wfn.org | Flight attendants at Chicago service share grief and seek healing

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2001-278

Flight attendants at Chicago service share grief and seek healing 

by David Skidmore

     (ENS) As the nation came to grips with the devastation of the terrorist 
attacks in New York City and the Pentagon, flight attendants and pilots from 
American and United Airlines gathered at St. James Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago 
September 19 to mourn their colleagues, pray for healing and find solace together 
as a community.

     "Our hearts break with yours. Our tears fall with yours," said the Rev. 
Helen Moore, the cathedral's interim dean, in her homily at the evening service 
billed as A Service of Blessing and Healing for All People. Speaking for the 
cathedral and the diocese, she told the over 700 crew members present, most in 
full uniform, "You have our deepest sympathy. You have our love. You have our 
caring. We are strangers no longer. We are bound together as one."

     "Amidst all this darkness there is light," she said, noting that God's heart 
"is as broken as the rest of the world." It is in God, she added, that we find 
both comfort and strength to carry on our lives. "May this time be one in which 
we recognize that in God only lies our salvation," she said.

     The shock and grief felt by crew members was evident as they lined up at the 
altar rail for prayers of healing following Moore's homily. Alone, in twos and 
threes, and with spouses and children, the flight attendants and pilots formed 
long blue lines down the cathedral aisles, some openly weeping, as cathedral 
cantor Robert Black sang "On Eagle's Wings." Later they listened to fellow flight 
attendant Doug Elmore, chair of the American Airlines flight attendants union, 
read the classic poem "High Flight" by World War II fighter pilot John Gillespie 
Magee, Jr.

Grieving process

     Elmore organized the service to help bring healing to flight attendants and 
other crew members who lost over two dozen friends and colleagues in the Sept. 11 
hijackings and crashes. Most of the crew members he has spoken with are 
experiencing signs of post traumatic stress syndrome, said Elmore.

     "We are finding that we need many, many closures, many, many healings and 
outreaches to one another," said Elmore. "We have lost friends we have known, 
people we have flown with, and our company is hurting." Added Elmore: "Even 
though we are a very large company, we are going through a grieving process."  

     That is the sentiment of many of Elmore's colleagues. As crew members 
clustered in the cathedral's narthex, American Airlines pilot Captain Thomas 
Stone said the aura of safe, friendly skies had been shredded by the horror of 
September 11. "There is this element of fear in all of our lives now. It's 
important to share that grief and fear with fellow workers," he said.

     That was what Elmore was doing at O'Hare every day in the week after the 
attacks, talking with American Airlines crew members, hearing their grief.  In 
the operations areas crew members "are just hugging each other and holding on 
because they know what went through those people's minds during the hijacking," 
he said.

     The idea for a healing service came to him when he realized "that there are 
many parts to grieving and one part is we need the spiritual." 

     Elmore found his spiritual home a little over a year ago after he was victim 
of a carjacking. St. James' former assistant, the Rev. Kevin Pearson, himself a 
former flight attendant, visited Elmore in the hospital. Later Helen Moore 
visited Elmore. He joined the parish on Good Friday 2000 and has become active in 
various ministries since, including the hospitality committee. "It's my church 
home. For me I have found that praying and working on this has helped me through 
the grieving."

--David Skidmore is director of communications in the Diocese of Chicago.