Today marks the 40th anniversary of a dark day indeed, the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff on January 28, 1986. And I have little to say about it today, for the simple reason that (against the better advice of my editor) I wrote about it last year, on the 39th anniversary of the disaster. Why? My urgency is explained well enough in the opening paragraphs:
We lost seven astronauts that day — the first time we had ever lost any in-flight, and the first in my lifetime. I have never forgotten the moment, even though I was only five years old; it was the first true national trauma I lived through. (It would not be the last.) I suppose I could have waited until the 40th anniversary next year to write this reminiscence, as my editor suggested this morning, but, then again, you never know when you might errantly stumble down a manhole or in front of an El train, so I might as well get this down on paper quickly while these fingers still function.
There is more than mere insouciance to my words. I’ll never forget where I was that day or how it affected me; the Challenger catastrophe was no minor incident in my young life. As a child of late 1980, I’m too young to have any solid recollection of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection, or anything whatsoever of political or international importance until this exact moment. My first real memory of things outside my family routine, of the “real world,” came with this. And how could it not have? For this was the moment when I was first forced to confront the reality of death.
As I explain in the piece, this was not merely the day that young Jeff, as a bewildered five-year-old, took his first step into the real world, it was the day I had my fears soothed in large part by the words of President Reagan. I don’t see how I could possibly add anything to what I wrote last year, so I invite you instead to wistfully recall an era when the president could speak to a nation in grief, with such surpassing grace and class:
It was precisely what I needed to hear, and I do mean precisely. I didn’t suddenly have some amazing epiphany about death and the meaning of life — after all, I was only five. But after listening to the president explain what had happened in those even tones of his, I no longer felt quite so queasy and bewildered. And I remember feeling encouraged when he continued: “There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.”
As an Xennial, Reagan is but the faintest of childhood memories for me — my political awareness didn’t dawn until the late Bush years. I lived through and enjoyed the fruits of his policy victories, of course, but my sole true memory from the Reagan years is that of his reaction to the Challenger disaster. And the reason is that I never forgot how a stranger on television could reach me in my first moment of great moral confusion, and calmly assure me that, despite tragedy, everything would be all right for America — and leave me asking my mother to explain, through her sniffling, what it meant to “slip the surly bonds of earth, and touch the face of God.”