Highest Duty

18. HOME

IT’S TRUE FOR all of us.

Everyone we’ve ever known and loved, every experience we’ve had, every decision we’ve made, every regret we have had to deal with and accept—these are what make us who we are. I’ve known this all my adult life. Living through Flight 1549 has only reinforced my understanding of what defines our lives.

In the wake of that flight, I have thought about all of my major relationships—my mom, my dad, my sister, Lorrie, the kids, close friends, colleagues.

My father, especially, remains in my mind.

I learned a great many things from him about the importance of being a man of your word, about serving your community, about valuing family and the precious time spent with your children. I smile at my warmest memories of him, including those days when he would close down his dental office for the day so he could lead us on a hooky-playing pirate adventure in Dallas.

I am grateful for the faith he had in me. From the time I was about twelve years old, he’d let me take a rifle and go out in the woods for target practice. He knew the best way to learn responsibility was to be given the opportunity to be responsible, and at as young an age as possible.

In his own life, my dad was content on a lot of fronts. He was content with his modest income, content with living a provincial life in Texas, content with a house that was far from perfect but pleased him because we built it with our own hands. I think of my father when I hear Sheryl Crow sing “Soak Up the Sun.” He lived a line from that song: “It’s not having what you want/It’s wanting what you’ve got.”

But there are darker memories, too, when I think of my father. He wouldn’t talk much about his depression—what he lightly called his “blue funk”—and my family never knew the depths to which his inner demons took him.

In the mid-1990s, my father began having gallbladder problems, but he didn’t go to the doctor until the pain was fairly acute. Then his gallbladder burst and he needed surgery. He spent weeks in intensive care and was put on a strong course of antibiotics. Some of his organs began to fail. My dad was in pain, and he knew it would take many months to regain his strength, but he was expected to make a complete recovery.

When he was finally sent home from the hospital on December 7, 1995, my mom got him settled in their bedroom. Then she went into the kitchen at the other end of the house to get him some juice, leaving him alone in their room. She heard a noise, a muffled pop. She thought she might have recognized the noise, and then she thought she knew exactly what it was. She dropped the glass of juice, letting it shatter on the floor, and ran across the house back toward the bedroom.

As she was running, she was hoping and wishing that she was wrong about that noise. She entered the bedroom, shouting, “Oh no! Oh no!” It was too late.

My dad had shot himself with a handgun.

He was seventy-eight years old, and he had given no indication that he was planning to do this. He left no note.

It was so distressing that my mom had to be the one who found him and called 911. She had to be the one who washed the bedspread, who got the stain out of the carpet, who called the handyman to fix the glass which the bullet had cracked.

I can’t begin to fathom my father’s pain, or why he made the decision he did. I assume that like so many suffering from depression, he couldn’t help but become inwardly focused. His view of the world was skewed and he probably had tunnel vision, seeing only his problems, unable to have a wider perspective. I think my father just felt so much psychic pain that he couldn’t stand it.

He may have believed that he was protecting my mother from having to look after an aging man who likely would need long-term care. Maybe he thought he was acting nobly by saving her from that responsibility. He was also a proud man. It was hard for him to imagine not being self-sufficient.

At the time of his suicide, I was forty-three years old. Naturally, I was distraught, angry, and upset with myself. I thought that I should have been paying closer attention to him. Intellectually, my mom, my sister, and I knew better. As with so many suicides, I don’t think any of us who loved him could have prevented him from doing what he did.

My mother chose not to have a memorial service for my dad. She was probably worried about what their friends and neighbors would think, and was ashamed of what he had done. I tried to gently talk her out of her decision, but I recognized that it was hers to make. And so Lorrie and I, my sister and her husband, along with my mom and a young minister, gathered after his death to scatter his ashes across our property in front of Lake Texoma.

It was a cold, bleak, gray day. In Texas, in the winter, the grass is dormant and brown. It all felt so lonely.

