LONDON — Jen Bidding still remembers not selecting the option to fly home for Winter Break.

Bidding, a 1990 Susquehanna University graduate who spent her entire junior year studying in London with Syracuse University, decided to celebrate Christmas in the city before returning to school in January.

Her first class of the spring semester was with Pat Utermohlen, a professor she’d had before. The class was scheduled to meet at the Courtauld Collection in central London. As soon as Bidding stepped into the elevator at the gallery, she saw her professor.

“She grabbed me and said ‘You’re still here’ and we started crying,” Bidding recalled in an email.

It was just one month after 35 of Bidding’s classmates had died when the plane carrying them back to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Twenty-five years later, Bidding can still recall the events of that winter. Some of the details have faded, but other parts remain vivid: the call from SU London as they tried to locate students, the media swarming outside the study abroad center and the tearful phone call with her mother.

For Bidding and other SU London faculty and alumni, memories of the Lockerbie tragedy have had a lasting influence. As the 25th anniversary of the bombing approaches, many are still working to reconcile their current lives with what happened nearly a quarter of a century ago.

“Those were some of the best and darkest days of my life,” Bidding said.

Ian Hessenberg recalled the silence at the abroad center that winter morning.

Many of the students had already left and the photography professor had come to the center to hand in his final grades for the semester.

Students were not supposed to know their final grades before they arrived back in the states, and Hessenberg strictly obeyed this policy. He had broken the rule only once, just a few days before, when he had run into one of his students on Portobello Road. The student wanted to know his grade and, since the student was one of his best, Hessenberg made an exception.

“I said, on this one occasion only once, I said ‘You got an unequivocal A.’ And he just, he slapped me on the back so hard that I nearly fell in the gutter,” Hessenberg remembered with a laugh. “And we parted great friends and promised to keep in touch.”

Three days later, Hessenberg stood in the SU London director’s office, staring at the student’s name on a victim list. Four other students out of the 12 he had taught that semester were also on the list.

In the days that followed, Hessenberg began collecting any newspaper articles he could find about Lockerbie. He went through his students’ work from the past semester, saving photos they’d taken as well as photos of them on field trips. He put it all in a folder, which he would sometimes show his students, reminding them how lucky they were to be in London.

Christopher Cook, a professor of communications at SU London, still mentions Lockerbie in his classes, but said he feels the bombing is, for many of his students, a part of the past.

“I think in the wake of Sept. 11, which, in a way, was such a more terrifying memory, that something like Lockerbie becomes part of another history,” he said. “It becomes part of a longer, wider history of acts of terrorism and the whole fractured world that we live in.”

And the world never felt more fractured than those first few days after the bombing. Realizing that the SU London community needed a way to come together, an interdenominational service was organized at a church near the abroad center. The service helped provide students and faculty with a way to support each other, Cook said, and provided everyone there with a real sense that “you could deal with this thing.”

After the service, Cook and a fellow SU London professor took a long walk together around the city. They felt, Cook recalled, “utterly helpless.”

“That I think was the most painful moment,” he said. “Because you began to realize a very simple truth: that you were the last person to see some of these students, before even their parents had seen them. And that was an awful moment.”

The horror of those first days has since receded, Cook said, and there have been many brighter moments since. About six or seven years ago, he was able to write a recommendation letter for one of his students who successfully applied to be a Remembrance Scholar.

“That was really fantastic because I really felt then a sense of the direct line between the present and what had happened,” Cook said.

These connections between Lockerbie and the present still persist for Hessenberg as well.

The Lockerbie tragedy has made him a better teacher who’s more sensitive to his students’ problems, he said. Now, when he has problem students, he’ll pull them aside and talk to them as friend, not as the guy who stands at the front of the class and hands out papers.

“The whole experience was very shaking,” Hessenberg said. “And, I suppose, to be truthful, it has colored my life, in a way.”

But when he teaches, Hessenberg rarely mentions the bombing. After about five years, he slowly stopped making references to Lockerbie in class. But it has taken 25 years for him to be able to hand over the folder. Two weeks ago, he turned it over to an SU archivist.

“For my part, I feel quite relieved to have handed this whole folder that I had over to the archivist because I feel I’ve let go of it now,” Hessenberg said. “It was a great relief but it’s still very strong in the memory.”

Published on October 7, 2013 at 12:16 am

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