Kerry Currie: The deputy head teacher at Lockerbie Academy returned this week to Syracuse, a place that changed her life. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

Not long ago, as James Johnson was preparing for last week’s visit to Syracuse University, his grandmother made what at first seemed like an everyday stop at his home near Lockerbie. Gwen Baxter is a longtime Scottish medical research scientist, and her mission with her grandson had a last-a-lifetime purpose:

Johnson is 17. She wanted him to understand, as best as she could possibly convey it, the night when Pan-Am Flight 103 was attacked and fell to Earth — and the role he was about to play in a cross-Atlantic love story, forged from pain, between two communities.

All of it was on Johnson’s mind Friday afternoon, as he sat outdoors with a group of classmates and teachers in a cold rain at SU, drumbeat of raindrops on a cluster of umbrellas held by silent and somber onlookers.

The annual rose laying is an emotional culmination to the university’s remembrance week. Ten students from the Lockerbie Academy, joined by two faculty members — equivalent to staff and students from an American high school — spent the week in Syracuse, as part of that observance.

It will be 37 years on Dec. 21 since the terrorist bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie. All 259 passengers and crew were killed. Eleven people died in the village far below, when the shattered plane dropped from the sky.

Syracuse University remembrance scholar Savion Pollard puts down a rose, at the place of remembrance. Credit: Credit | Syracuse University

Among the dead were 40 travelers from Central New York, including 35 students from SU. In a service a few weeks later at the old Carrier Dome, the late SU Chancellor Melvin Eggers promised grieving families their “sons and daughters will be remembered so long as any of us shall live and so long as the University shall stand.”

The annual autumn Remembrance Week — as well as this visiting contingent from Lockerbie — became living parts of that commitment.

Like everyone in Lockerbie, Johnson said he grew up aware of “the disaster.” But the teenager was born 20 years after it happened, and he said the sheer horror of the bombing meant living witnesses — many now in retirement, or nearing it — do not casually talk about what they saw.

His grandmother, in their living room, had some things she felt he had to know before his journey. She told Johnson how she hurried out that night to render whatever medical care she might provide for survivors in her burning village, though she soon realized the magnitude of the loss demanded a heartbreaking kind of service:

For many days and nights Baxter was at the town hall, doing what she could to help identify the remains of individual passengers, brought to a makeshift morgue inside the building.

Johnson said Baxter “rarely spoke of it” over the years. As he listened to her account, he sensed the urgency of her message:

She wanted him to grasp the “real impact of the disaster,” as well as the significance of being chosen to represent so many who were lost.

Yes,” Johnson said, as the rain began in Syracuse, “this means quite a lot to me, personally.”

We spoke Friday, just before Johnson and his classmates took their seats outside to watch as 35 SU remembrance scholars — each one selected annually to honor the specific memory of Syracuse students on the plane — placed white roses on a memorial wall at SU’s “place of remembrance.”

James Johnson, on visit from Lockerbie, meets Otto. Credit: Credit | Kerry Currie

The visiting students and faculty formally represented the 11 people killed on the ground in 1988 in Lockerbie, as well as visiting Lockerbie scholar Andrew McClune, who died at 18 in Syracuse, in 2012. The Scottish group included Kerry Currie, 47, deputy head teacher at the Lockerbie Academy, who has her own deep ties to Central New York.

In 1996, she spent a year in Syracuse as one of two visiting scholarship students from Lockerbie — part of a decades-long initiative in which two Lockerbie teens spent the academic year as students at SU. Currie said she was deeply affected by the physical beauty of the university and the Onondaga Valley, and by the warmth and life-changing connections of so many instant friends.

Years later, on the day she married her wife Vicky, now-retired Judy O’Rourke — former director of SU undergraduate studies, and a remembrance volunteer who remains intensely close to many Flight 103 families — journeyed to Scotland to attend the wedding with her husband, Ed.

That longtime Lockerbie scholarship tradition changed this year. Rather than two year-long scholars, the initiative focused instead on bringing a larger group of Scottish students for remembrance week — though SU released a statement in May saying two students from Lockerbie Academy will again receive scholarships in the next academic year, renewing that approach at least until the 40-year remembrance in 2028.

Currie’s goal with this visit was fundamental: She wanted her students to hang onto the meaning of the bond, forever. She was a child, about five miles outside of Lockerbie, on the night the plane was bombed. She remembers the light in the sky and how “the sound was so loud” and how her dad, standing in the yard and looking toward the village, wondered if a train had exploded near the tracks.