I said a few words. My sister said something. So did the minister, who had driven up from Waples Memorial United Methodist Church in Denison. When it was my mom’s turn, her words were simple: “I had a chance to say everything I needed to say to him when he was alive. There was nothing left unsaid.” My mother was outwardly OK, strong and stoic.

None of us spoke too long. I guess we were just shocked standing there, and angry that my father had made that choice. I was especially upset that he would choose to remove himself from my daughters’ lives. I couldn’t believe he would do that.

After Flight 1549, people wrote to tell me that they could sense how much I valued life. Quite frankly, one of the reasons I think I’ve placed such a high value on life is that my father took his.

I didn’t think about my father’s suicide when I was in the cockpit of Flight 1549. He wasn’t anywhere in my thoughts. But his death did have an effect on how I’ve lived, and on how I view the world. It made me more committed to preserving life. I exercise more care in my professional responsibilities. I am willing to work very hard to protect people’s lives, to be a good Samaritan, and to not be a bystander, in part because I couldn’t save my father.

After my father died, and my mom was able to come to terms with her grief and guilt, she reinvented herself. I was very proud of her. She traveled, and after a few years, she even met a nice man and began dating him seriously. She really blossomed.

I think my mother would have continued to live a rich and busy life if she hadn’t been diagnosed with colon cancer in December 1998.

The day I got the news of her cancer, I was finishing a trip on the MD-80 in Pittsburgh, and I immediately got on a flight to Dallas. My mother knew she was terminal, and said so. It was shocking for us. She was only 71 years old and had never been seriously ill in her life. She came from a line of long-lived people. Her father lived until age 94 and her mother until 102.

But we accepted the hand she’d been dealt, and in my mother’s final weeks, I had a chance to have many talks with her about our lives, about her wishes for Kate and Kelly. She said she had few regrets. Unlike with my dad, I was able to say good-bye. My mom lived just one month after her diagnosis. And so for the second time in just a few years, we experienced a heartbreaking loss. This time, I felt all the things I had felt after my father’s death, except anger.

There have been lessons for me.

In the three years between my father’s suicide and my mom’s death, my mother was severely tested. But the former schoolteacher taught herself how to get the most out of life and how to be as happy as possible. I admired her even more for how she lived as a widow.

I didn’t think of her when I was in the cockpit of Flight 1549, but her will to live had already served as an inspiration to me.

LORRIE AND I wish my parents could have lived to witness what has happened as a result of Flight 1549. The incident would have been frightening for my mother, and very emotional. She’d be overjoyed at the outcome, of course. My mother would have cried. My father would have been proud.

When I first became a pilot, my mother was always telling me to stay safe. “Fly low and slow,” she’d say. I’d roll my eyes. It was like a comedy routine between us.

I’d remind her that flying low and slow isn’t as safe as flying higher and at an appropriate speed. She understood that. But the line “fly low and slow” became her way of encouraging me to be careful. It was her handy little admonition.

We were certainly flying low over the Hudson on January 15. Without engines, we were slowing down, too. I can imagine my mom would have had a comment of some kind: “Low and slow turned out OK for you, didn’t it?”

I assume my father would have summed up Flight 1549 by telling me something like: “It looks like you learned your lessons well. You became good at something you cared about it and it paid off. You made a difference.”

I don’t know if he would have bought into any of the hero accolades thrown my way. In his generation, people were put in tough situations and they were up to the task. His contemporaries won World War II, and for the most part, did it humbly and without personal aggrandizement. I think my dad would have been proud of my achievements, but he would have put what happened in perspective: I did my job well. So have a lot of other people before me.

My father and I were affectionate, and we were close in our own somewhat stiff way. But we weren’t as close as I wish we could have been. That was his temperament and mine. We were both quiet and pretty stoic. We never shared a lot of personal feelings. We kept a lot to ourselves.

