FLIGHT 592’S LESSONS OF LOVE, LOSS;

BE KIND, HUG YOUR KIDS, ENJOY EVERY DAY, ONE FAMILY URGES

Palm Beach Post

June 4, 1996

Copyright 1996 Palm Beach Newspaper, Inc.

CANDY HATCHER;

He was standing in front of the microphones, rambling about rainbows and grief and making something good of something tragic, and Dick Kessler wished like crazy that God had picked somebody else for this job.

He didn’t apply for it, he said. He really wanted to turn the clock back 3 1/2 weeks so he would be home in Atlanta with his wife, Kathy, and their daughter, Grace, leading a busy, respectable corporate lawyer’s life. He’d be laughing with his family, appreciating how much alike his wife and daughter were, planning a celebration for his 23rd wedding anniversary.

But here he was Monday, standing by a canal in the Everglades, talking about the plane that crashed May 11, and the 110 people, including his wife, who were killed. He couldn’t stay home and grieve privately, not when there was so much to be learned from the crash, so much to share.

People should know, he said, and he wasn’t talking so much about the circumstances of the crash and what caused it.

He wanted us not to forget the people on ValuJet Flight 592 – good people, helpful people. “The cream of the crop of humanity,” he called them.

He wanted us to be more respectful, more sensitive, more human when dealing with tragedies and the people hurt by them.

Mostly, he wanted us to understand the importance of enjoying every day. Pay attention to your wives and husbands, he said. Pick up your children tonight and hold them tight. Spend time with them. Teach them. Laugh with them.

The people who died in the crash did that, he said. And they are at peace.

The last day the Kesslers spent together, Friday, May 10, was one of those gorgeous, lovely-to-be-alive days, with perfect weather and a reason to celebrate. Grace Kessler, a 21-year-old artist with her mother’s eyes and a room- brightening smile, was graduating from the University of Miami. Her parents had flown in from Atlanta to witness it.

Kathy Kessler had been concerned that her daughter might not graduate. Grace had had trouble with a Spanish class, and every time Kathy asked how she’d done on a crucial Spanish exam, Grace avoided answering. Don’t worry, she said, as though telling a mother not to worry ever does any good.

But Grace graduated, and that night, Dick Kessler boarded a plane to Jacksonville. He was leading a Georgia Bar meeting on St. Simons Island, Ga., Saturday morning. Grace was going diving in the Keys, and Kathy was scheduled to fly back to Atlanta at 6:15 that night.

Dick chaired his meeting. Played a lousy round of golf. Showered and dressed and drove toward the club where he was meeting friends for dinner Saturday night. As he was driving, it started to rain. He looked up over the little airport on St. Simons Island, and half a rainbow appeared. It started in the sky and ended in the marsh.

“Something’s going on,” he recalled thinking. Shortly after he arrived at the club, he got an emergency telephone call and learned ValuJet had been trying to reach him.

Kathy wasn’t on the 6:15 flight. She’d caught an earlier one, and it had crashed, and she was dead.

“I collapsed in the phone booth, and I was sobbing and crying,” Dick recalled. His friends found him there and took him back to his hotel.

And then he remembered.  Grace didn’t know. He had to reach her before she heard it on the news. He found her dive instructor, told him to get Grace back to Miami, then got on a plane Sunday morning and got to Grace right after she’d pried the horrible news from a friend.

Grace said she had been at a “mental crossroads” in the weeks before her mother’s death. “I decided I wanted to have a more optimistic life,” she said. “I wanted to live life.”

And one of her last thoughts before she adopted the positive outlook was: “Something very soon is going to happen to test this and try to bring me down again.”

She treasures the time she spent with her mother at graduation. “I came to pick up my mom and dad to take them to graduation,” she told friends at a memorial service May 25. “I was wearing this cute little black satin dress.” She imagined her mother would say it was inappropriate. Instead, Kathy Kessler looked at her daughter and said, “You look good in that dress.” And it was as if she were saying, “I love you for the woman you’ve become,” Grace said.

“I knew at that moment she was realizing she’d done good.

“And then she died the next day.”

Grace wanted to do something so her mother and the others who died would be remembered. She began planning a memorial to be placed in the Everglades, sketching rainbows and talking to her architect friends about what could be built.

She talked to her dad, an influential Atlanta lawyer who heads the fourth-largest section of the Georgia Bar, and he talked to some of the other families of the crash victims.

They began raising money for the memorial and established an account with the United Way of Dade County. They wanted to bring Miami and Atlanta – the two cities most affected by the crash – together.

