners would want to explore the world together made such perfect sense.

Maybe it was the communal sense of loss.

In urban settings like ours, where the lines between cities are so blurred, the county becomes the sense of home. You may live in the Chicago area, or suburban Boston. But here we are Orange County.

So Many Lives Lost at Once

And Orange County just doesn’t see tragedies of this magnitude. The last time we had anything close was seven years ago, when eight people were killed in a traffic collision involving a church van in downtown Santa Ana.

Our greatest air disaster was in 1965, when 84 were killed aboard an Air Force jet when it crashed into Loma Ridge. The plane, carrying 70 Marines, was en route to the Far East from El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. But most of us weren’t around then. Nothing since has had the impact of the EgyptAir crash.

This week, we lost 10 people who were all in one way or another community activists. They sat on civic boards and did volunteer work and chaired fund-raisers. They were people who loved their county and cherished their good fortune in living here.

They left behind not just their children and grandchildren, but hundreds whose lives they had touched.

Maybe it was the timing.

The tragedies had begun just a week before, with the death of golfer Payne Stewart, on that horrific private jet flight from Florida to Texas, where the unmanned plane crashed in a South Dakota field.

After Stewart, tragic deaths from the front pages continued to bombard our senses. There was the passing of football’s Walter Payton, just 45, and the fatal crash of race car driver Greg Moore, 24, at the California Speedway. ESPN was praised for not constantly repeating the tape of Moore’s race car crashing into the wall at high speed and breaking into splinters. But you only had to see it once to know it was a sight that would live with you forever.

A Tough Time for Fans of Golf

Stewart’s loss hit me hardest.

If you’re a golfer--and thousands of us in this county are--you loved U.S. Open champion Payne Stewart and his beautiful, effortless swing.

Many of us had barely recovered from the televised two-hour memorial service for Payne Stewart when word came about the EgyptAir crash.

And yet another air tragedy marred the week. Three days before Halloween, two pilots from the Navy’s Blue Angels air team were killed when their jet went down in a practice run. The Blue Angels have a huge following here, from those who loved their performances at the annual air show at El Toro. The two pilots were killed in Georgia, but in a week when we’re overwhelmed with victims, their deaths seemed close to home for me.

Maybe it was because we could see ourselves there.

Next spring, my wife and I will send our son on a trip to Europe, sponsored by his high school. I can’t imagine we can hug him goodbye at LAX without our minds racing back to the thoughts of EgyptAir 990. The other parents for that trip must surely feel the same.

Maybe because of the cruelty of these deaths.

We were stunned by the aviation experts’ words, that EgyptAir 990 plunged straight down toward the ocean, nose first, for a minimum of 30 seconds. My columnist colleague, Ann Conway, sat in her car in traffic and timed just how long 30 seconds is. Forever, if you’re on that plane.

Payne Stewart, we are told, died in just seconds when his plane lost oxygen. The EgyptAir passengers did not escape horror so easily.

We search for answers when there are no answers. Maybe Karen Baria’s is as good as any we’ll hear:

“The Man upstairs just had a place for these people to be. But it was too soon. Too soon.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling (714) 564-1049 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Memorial Services

* Judith Bowman: Services will be at 11 a.m. today at First Christian Church, 1207 Main St., Huntington Beach.

* Rick and Dotti Foth: A “life celebration” will be held Nov. 13 at 10 a.m. at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Laguna Niguel Stake Center, 22851 Aliso Creek Road, Aliso Viejo.

* Beverly Grant: Memorial services are tentatively planned for 1:30 p.m. Sunday at Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent c/o Beverly Grant to either St. Joseph Hospital at 1100 W. Stewart Drive, Orange 92868 or to Heritage Point at 27356 Bellogente, Mission Viejo 92691.

* Sheila R. Jaffee: Memorial services were held Wednesday at Temple Beth David in Westminster. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be sent to the Sheila R. Jaffee Fund, c/o Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, 2950 31st St., Suite 125, Santa Monica 90405 or to the United Cerebal Palsy Assn. of Orange County, 3010 W. Harvard St., Santa Ana 92704.

* Effat and Virginia Mansour: Services pending.

* Arthur and Barbara Peever: Information not available.

* Tobey Seidman: Services pending.