There wasn’t really any yelling and screaming in our house; we were all too polite and reticent. That made for a calm childhood, but there was a flip side to that. Though we enjoyed each other’s company, we didn’t share a great deal of emotion. We didn’t talk about too many personal things. As I got older, a part of me envied and admired those big, stereotypical ethnic families where people argued all the time, almost as a way of showing love. I didn’t grow up in a family where everyone was always offended and making grand, dramatic pronouncements. Don’t get me wrong. It was wonderful to be in a peaceful household. But it could also feel slightly passionless at times.

I think that the urges toward staid family dynamics are in my DNA. I’ve tried to broaden myself and break out of the mold with my daughters, to be more outwardly emotional. I’m still working on it.

KATE AND Kelly were toddlers when my parents died, and I wish my mom and dad were alive to see the lovely young women they have become. I have tried to pass on my parents’ values to them, and I can see that the girls have embraced many of them.

The girls also have attributes and gifts that come from within them. It’s not that Lorrie and I have taught them, or that we’ve even shown them the way. And in the wake of Flight 1549, some of these attributes of theirs have become clearer to me.

Kate, for instance, is supremely self-confident. When Lorrie and I reflect on how comfortable Kate is with herself, we sometimes say we want to grow up to be just like her. Now sixteen years old, she is also very focused and funny, and she is a conscientious student. She has always wanted to be a veterinarian and has never wavered.

Her friends say she may be the most self-assured kid they know. They have stories about her that prove their point. Once, in middle school, a girl didn’t like the shirt Kate was wearing and told her so. “I’m sorry you don’t like it,” Kate answered, “but I like it a lot.”

Lorrie says many girls would have dissolved in the wake of a peer’s dismissive fashion comment. Not Kate.

She’s comfortable around boys, too. Once, when she was nine years old, we were on vacation at a ski resort and she saw a bunch of older boys making a snowman. “I’m going to go play with them,” she told us.

We cautioned her. She didn’t know any of them. They were a few years older. But she marched fearlessly right into that circle of boys and announced she was there to play. She staked her claim. At first the boys looked shocked. And then, because she was so sure of herself, they let her join them for the rest of the afternoon. Lorrie and I marveled at her confidence.

A few weeks after Flight 1549, I saw that confidence again, when she took her driver’s license test at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Lorrie and I went along, and we were both nervous for her. She had prepared well, and I trusted her behind the wheel, but you never know how a kid will perform in the tension of the moment.

While Kate took her road test, Lorrie and I stayed behind in the DMV waiting area. It felt like a long twenty-five minutes before she returned with a big smile on her face. She had passed.

I had to ask her: “Was it hard? Were you worried you’d fail?”

Her answer: “I knew I could do it.”

What Kate meant was this: She was confident because she had done all the preparation. She had worked and studied and practiced.

When she said that, she reminded me of how I felt when the engines died on Flight 1549. In fact, she had used the exact same words I had used when Katie Couric asked me whether I was confident while descending toward the Hudson. Kate didn’t remember those were my words on TV. She just had the same confidence in her preparation.

Kate has always seen things in black and white. It’s yes or no. It is or it isn’t. Lorrie says she’s like me in that way. She has always been very controlled with her emotions, very much the intellectual. I understand that about her, and even though we’re alike, it’s not always easy for us to connect emotionally.

For a couple of years now, Kate’s growing independence has been tough for me. As she became a teenager, she was less willing to confide in me. She’d still turn to Lorrie, but I sometimes felt like an outsider. Her old dad.

Flight 1549 changed the dynamics a little. She’s willing to be more physically affectionate now. The love between us often remains unspoken, but we both feel the connection intensely.

Unlike Kate, fourteen-year-old Kelly has always been very sensitive and affectionate. As a toddler, Kelly would snuggle up with us—Lorrie called her “our snuggle bunny”—and it was just the greatest feeling. She also would be more apt to cry when I left on a trip. When she was three or four years old, and she’d see me putting on my uniform, the tears would well up.

Kelly has always been innately empathetic. If there’s a new girl at school or a child with disabilities, she is the first one to arrange a playdate or to say, “Why don’t you sit with us at lunch?” She always feels a need to reach out to these kids, and it can be an emotional burden for her.

