Space Shuttle Challenger: A Personal Recollection

There have been a few events in my lifetime that have stuck with me and have made it easy to answer that famous question; "what were you doing when.....?"� 9/11 obviously tops the list of those events, but the Challenger disaster actually runs a pretty close second for me. I can recite, in glaring detail, the events of that day just as though it had happened yesterday.

I was 18 years old at the time, teetering on the brink between teen and grown-up, and this event just sort of nudged me over the edge. It was the first moment in my life that I remember seeing something that had a major emotional effect on me. Here is how my day went....

I woke up that morning feeling very ill, called in sick to work and made an appointment at the doctor's office. I was still living in Scotland at the time, and I remember it as a typically dreary, gray Scottish day, which only added to my general gloominess. The office was really busy and everyone was crowded around an old TV that had a really horrible picture, the images barely breaking through the static and white noise.

I remember seeing two women hugging, one of them was crying and the other consoling. I was finally able to make my way through the crowd to get a look and see what all the fuss was about. They seemed to be playing the explosion on a permanent loop and the graininess of the picture combined with the poor quality of the reception added a very surreal feeling to the whole thing. It was like watching an old sci-fi movie, except realizing that it was real was like taking a blow to the gut. I remember feeling like I was going to break down and join the sobbing woman beside me. I eventually ended up leaving the office without being seen as I wanted to go home and watch it in private.

Walking home, people seemed to be wandering around, numb, not really knowing how to react. It was a very strange feeling.

For me, that was the day my childhood ended. That day I lost the last of my innocence and realized that bad things were actually happening in the world around me. You have a feeling at that time that you will be toughened, ready for the next great horror or disaster, but the truth is, we are all mentally and emotionally unprepared for a disaster on that scale whether we see it first hand or through our television sets.