January 28, 1986

My younger brother Eric's early obsession with space and space flight is legendary in our family. Every time we went to the library, he would check out books on the solar system or astronauts or space ships, and he could quote statistics about Saturn and Jupiter and Pluto off the top of his head. He learned about what it took to prepare to go up in space, and got Space Camp brochures in the mail. My mom didn't even need to ask him what he wanted to dress up as for Halloween.

All little boys go through phases, but this was a particularly intense phase, and I can remember it well. I pored through those same Space Camp brochures, and Eric and I would have very serious discussions about which Space Camp program was right for us. We never made it, though, and it wasn't until this past summer that I found myself in Huntsville, AL, the home of Space Camp and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Along with my travel companions, I got to sit in a space capsule, tour a scale model of a space station, discover a hidden roller coaster on a virtual Mars, and make myself dizzy in an anti-gravity spinner. I even picked up a brochure about Space Camp for adults who never got to live our childhood dreams.

But it was not my own dream that I was living that day. In fact, as fun as Space Camp sounded to my childhood self, I had major reservations about the possibility of my brother actually going into orbit. At a time when my whole family was sure that Eric would grow up to be an astronaut, I secretly prayed that he would change his mind. I did not want my brother to die.

25 years ago today my brother was not quite 4 years old. He had not yet begun to dream of space travel, and he was too young for his future dreams to be impacted by what took place. But 25 years ago I was almost 6 years old. I was old enough to understand, at least a little, that a woman was about to make history as the first teacher to go into space, and young enough that the image on the news when I came home from school, of the Challenger rising majestically in the air and suddenly bursting into smoke and flame and debris and nothing, of the sudden and unexpected end to the lives and dreams of Christa McAuliffe and six other astronauts, will never leave my memory.

This was my earliest encounter with a tragedy that I could understand, and even though I knew none of those people, and even though as an adult I have encountered death and sorrow in the news hundreds of times over, I still found myself beginning to cry uncontrollably today as I listened to an NPR story about the launch, and my tears started flowing again as I began to write this blog post. The emotions I experience in connection with the Challenger explosion are akin to the emotions I experience with the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11, in spite of the great difference in the magnitudes of the events. If you comb the web for news on the 25th anniversary of the Challenger explosion you will find that, other than relatives, the voices remembering the tragedy are those of teachers and of children. I feel the loss and sadness and shock even today because I was part of the generation that felt the loss and sadness and shock most deeply at the time.

And so today I want to remember that date 25 years ago for the sake of those who died, and for their families and their loved ones. But I also want to remember it for all of us who, fortunate enough to have had loving, secure, and sheltered childhoods, had our first brush with mortality that day, and learned to grieve for people we had never known.