Given how deeply she feels things, she is sensitive to words that sting. She doesn’t engage in the sometimes rough dialogue that is normal for teenagers. She takes greater care with her words. She will couch even something negative in gentler terms. She doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings.

I remember when she would get home from school in third or fourth grade, and Lorrie and I would ask her, “So how was your day?”

Invariably, she’d tell us about a schoolmate who was having a tough day at school. She could sense when someone else was troubled. She felt this need to reach out to them. I know that can be an emotional burden for her.

From day one after Flight 1549, Kelly experienced the incident fully. The moment Lorrie told her what had happened, she started to cry, even though she already knew I was safe. Her feelings were partly rooted in the idea that my life had been at risk. But I also think she deeply felt what that experience must have been like for me, and her heart went out to me. Hearing the details was very disturbing to her.

Both Kelly and Kate saw their grades take a hit in the wake of Flight 1549, and Kate wasn’t able to get hers back up completely. At first, it was a stressful time for all of us. They missed school and then, as soon as they returned, took several exams that they weren’t prepared for. Once they were in that deep hole, it got hard to get their averages back up. Our routine was disrupted for weeks, and the “public figure” aspect of our new lives—always having to be “on” when we were in public—was hard for them.

In the wake of the flight, we’ve sat down together as a family to read through some of the stacks of mail we’ve received from around the world. It helped us process the event together, to see how other people connected with it emotionally. It reminded us to cherish the bonds between us, because nothing is ever for sure. I think the girls have a better understanding of this now.

As teenagers, Kate and Kelly are far less apt to snuggle with Lorrie and me than they once were. We miss that. Sometimes, when they’re not feeling well, it becomes OK to snuggle again. And in the wake of Flight 1549, we hug a bit more. I’m more apt to kiss the girls before I leave town, even if it is early in the morning and they’re in bed, sleeping.

A FEW weeks after Flight 1549, Lorrie wrote a letter of thanks to all the friends and strangers who had gotten in touch with her to express their concern. “It is still hard for me to sort out all my emotions,” she wrote. “The events of January 15 have been like an onion, multilayered, and peeling back the layers has taken time and will take more time to come. For me, there was the accident itself, the huge media interest, and then the mail.

“It’s interesting how our brains protect us from trauma, because after Sully told me the news, I didn’t feel panicked. I just felt this weird, out-of-body feeling that it was not real. I was going through the motions but I could not believe that the images I was seeing on TV were of my husband’s plane.

“I know intellectually and believe with all my heart that commercial aviation is the safest form of travel, so I have never been afraid of Sully’s career. How incredible were the odds that my husband was involved in an airline accident? Impossible, and yet not.”

Flight 1549 has had an impact on our marriage. The resulting emotions for both of us have been overwhelming and sometimes confusing, and we haven’t been able to sufficiently be there for each other at every step.

One morning, five months after the incident, Lorrie said to me, “I’ve wanted to cry all morning.” And so she went by herself to our favorite hill in the neighborhood—the “anything is possible” hill. She stood on top, took a moment that was all her own, and cried. Why was she crying?

“The accident, the aftermath, it’s still unbelievable to me,” she told me. “I feel like I haven’t been able to fully process it all.”

It isn’t just that Flight 1549 jolted her into the realization that she could lose me. “I’ve always known I could lose you,” she says. “Like all of us, you’re at the mercy of those driving next to you on the highway, or the food you’re eating in a restaurant, or a disease we don’t yet know about. So it’s not that I feel like you’re cheating death every time you fly.”

Instead, Lorrie just feels as if the incident in the Hudson, and the continuing aftermath, has scrambled her brain. It affected the dynamics in our family.

For our entire marriage, Lorrie spent long stretches as a single parent. I’d be off on trips, and she’d be dealing with everything in the household. It seemed like things always decided to break when I was gone—the car, the washing machine, the oven. Once, I was on a flight doing preparations before pushing back from the gate, and my cell phone rang. It was Lorrie in a panic. Water was pouring down the side window of our house. At first she thought it was a bad storm, but then she realized that the seal on our pool pump had broken, and water was gushing into the air like an open fire hydrant.

