Found and Lost: A Story From Air France 447

Lost and found is a familiar concept. It’s older than the tale of the prodigal son and simple as the kindergarten lost and found bin. As we journey through life we are all graced by the fleeting joy of finding something truly special just as surely as we are forced to engage with the difficult emotions that accompany loss. But what if the circle of life took a devious diversion from its usual course and we found the thing we had surely lost, only to lose it permanently almost immediately upon rediscovery. This is the story I read today and it reminded me of how hard this life can be.

Copied from The Times Online, June 11th, 2009:

“An Italian woman who arrived late for the Air France plane flight that crashed in the Atlantic last week has been killed in a car accident.

Johanna Ganthaler, a pensioner from Bolzano-Bozen province, had been on holiday in Brazil with her husband Kurt and missed Air France Flight 447 after turning up late at Rio de Janeiro airport on May 31.

All 228 people aboard lost their lives after the plane crashed into the Atlantic four hours into its flight to Paris. The ANSA news agency reported that the couple had managed to pick up a flight from Rio the following day. It said that Ms Ganthaler died when their car veered across a road in Kufstein, Austria, and swerved into an oncoming truck. Her husband was seriously injured.”

When I read this story I was not moved for the reasons you might think. Is it creepy that this woman’s death seems “fated” like it was cut from the Final Destination movie series….of course. The thought that left me reeling was the idea of what her husband might be faced with right now.  My romantic notion of the situation is that they had an opportunity to rediscover each other because of this random stroke of good fortune.  Imagine the surreal feelings they must have experienced when news of the plane crash flickered across the television.  My romantic notions make me ask questions. Did it rekindle their passion for each other?  Did they silently renew their vows and pledge to live intentionally?  What happened as they held each other against this backdrop? And in that embrace could they have ever imagined that, just as flight 447 hurtled with awful certainty towards the Atlantic Ocean, they were hurtling towards a crueler fate…found and lost.

Sometimes the ambiguity of visual art enables emotions that can’t be articulated. Much like inert gases are used to prevent undesired chemical reactions, we have inert emotions that keep us grounded but we do not speak of them because to say it would simply be too much.  The following is an image by Los Angeles artist David Kinsey from a series called Found and Lost.  In the context of the story from 447 I see a picture of the subject here and it captures some of the feelings I can only imagine he is wrestling with. This piece is searing, burning, broken, emotional, unemotional, dealing, dead, hollow, pensive, hopeless…the rest of the adjectives are for the individual viewer to wrestle with. 

As we traverse this unpredictable lifescape we live in a tension of making sense of everything.  Causality, fate, and purpose, are tough to pin down. There is no manual, no explanations.  The only consistent thing is that life is just hard sometimes and that’s all there is to it. I say a prayer for the man in Austria and my prayer for him is that healing and hope lay at the end of the tough road ahead.

~ by the last astronaut on June 12, 2009.