What Happened?

Well, tomorrow is my birthday, and I spent the day today napping and thinking. These milestones are extremely difficult and each one sets me back just a bit in my quest for peace of mind.

Birthdays with George were pretty predictable. He was nice to me. Sounds silly, but I’ve been with people who used birthdays and anniversaries to complain about the other person. Every birthday morning I could expect to find balloons, roses and a card at the kitchen table. George would stop at the grocery on the way home and get me red roses and the biggest balloon he could find. He spent a great deal of time picking out cards. I am one to buy a funny card and then write something personal on the bottom. George had a hard time with writing the personal stuff, but he wanted to get his message across, so he would haunt the card aisles until he found one he thought said it all, and then sign it, always, “Your Husband.”

He liked a being a husband, which I found charming since he avoided it for so long. He always wore his wedding ring, and he liked to tell people about Lily and me. Our pictures were proudly on display in his wallet.

He was a bachelor for 46 years, but once he became a husband he went after it full bore. When talking about our connection, we’d agree it was intense and unique in our lives. Once I said, “Maybe we just like making a lot of it. Lots of people have a strong connection.” That pissed George off. “We are one of the lucky couples. We have a special connection. Don’t discount it! You should tell everyone.” After that, I did.

George and I were constantly in it, at it, on it. We fought, we discussed, we debated. We disagreed and we agreed with glee. Every night when he came home he’d “accidentally” wake me up and launch in to gossip from work, complaints, stories and anecdotes. We’d talk about the “news” he’d learned from the incessantly running FOX news channel they ran day and night at Quest. When it came to that stuff, we pretty much agreed on everything. Then we’d talk about Lily, with me filling him in on her comments and antics since he left for work earlier that day.

I usually ran out of gas after a couple of hours and laid down on the couch while he watched his beloved westerns, or the history channel. Most days I had just fallen asleep moments before it was time to get Lily ready for school. So I’d get up and try to tame the whirlwind and drive her to school and get home in time to hit the sack with George.

It was an odd way of life, and one that neither of us really liked, but we made the most of it. It was a job, and I think despite the strange schedule our attachment was deepening and growing constantly. The future felt boundless and bright, and we had so many plans and dreams to explore together.

So it was an awful, wrenching shock when he got in the accident. I had thought many times about the real possibility of an accident. Quest had had wrecks before, even deaths, and they fly with an aging fleet and push their pilots hard… way too hard. They had gotten into a habit of adding contract pilots and George was flying with a contract pilot the night of the accident. George was in the right seat, while the other guy had the controls. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. George had over 15000 hours in the air. The contractor had 1500. I keep going over and over that information in my head. We won’t know for a while what the FAA and the NTSB think about the accident itself (not until September at least,) but I will be very relieved to see how they think things went down. George had a completely clean safety record, and was absolutely by the book when flying. Yet he got into this accident on a beautiful day, in a plane that has been deemed mechanically sound. Something odd happened, and it haunts me.

I want to know what killed my husband. I’d think anyone would. It bothers me that no one seems to think its important to tell me exactly what happened.

I get exhausted thinking about all of this. The company has paid me what we were legally owed and I hear nothing from them now that most of our legal obligations have been met (the odd business-related email.) I never received any flowers, or a card from the company itself, though some individuals who work there were very, very kind. I got an informal email from a vice president. After that, it was back to business as usual.

From what I can see nothing much has changed over there. Same planes, same pilots, same schedules, same management. My husband is dead, but they are all getting up and going to work each day, getting a paycheck, living their lives. It seems impossible that nothing has changed. It seems impossible too that after my husband worked there 15 years they seem to feel no obligation to even pretend to care about what has happened to us. We struggle along, they continue to roll along, looking for more profit, more glory. I know this happens everywhere, all the time, but it is very difficult to actually live through.

So tomorrow I’ll be 52, and I guess I know more now than I thought I would have six months ago. I know that if you have a happy marriage, you should cherish it daily and do everything you can to make you partner know how much you care for them. I know families should set aside time to be together no matter how hard it is to work it out. I know that large companies, no matter how many newsletters they send out and mission statements they tout, seek profit growth at any price. And the individuals who run  the companies care far more that they keep their own jobs than about anyone’s safety or quality of life. And this goes all the way up to the CEO.  Yes, these people make obscene amounts of money. And no, they don’t share it with you if your husband dies. They still get on their private jet with the leather seats and fly around making the big decisions and the big bucks. If something goes wrong while you’re working for them, you get what you signed up for when you selected your benefits, and that’s it. So choose your benefits well.

George was a great husband and a wonderful father. He was a by-the-book pilot, a great employee who behaved responsibility and avoided being involved with the many, many disgruntled employees at Quest and went about his business professionally and pleasantly. He was obsessive about getting enough sleep, and completed all of his training on time. He exercised regularly so that he was in shape for his demanding job, where he might take off and land 14 times in one night.

So now, when I go through in my mind all of the things that led up to George’s accident and subsequent death, I feel hollow and cheated. He was a good man and a wonderful employee, and yet he died in an accident that has yet to be explained to his co-workers or family. Six months later we are haunted, full of questions and struggling with depression and loss. It seems monumentally unfair, but I fear it is business as usual in fortune 500 land.The big shots get the reports and the rest of us are left to imagine what’s in them. I suppose they feel better controlling and spinning the information to their satisfaction. And we get no satisfaction whatsoever.

Lily asks all the time what went wrong, and I’m hard pressed to give her an answer I can live with. I look forward to the final accident report. I try to accept that I may never really know. And I spend a lot of time making an effort to honor George. To think of him every day. To hold him in my heart. And to continue to live a good life for Lily and Sara, and my family and his mom.

But its hard, when so much has been taken, and so little has been explained.

And it is painful, knowing that the last six months could have been so much more bearable had someone been humane enough to share information with me that could soothe my daughter’s fears, calm my husband’s mother’s horror, and set to rest my own obsessive concerns.

Six months and counting, while we wait miserably for someone to step forward with the truth.

Related posts:

1. Talked to an Angel
2. Other Pilot Visits the Crash Site
3. The Worst/Best Day of Our Lives
4. Down and Dirty
5. Rage Wave

Tagged as: anger, burned in crash, crying, george maddox, grief, Killed, lily maddox, lisa maddox, marriage, Plane Crash, Quest Diagnostics, shirley maddox, single parent, small plane, teterboro airport, widow