Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  Some passengers took the time to introduce me to everyone they had brought with them. “This is my mother, this is my father, this is my brother, my sister…”

  It went on like that for close to two hours.

  In the abstract, 155 is just a number. But looking into the faces of all of those passengers—and then the faces of all their loved ones—it brought home to me how profoundly wonderful it was that we had such a good outcome on Flight 1549.

  At the end of the reunion, I thanked them all for coming. “I think today was as much, and as good, for me and my crew as it was for you,” I said. “We will be joined forever because of the events of January fifteenth, in our hearts and in our minds.”

  I had received a letter a few days earlier from a passenger named David Sontag. A seventy-four-year-old writer, film producer, and former studio executive, David is now a professor in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was on Flight 1549 returning from his older brother’s funeral. From his seat, 23F, he saw flames in the engine. He decided to say a prayer as we descended: “God, my family does not need two deaths in one week.”

  He sent letters thanking me and the crew, and shared words that he had delivered at his brother’s memorial service: “We leave a little bit of ourselves with everybody we come in contact with.” He also told me that the crew would live on “as a part of all of us who were on board the flight—and everybody we touch with our lives.”

  I was humbled to think of the connections I now have to each passenger on that plane, to their spouses and their children. It was my honor to spend time with all of them.

  So many people came into my life because of Flight 1549—ferry-boat captains, police officers, investigators, journalists, bystanders, witnesses.

  Again and again, I return to thoughts of Herman Bomze, the eighty-four-year-old Holocaust survivor who sat in his high-rise overlooking the Hudson River, believing in his heart that saving one life can save the world. And then I think of those on the plane itself; passengers, such as David Sontag, who have now vowed to wrap that lovely thought into the rest of their lives.

  David’s letter to me was haunting and moving, and I later wrote back to thank him for his kind words. I told him: “As I will live on in your life, you will live on in mine.”

  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 preservi
ng 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.