“Oh my God!” Lorrie said. “The pool is broken! A quarter of the water that was in it has drained out already, and hundreds of gallons are raining down on our window!”

“I’m about to push back,” I said to her, which meant I was required to turn off my cell phone. “Turn off the filter pump and call the pool guy. I have to go. I’m sorry.” And then I shut off my cell phone, taxied toward the runway, and left her on her own to stop the rain.

No woman dealing with an emergency like that wants her husband hanging up on her. Again and again, my flying career came at a cost.

I’ve been even busier and more out-of-pocket since Flight 1549. I’ve been asked to make appearances, give testimony, answer requests from the media, and travel as a public face of the piloting profession. For the first seven months after the Hudson incident, I wasn’t even flying planes for US Airways. Still, some weeks, I’d be gone from home more than I used to be when I was in the cockpit.

“You won’t get a do-over with the girls,” Lorrie has been telling me. “If you wait until the next year or the year after that to live your family life, you’ll miss too much. The time you’ve lost is gone forever.”

I know this, and I’ve tried to make adjustments in my life.

A stressful incident such as Flight 1549 either pulls a couple closer together or leaves them further apart. Lorrie and I have seen both extremes. At first, we clung to each other like ports in a storm. There was an onslaught of attention, and we were hanging on to each other for dear life.

Now Lorrie sometimes gets frustrated with me when I’m “Sully, the public figure.” Almost everywhere I go, people recognize me and want to interact, get an autograph, or reflect on something from their own lives. I’m cordial and gracious to everyone, and genuinely interested in their stories. Sometimes, when I get home, I can be frazzled and used up and short-tempered. I can be impatient with the girls.

“You have your priorities wrong, Sully,” Lorrie has told me firmly. “As nice as you are to strangers, that’s the same nice you need to be to me and the girls.”

She is completely right about that, and I’m lucky to have a spouse who loves me enough to tell it to me straight.

AT ABOUT eight o’clock one morning, a few months after Flight 1549, Lorrie and I were in our garage, looking out into the street. Kate had just pulled out of the driveway, headed for school. It was a bright, beautiful morning, but inside the garage, we were standing in shadow. Lorrie and I were holding hands and watching her pull away.

Kate began her three-point turn to pull out of our court, and she stopped for a moment to shift from reverse into drive. As she turned her head, her ponytail was swaying, and she looked so grown up. She looked almost like a woman in her twenties. It was startling to us.

In that instant, I felt a cascade of images coming into my head, images of her growing up and becoming the strong, confident young lady she now is. It was almost as if she were driving away that morning on her way to her own adult life. Standing there, I remembered when we took her to her first day of preschool at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Danville, and how a lot of the other kids were clinging and crying, and Kate just took off, happily independent. She said good-bye and never looked back.

In that moment, I also thought about an essay Kelly wrote in third grade. In the spring of 2002, US Airways had parked its MD-80 fleet and was retraining pilots on the Airbus. Until I got the Airbus training, I wasn’t flying, and I was able to remain home for a few months, very present in the kids’ lives. Kelly’s essay assignment, in the fall of 2002, was to write about the happiest time of her life. “The happiest time of my life,” she wrote, “was the time when Daddy was home.” Reading that was one of those bittersweet moments that filled and broke my heart at the same time.

Now here we are, with the girls pulling out of our driveway all on their own. I’ve blinked and everything has changed: My parents are long gone, the things I missed with my kids can’t be reclaimed, and my life is different now. Lorrie is right. I need to remember every day how precious our time with the girls really is.

By landing safely, Flight 1549 returned passengers and crew to the loving embrace of their families. We’ve all been given second chances. We’ve been given new reminders that we are loved, and new opportunities to show affection to those we care about. There were 155 people on that plane who got to go home. I must never lose sight of the fact that I was one of them.