The villagers were traumatized. It would be a decade before Lockerbie again put up decorations for the Yuletide, a holiday season that even now is impossible to totally separate in the village from collective memory of the night the plane came down. But that pain led to a community realization, which remains strong to this day.

It forged a bond between Lockerbie and the families of every passenger on Flight 103. When relatives go there, to this day, they are embraced — even if the years have caused a quiet change in the way villagers carry the memory.

The students from Lockerbie Academy with head teacher Brian Asher (left) and deputy head teacher Kerry Currie (right). Credit: Credit | Kerry Currie

“Lockerbie’s a different place now,” Currie said, with entire generations born after the disaster. Still, in some deep and subtle way, what happened 37 years always remains seared into civic consciousness, particularly for the graying women and men who remember what they witnessed, just outside their front doors.

Even now, Currie said, the sound of a plane can generate a split-second reaction in which “you look up, to see what’s above you.”

Her experience in Syracuse still shapes her own life philosophy. What she found in her year at the university was warmth and love. Currie’s theme for her students — what she hopes they learned and felt in Central New York — is the transformative power of looking harder for true relationships.

Roses on the wall of remembrance at Syracuse University, which carries the names of 35 Syracuse University students lost in the Lockerbie bombing and air disaster. Credit: Image | Courtesy Syracuse University

Of the 11 people killed in Lockerbie, three were children. The whole significance of remembrance week — a point made by Currie and many others — is the notion of committing each day toward service, love and meaning, part of the larger human mission of pushing on to honor all those lost far too soon.

As Donald Bogie — a civic official in 1988 in Lockerbie — once said to me: After the disaster, whenever villagers heard of global disasters involving dozens of deaths or more, they understood:

To fully grasp the magnitude, count by ones.

In Lockerbie, Currie said that awareness meshed into a kind of loving resilience — an almost indescribable spirit that explains why so many families of the lost find comfort when they travel there, rather than despair.

The goal of remembrance week was evoking that same feeling. It was coordinated by Tamara Hamilton, SU’s director of program initiatives, who said the imperative of homage is also intended as a call to “acting forward” for all the young people involved — with the hope that message will resonate for life.

Associate Provost Elisa Dekaney said the students from Lockerbie had a busy schedule: Among their many meetings was time spent with England-born men’s soccer coach Ian McIntyre, whose SU team won the 2022 national NCAA championship. On Wednesday, they were part of the 35-minute “sitting in solidarity,” in which remembrance scholars spent that time in silence, as a statement of honor and commitment, in chairs aligned on the quad to match where every student sat on Flight 103.

All of it built into Friday’s rose laying, at the memorial to the disaster near the Hall of Languages — with an audience including Chancellor Kent Syverud and his wife, Dr. Ruth Chen. The ceremony began with a version of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” by a campus a capella group called the Otto Tunes, led by remembrance scholar Logan Wagner, whose voice shook with palpable emotion.

The students on the plane were represented in the crowd by the most intimate and faithful of groups — a little gathering of parents and relatives. Many are now in their late 70s or 80s, yet they sat intently throughout the entire ceremony, as it rained.

Rain fell Friday on those gathered for Friday’s rose laying at the place of remembrance. Credit: Credit | Syracuse University

Two students from Lockerbie — Grace Key and Amelia Cameron — were among the speakers. Just before the ceremony – Joined by a friend, Iona Yule – they paused to describe for me just how much this meant to them. They recalled the impact the disaster had on their parents or grandparents, and how the week in Syracuse helped with the revelations that Currie, one of their teachers, said changed her life.

In front of the remembrance wall, with their classmates standing behind them, Key and Cameron explained how the Lockerbie students were setting down roses to honor the villagers who died on the ground, as well as McCune. They spoke of the three children lost that day who should have graduated from their academy, and Cameron asked:

How does a village, a university and a community “face the unthinkable, and still find the resilience to rise?”

They understood: They are living out the answer.

Those students are now part of an extraordinary bond, in love and motion, between two faraway points. During my conversation with Currie, she reacted with passionate approval when I mentioned a Scottish expression I heard countless times during a long ago visit to Lockerbie, four words that seemed to sum up the village melding of grief and resolve:

Nothing else for it.

That feeling sustained everyone gathered Friday in a cold rain, by the wall.  

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...