A Bombing and a Past Life

From Learning to Fly Chapter in version one of Blind Love | Mixed media | © 2015 by Lavavoth Stuart

I awoke on December 22 to the news of the Pan Am Bombing with media footage that was so viscerally disturbing, I experienced what I would later come to understand as a panic attack.

The remnants of a life once lived have a way of slipping into the present. I come up against moments that defy explanation. These events don’t belong to me, yet feel as if they do. How can I carry the imprint of something I have no conscious connection to as though I’ve already been there?

In a previous post, I discussed my early awareness of my past life in Germany and having died in an air raid bombing. This early awakening to my past life occurred while I was vacationing in Sarasota when I was 11 years old. The poem, Untergliechness, creatively sums up the event that occurred back then.

Decimated Hamburg, July 1943, Eilbek District. Photo by J. Dowd | Digitally manipulated/designed by Lavavoth.

But nothing would prepare me for what I would endure when I found out about Pan Am 103 exploding over Lockerbie Scotland.

It was late December 1988. I was 15 years old, working my way into the Orlando goth scene, listening to David Bowie, The Cocteau Twins, and The Smiths. I played War by U2 [1] so often in my cassette player that the tape began to deteriorate. I was getting ready to fly to New Jersey on my own to visit a friend from when I had lived there. She and I had been dancers in the same dance studio.

There was something about the unsuspecting victims on the ground who carried on about their lives with Christmas just around the corner triggered a kind of existential anxiety. This feeling was so severe that I silently unraveled.

Flying has been a part of my life since I was six months old when my family and I had moved to Europe and then to South America. I was seasoned at flying alone and had done so since I was about 9, being sent here and there to visit with family across several continents. So flying from Florida to New Jersey was no big deal. I was excited to see snow again and to visit New York City.

Pan Am Flight 103 was flying at an altitude of 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, when a terrorist bomb exploded on board. The plane’s wings, along with tanks carrying 100 tons of jet fuel, crashed into the Sherwood Crescent neighborhood, creating an inferno and a crater more than 150 feet deep. Eleven residents were killed instantly (AP photo).

I awoke on December 22 to the news of the Pan Am Bombing with media footage that was so viscerally disturbing, I experienced what I would later come to understand as a panic attack.

This was my first panic attack. It was such a foreign experience that I simply kept it bottled up until the holidays were over. But as the flight traffic over our house kept reminding me of the air disaster, I silently unraveled. That the plane had exploded and killed hundreds of passengers seemed less dramatic than the 11 deaths that occurred on the ground. None of it made sense.

It was Hans who offered the clues years later and helped me to understand the origin of my fear.

When I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, my fears would once again become elevated by the air traffic.

But in 1988, my fears became so heightened that I ended up seeing a psychiatrist whose only suggestion was to purchase a nightlight, perhaps assuming that the monsters would keep away from the light. It didn’t help.

But my irrational fear (or what I would later call a phobia, before Hans’s arrival) would ebb and flow depending on circumstance and my proximity to air traffic. When I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, my fears would once again become elevated by the air traffic. It happened again when I bought a home in Burlington, Vermont years later. But it was there, in 2010, that Hans finally came through and helped me recall my past life, and how the plane falling on Lockerbie somatically unlocked the traumatic experience of those distant events that I still couldn’t piece together.

··· Unlocking My Past ···

Learning to Fly Chapter in version one of Blind Love During the Madness | Mixed media | © 2015 Lavavoth Stuart.

I had lived a civilian life as a middle-aged German woman in a sparse apartment on one of the upper floors of a brick building. By all accounts, through Hans's guidance in past-life recall, I was an unremarkable, ordinary German living in extraordinary times. I died in an air raid, trapped in the building, feeling the structure give way, and carrying the visceral imprint of that collapse into this life. It’s that experience, however small, that is often here, like a low nearly imperceptible buzzing in the background. Most days, I hardly notice it. Then the Surfside condo collapse happened, reigniting my fear in a disruptive way, similar to the Pan Am bombing and 9/11 [2]. It’s been a month since it happened, and only now am I beginning to feel a semblance of normalcy.

Most days, I stay busy. I focus on tasks, move through to-do lists, try to stay grounded in the life I’m living now. But the ghosts, the ones who share moments from when they were alive, remind me of the entanglement of past, present, and future, and that we are more than the bodies we briefly inhabit. At times I feel them on a cellular level, woven into me, interconnected. I’ve had to learn to adapt to this way of knowing, contending with interdimensional trauma that lingers like the air I breathe.

“How will it end for me this time?” I ask Hans every now and again, knowing his response.

“It isn’t life without the element of surprise,” he says keeping the mystery locked away, a secret meant to be understood at the moment of departure.

··· Notes ···

[1] Not a goth band, but an album with a dark and layered intensity.

[2] I've never addressed 9/11 because it's too personal and difficult.