Flight 93
A bit of a reality check-
The first thing he told me was, 'My plane has been taken over by three men.' He said they were Iranian-looking, they were wearing red headbands. One of them had something strapped to him that he was saying was a bomb. They moved everyone to the back.
And we just started saying, 'I love you.' It was an endless stream of 'I love you so much.' It calmed us down -- we had just had a baby, we had just bought a house. Jeremy was a very devoted family man, very caring, very athletic – a wonderful sense of humor, a strong sense of values.
Then he told me he thought he was going to die; he said he would respect any decisions I made. He didn’t sound panicked, he didn’t sound angry. He just sounded very, very sad.
Then he started asking me questions about what was going on in New York. He said he had heard from one of the other passengers that planes were crashing into the World Trade Center. He wanted to know if this is true. I told him he needed to be strong, that yes, it was true.
Then he said, 'Are they going to blow up my plane, are they going to crash it into something?'
Then he went into a planning mode. He said there were three guys as big as him-- – Jeremy was a large guy, a little over six feet and 220 pounds; in 1993 he was the NCAA judo champion for his weight class -- and they were thinking of jumping the hijacker with the bomb. Did I think it was a good idea?
I hesitated, then I said, 'Honey, you need to do it.'
Braver words were never spoken. It makes me cloud up just to read them.
via Insty and Judith Weiss