Monday, United Way officials called a news conference to announce the memorial. They said 100 percent of the contributions would be used for a memorial – no operating expenses would be paid with the money.

They don’t know what it will look like or where it will go, they said, because the families aren’t ready to make those decisions.

“Right now, they’re still in shock. They’re grieving,” said Dick Kessler, who flew ValuJet to Miami last weekend to work out details for the memorial fund.

“I’m still trying to cope with my life right now. It takes time to refocus. I lost my companion of 23 years. My best friend.”

In the first days after the crash, when nothing made sense, Dick Kessler found himself understanding the significance of the rainbow. It had looked like an outstretched arm pointing from heaven to the marsh. A left arm. Kathy was left-handed. …

“I’d been in the seminary for three years, and I used to pray that God give me a sign: Are you real? I believed, but I wanted to know.”

Kathy sent the rainbow, he said. “She was an in-your-face woman. She got up there in heaven and said, ‘God, you gotta give him a sign.’ The old lefty gave it to me.”

He and Grace joined the families of the other passengers at a Miami hotel to wait for word about the remains of their loved ones. Those were frustrating, heartbreaking days, they recalled. The families wanted something to bury. They wanted someone to blame. They wanted to see where the plane went down. They wanted the reporters and photographers outside their hotel to go away.

Five days after the crash, four buses and a van carrying more than 100 family members left the hotel for an hourlong drive to the Everglades. They were going to the crash site for a memorial service.

Traffic was stopped at intersections. People had left their cars and were standing silently along the road, showing their respect. Some had signs: God be with you.

It had been dreadfully hot and humid, and as the buses neared the site where the plane crashed, horseflies and mosquitoes banged against the windows. But when the buses stopped and the families walked out, the temperature had dropped to about 80 degrees. A breeze blew. The sawgrass swayed. “There were no bugs. They disappeared.”

They’d heard so many awful things about the place their loved ones died – poisonous snakes and alligators were probably preying on the remains – and here they were in the most peaceful, quiet place they could imagine.

“My wife was an environmentalist,” Dick Kessler said. If someone had asked her where she wanted to be buried, she would have looked around at the sawgrass shimmering in the breeze, and she would’ve said, “Well, this would be a good place.”

Dick was standing there in the tranquility, listening to the prayers being said by the ministers and priests and rabbis. He found a Catholic priest and asked him to bless the area. Then he picked up a handful of dirt, threw it into the Everglades and said goodbye.

On the drive back to the hotel, Grace spotted the arc of a rainbow. She pointed it out to her father. And as they watched, a plane flew up through the rainbow, as if it were heading to heaven.

God sent two rainbows to signal that Kathy and everyone on her flight are in heaven, Dick Kessler said. “We have to grieve, but God has given us a sign that He is real. Grace and I are OK. Kathy’s in our hearts. She’s going to live happily ever after.”

Dick Kessler still remembers the moment he met Kathy. He saw her walk through the doors at Emory University Law School in 1969, and he was attracted immediately – spiritually and physically. “Electricity all over,” he recalls with a grin.

They married in 1973. Kathy, a Miami native who had grown up in New Jersey, became a crusader – not one of those publicity-seeking types whose name was always in the newspaper – but someone who fought discrimination and corruption and won respect across Georgia.

Two weeks after her death, Dick stood in Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, two hours into a 3 1/2-hour memorial service and told everybody it was OK if they got up and went to the bathroom. Kathy would have insisted on a bathroom break, he said.

He said Kathy taught him to laugh during tragedy when she suffered with breast cancer five years ago. She was gregarious and unpretentious. She was ethical. And she would be infuriated by the tactics of some lawyers and journalists who descended on grieving families the week after the crash, Dick Kessler said.

Someone found a reporter hiding in the bathroom on one of the buses heading to the memorial service, he said. Others  reported  lawyers  passing  out  business  cards  at  the  hotel.  “We  all  have  responsibilities”  to  be compassionate, he said. When the next tragedy occurs, he says, he hopes journalists and lawyers will be more responsible, more compassionate. Good can come out of this, he said.

Some already has.

He’s been telling everyone he meets how important it is to spend time with the people they love. “If you’re worried about what you’re going to do tomorrow,” he tells them, “you’re missing the whole point of life.”

His crusade seems to be working. Monday, a reporter stopped Dick Kessler in a restaurant and shook his hand. He said he had a 2-year-old at home, and his job forced him to be away from the child more than he liked. He was going home to give the boy a hug, he said.

“You do that,” Kessler told him. “You don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”