"I Love You, Goodbye"

With only minutes to live, some passengers aboard Tuesday's four doomed airliners made one last call on their cell phones.

"I love you, honey," Californian Thomas Burnett, aboard United Airlines Flight 93, told his wife, Deena.
From the same plane San Franciscan Alice Hoglan heard her son Mark Bingham say: "I love you very much."
Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles reached out to her husband and four sons in Fort Myers, Fla., to tell them of her love before she, along with Burnett, Hoglan and 42 others aboard UAL 93 perished, in a field 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. 

Barbara Olson, a political commentator flying from Washington to Los Angeles aboard American Airlines Flight 77, told her husband, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, her plane had been hijacked, and that she loved him. Seconds later the aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River from Olson's office. The death toll at the Pentagon could be 200 or more military and civilian casualties.

Last Tuesday morning, husbands called wives, sons called mothers, fathers called daughters in farewell before terrorists' flames consumed their lives and scarred their families and friends forever. We'll probably never know exactly how many died when two of the hijacked airliners hit the twin 110-story World Trade Center towers and brought them crashing to the ground in New York City. The victims number many thousands of the 50,000 workers and 80,000 visitors who were estimated to be in the two buildings every weekday. We will also never know how many of the dead reached out to let their dearest ones hear their voice one last time.

What we do know from victims' survivors is that their last message was one of love.

No one reported getting a phone call conveying the message: "I despise you, I dislike you, I want you dead." Only the terrorists who perpetrated the carnage left hatred as their last message.

With ash and dust and debris still swirling over Manhattan, with pockets of fire still smoldering at the Pentagon, with bodies still trapped in the rubble of three disaster sites, Americans are beginning to express their own hatred for those they believe unleashed the whirlwind.

On talk radio, in Internet chat rooms, in letters to the editor, on the street, in offices and living rooms, many are engaged in indiscriminate, blanket condemnation of Islam, Arabs, the entire Muslim world. They think America should bomb cities or even some countries "back to the Stone Age," maybe use nuclear weapons, definitely seek revenge.

They need to stop and listen to our leaders who say we must wait for the facts. Nobody yet knows definitively who is responsible for this terrorism. All the evidence isn't in, though we are assured by President George W. Bush and his government that the full power of the United States has been brought to bear on this effort.

For the same reasons Tuesday's victims tried to make one last phone call, we need to reach out to one another for solace, tell others how precious they are to us, show a reverence for life.

The best way to honor the memory of the thousands of innocents who died will be to remember -- always -- that their last thoughts on this earth were not of hate, but of love.

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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