Dr. Jon Clark, an Army brat as a boy, an ambitious flight surgeon as a man, has long preferred the cold facts–“the stats,” as he calls them–to messy emotions. But at home, he realizes now, he was mired in an unspoken competition for his son’s love. And, like many fathers, he was losing.
“We were buddies and everything,” he said. “But I was on the sidelines. He just worshiped his mom.”
Then, just like that, she was gone.
Laurel Clark, a Navy captain and astronaut who graduated from high school in Racine, Wis., was killed a year ago Sunday when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over East Texas. Today, Jon Clark, 50, and his only son, 9-year-old Iain, are partners. Death has brought them together.
“We both lost the love of our lives,” Clark said last week at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
It has been a year of heartbreak, of funerals and memorials and visits to the psychologists. Clark has met with survivors of the astronauts killed aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Their message, he says, was clear: Don’t expect the pain to end.
Iain still feels betrayed, bewildered that his mother didn’t take his advice and just stay on Earth.
In the end, though, father and son have found a glimmer of optimism. As Clark has struggled with the practical realities of being a newly single parent, he and his son have become, in some ways, equals.
Clark has become a reluctant crusader at NASA, where he is involved with the shuttle program, calling for reform of an inflexible culture he believes contributed to the accident. He uses his campaign to teach Iain lessons about foresight, about mistakes and consequences.
The boy, in turn, has taught Clark about looking beyond the stats. What the surgeon might have seen as youthful delusion–Iain’s efforts to “fix” his mother’s death–the father now sees as a ray of hope. Iain has suggested, among other things, building a time machine so he can warn his mother not to board the shuttle.
As the Columbia mission approached last year, it became clear that Iain did not want his mother on that spaceship. He was sure that if she went into space, she would not make it home.
Launch day came on Jan. 16, and the crowd cheered as Columbia soared toward space. Iain wept.
The morning the shuttle was to return, Clark and Iain walked outside the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to wait for the landing with the other families.
“Columbia. Houston.” It was NASA’s mission control, trying to talk to the crew. “We see your tire pressure messages.”
Something was wrong–Clark knew it at once. Within minutes, NASA reported that it had lost contact with the crew. Television reports began showing pieces of the shuttle streaming across the sky.
Laurel Clark was dead at 41.
“I didn’t want her to go,” Iain told his father not long after the accident. “She went anyway. And now I don’t have a mom.”
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Remembering Columbia’s 7
Events across the nation will honor the crew of Columbia to mark the anniversary of its disintegration while returning to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003. Some of the events:
– A public ceremony Sunday morning for all fallen astronauts is scheduled at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
– At the Super Bowl in Houston on Sunday, Aerosmith will perform a song dedicated to Columbia’s crew. Also, Josh Groban will sing a tribute song, “You Raise Me Up,” and astronauts on the next space shuttle mission will be recognized.
– A memorial to the Columbia astronauts will be dedicated at 3 p.m. Monday at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe will preside at the private ceremony; the memorial site will be open to the public after the event.
— Orlando Sentinel
